The story of Gladstone's life

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. ''The Gledstanes" ....... i

II. Eaton and Oxford 8

Chapter I " The Gledstanes "

I THINK I may take it for granted that Mr. Gladstone is the greatest English statesman who has appeared during the reign of Queen Victoria. This, indeed, seems to me a statement of fact and not a question for argument. We may all have our different opinions as to the policy involved at this time or that in the statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone. Some of us may admire him more in his earlier days, some of us in his later, or even his latest. He may be charged with inconsistency — a charge which has naturally to be made against any great statesman, for the essence of statesmanship consists in the recognition of imminent tendencies and actual facts. Nobody can possibly be called a statesman who starts in life with a pack of political nostrums which he proposes to apply inveterately to the cure of every constitutional malady in the

State. A mind like that of Mr. Gladstone is inexorably compelled to go on studying the changing conditions of things, and is absolutely prohibited from applying remorselessly the remedies of the day before yesterday to the troubles of to-day. Many years ago John Bright said to me that Gladstone was " always struggling towards the light." Such might indeed be the statement of Gladstone's whole career. He has been " ever a fighter," like Robert Browning's hero — ever struggling towards the light. I propose to tell, as best I can, the story of his rich and noble life. Of course I can tell it only from the outsider's point of view ; but I may perhaps say in excuse of my enterprise that I have followed and studied with the deepest interest, since I came to know anything of public affairs, the career of Mr. Gladstone — that I sat in the House of Commons with him for many years, and that I was fortunate enough to have much interchange of ideas with him — and I may perhaps say I was admitted to his friendship.

William Ewart Gladstone is an Englishman only by birth. He was born on the 29th of December, 1809, in Rodney Street, Liverpool, one of the chief residential streets of the city — a street which was, and still is, much occupied by leading merchants, barristers, and physicians. But Mr. Gladstone's family came from Scotland. Many generations

"THE GLEDSTANES" 3

ago the family bore the name of Gledstane. My friend Mr. George W. E. Russell, in his monograph on Gladstone, which belongs to the series called " The Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria," a very delightful little book, explains the meaning of the name. The family had had their abode from very early times in Lanarkshire. " The derivation of the name," says Mr. Russell, "is obvious enough to any one who has seen the spot. Gled is a hawk, and that fierce and beautiful bird would have found its natural home among the staples, or rocks, of the craggy moorlands which surround the fortalice of Gledstane:s." "As far back as 1296," Mr. Russell tells us, " Herbert De Gledestane figures in the Ragman Rollas one of the lairds who swore fealty to Edward I." By degrees the family estates became less and less, and at last became practically nothing at all. The latest surviving son of the family removed into a neighboring town and set up in business as a maltster. By the time this man's grandson had been born the family name had been changed into Gladstones. Yet a little later and it became that which we all know as one of the most illustrious names in English history — Gladstone. By something like an accident, John Gladstone, then the eldest son of the house, having been sent to Liverpool on business, attracted the attention of a leading corn merchant of the town, and by his advice settled there for good. He became one of the great merchant princes of Liverpool, a member of Parliament, and a baronet. He was a pure Lowland Scotchman, and he married a Highland Scotch vi^oman. The pair had six

children, and the third son was William Ewart Gladstone. John Gladstone was a man of great ability and energy — a man to make his way through any difficulties and to win the honor and respect of any community.

In the public and political sense he stood in somewhat the same relationship towards his son William Ewart Gladstone that the first Sir Robert Peel occupied with regard to his son, the great Sir Robert Peel.

One of William Gladstone's elder brothers I remember well in Liverpool, where as a very young

Mr. Gladstone's Birthplace

62 Rodney Street, Liverpool

"THE GLEDSTANES" 5

man I spent several years. This brother, Mr. Robertson Gladstone, was a man of singular energy and force of character, of genuine ability both in politics and finance, a powerful and impressive speaker, a sort of rough-hewn model for his younger and much greater brother. He was a man of somewhat uncouth appearance and eccentric ways, about six feet seven inches in stature, and people turned their heads to look after him in the streets of London, although, of course, in his native Liverpool he was too well known to be stared at. He had, as I have said, eccentric ways, but he had no ways that were ignoble or unmanly. He was as straightforward a politician as ever lived. He had begun life as a Tory, but he gradually became a Liberal, and, indeed, an advanced Radical. If he were living in our time, he would be a powerful and uncompromising opponent of Jingoism. It was the common belief in Liverpool, and probably is the common belief there still, that Robertson Gladstone assisted his brother William in the preparation of his budgets when William was again and again Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was eloquent in a strong, unshapely sort of way, with a half-poetic gleam of feeling glancing every now and then through his speeches.

The eldest brother. Sir Thomas Gladstone, passed through life without advancing from his old-world politics, and made no particular mark upon his time. I have often thought that nature resolved to make a decided advance in the family history

Sir John Gladstone by the creation of Robertson Gladstone, and that, not yet quite satisfied, she tried again and gave William Ewart Gladstone to the world.

Sir John Gladstone, the father, was one of those

"THE GLEDSTANES" 7

men who, like his illustrious son, seem destined never to grow old. There is an interesting description given of his ways with his children which may perhaps help to account for the extraordinary aptitude for debate of William Ewart Gladstone. One of his friends has told us that nothing was ever taken for granted between Sir John Gladstone and his sons. He started and kept alive a constant succession of arguments on small topics and on large. His family circle appears to have been what the King of Navarre in Shakespeare's play says his court shall be — "a little Academe." Every lad was put on his mettle to defend his own case or to damage the case of another. It was all done in the most perfect good humor and with the full and unflagging enjoyment of those who took part in it. It must have been capital preparation for the Oxford Union and for the debates in the House of Commons. Sir John Gladstone was a great friend and admirer of George Canning. Young William Gladstone was sent to begin his education at the vicarage of Seaforth, a place in the neighborhood of Liverpool. Here he had as one of his fellowpupils the late Dean Stanley, of Westminster. The friendship between these two lasted to the end of Dean Stanley's useful, refined, and gracious life. Gladstone did not remain long at Seaforth. At the age of eleven he was sent to Eton.

Chapter II

It would not, perhaps, be easy to convey to any untravelled American an idea of the glamour and the fascination which Eton exercises over the mind of a schoolboy who has any feeling for the picturesque, the venerable, and the poetic. Eton College stands within the very shadow of Windsor Castle. England has nothing to show more beautiful than the landscape which spreads around on every side. There is witchery in the river, in the woods, in the old historic Castle. One might almost say that the whole current of English history streams on with that noble river. I am not certain, so far as my travel goes, whether anything quite like those Windsor landscapes, including with them the historical memories and associations, can be found anywhere outside England. So far as one can judge, the whole effect impressed itself deeply on the mind of the schoolboy William Gladstone. All through his life he could become fired with enthusiasm at the mere mention of Eton and its studies and its memories. He seems to have worked hard as a student, and, indeed, earned a certain amount of unpopularity by his persistence in regarding serious study as part of his business and his duty. He was untiring at Greek and Latin, and occupied his hoHday time in studying mathematics. He never, I beheve, became a great classical scholar in the narrow and pedantic sense. Probably no one whose scholarship took that limited and practical form ever really appreciated the beauty of the great authors whom he studied. You cannot appreciate Shakespeare if you are always occupied in trying to parse him. Young Gladstone soon came to have the most magnificent appreciation of the soul and spirit and form and phrase of the great Greek and Latin authors whom he loved. He persisted while at Eton in being an unostentatiously pious and religious student. He would not join in or countenance any mockery or levity about things which he had been taught to regard as sacred. Yet there was nothing whatever of the " prig " about him, and his force of character even then was such that he compelled the most light-minded to respect him and his ways. Nor would he stand any frolicsome cruelty to dumb animals. " He stood forth," says Mr. Russell, " as the champion of some wretched pigs which it was the custom to torture at Eton Fair on Ash Wednesday, and, when bantered by his schoolfellows for his humanity, offered to write lO THE STORY OF GLADSTONE'S LIFE

his reply in good round hand upon their faces." This is the sort of boy whom even schoolboys must admire.

The merits of the system of education and of discipline adopted at Eton have been the subject of much criticism and complaint. The education given there is said by some commentators to consist of nothing but Latin and Greek, and of these superficially taught, and without any attempt to instruct the learners in mathematics, physics, or metaphysics. I shall not attempt to go into the subject further than to accept it as highly probable that Eton is, or was in Mr. Gladstone's schooldays, a place where a boy who loved learning could acquire as much knowledge as he wanted, but where a boy disinclined for severe studies was left free enough to indulge his indolent inclinations. A man of eminent authority was once asked whether a boy would be looked down upon at Eton for being industrious in his studies. The answer was significant : " Not if he could do something else well." Such a school would probably suit the peculiar mind and tastes and aptitudes of a boy like young William Gladstone. He would soon find out for himself what studies suited him best, and he was free to apply himself to these with all his might. On the other hand, a school with different modes of training might merely force

ETON AND OXFORD u

a pupil along some broad and common way without giving any opportunity to his natural peculiarities to assert themselves. Certainly Mr. Gladstone's predilection all through his life was rather for what may be termed literary studies than for mathematics or physics or metaphysics. One thing to be said in favor of Eton is that all its best and most distinguished students have looked back upon it with love and affection during the whole course of their lives in the outer world. " Floreat Etona " may be called the motto of the school. It is the pious wish of every student of Eton whom I have ever met. Such a fact in itself speaks for the school " with most miraculous organ," whatever its past or present defects of training or of discipline. It was probably just the place from which young Gladstone would draw all the best it could give.

Sir Roderick Murchison, the famous naturalist, has left it on record that Gladstone was " the prettiest little boy that ever went to Eton." Most of us can testify from our own knowledge that Mr. Gladstone lately is the handsomest old man who ever went to Eton or anywhere else. Visitors to Eton are shown, of course, the name of Gladstone carved into a wall or a woodwork here and there. But, naturally, no one ever goes to any place where a famous man once lived without being shown his name carved, as it is confidently affirmed, by his own hand.

At Eton Gladstone's closest friend was that Arthur Hallam to whose gifts and virtues the late Lord Tennyson has inscribed his " In Memoriam." Among his other mates were some whose names will still be remembered in America — Frederick Tennyson, for example, brother of the poet and himself a poet ; Alexander Kinglake, the author of " Eothen," and the historian of the Crimean War ; James Bruce, afterwards the famous Earl of Elgin ; Charles Canning, afterwards Earl Canning and Viceroy of India, the " Clemency Canning" of the Indian Mutiny — a nickname then given to him in scorn by the panic-stricken votaries of a policy of slaughter, but now remembered to his honor and to his glory.

William Gladstone was not much of an athlete, as the term was then understood. He did not care for games of any kind, but was very fond of sculling, and kept a boat for his own use, and he was then, as ever since, a tremendous walker. He walked very fast, and he walked great distances. His delight was to wander about through all the lovely places surrounding Windsor, in company with a few boys of his own age and of his own tastes. Outside this inner circle of his intimates Gladstone was not well known at Eton. He seems to have been neither popular nor unpopular — a somewhat curious beginning in life for one whose strength and energy of character made it in his after years impossible for any one to avoid forming a very distinct opinion for or against him.

Eton from the Thames

He distinguished himself decidedly in the debates of the " Eton Society " and in the editorship of the " Eton Miscellany." Mr. Russell tells us that the Eton Society in Gladstone's day was " a remarkable group of brilliant boys." " Its tone was intensely Tory. Current politics were forbidden subjects, but political opinion disclosed itself through the thin disguise of historical or academical questions. The execution of Strafford and Charles the First, the characters of Oliver Cromwell and Milton, the ' Contrat Social ' of Rousseau, and the events of the French Revolution, laid bare the speakers' political tendencies as effectually as if the conduct of Queen Caroline, the foreign policy of Lord Castlereagh, or the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act, had been the subject of debate." We all know the tremendous earnestness which schoolboys throw into the discussions of their debating societies. Probably Mr. Gladstone was never more thoroughly in earnest at the very zenith of his statesmanship, and when a speech from him might decide the fate of a ministry or a policy, than he was when he addressed the Eton Society on the subject of popular education. He was the means of introducing Mr. Kinglake to this Eton Society. He took a prominent part in the starting of the " Eton Miscellany." He became its editor and its most prolific contributor. He was actually the author of a humorous ode to the shade of Wat Tyler !

Shade of him whose valiant tongue On high the song of freedom sung ! Shade of him whose mighty soul Would pay no taxes on his poll !

— and much more, in the same elaborate strain of the mock-heroic. Only the other day, it may be said, this humorous versical freak of a schoolboy was rescued from oblivion by a serious Tory critic, who brought it up as conclusive evidence that Mr. Gladstone had been from his earliest years the consistent advocate of anarchy and rapine. Such a critic may well remind us of that contemporary of Swift who took the trouble to point out that there could be no such places and people in the world as those which Lemuel Gulliver professed to have visited in his travels.

Gladstone remained at Eton until the end of 1827. He then studied for a few months with private tutors, and he became fond of gymnastics, of turning, and of wood-carving. He still delighted in his rambles through fields and woods, in his long, rapid walks, and in his chosen companionships. In October, 1828, he went up to Christchurch, Oxford. There were many young men then at Christchurch who afterwards made distinguished careers for themselves in the Church and in law and in political life. Among the undergraduates at other colleges in Oxford were Henry Edward Manning, the late Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster; Sidney Herbert, afterwards one of Gladstone's clo:est friends and colleagues in Parliamentary life ; Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord i6

Sherbrooke ; and Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a man of wonderful gifts and acquirements, curiously forgotten by the Englishmen of to-day — a man who, but for his unhappy defects of voice and articulation, might Have been one of the greatest speakers in the House of Commons.

Oxford. Christchurch College

There was some doubt in Gladstone's family as to whether he ought to be sent to Oxford or to Cambridge. Now, it would seem to most of us that there was an absolute necessity, for the sake of historical fitness, that he should have been sent, as he was sent, to Oxford. The entire atmosphere of the place, steeped in its peculiar traditions and its medisevalism, seemed exactly suited to the whole temperament and genius of the youthful Gladstone. Members of the two universities are constantly arguing as to which of the rivals can show the more splendid beadroll of great students. Into this controversy I have no inclination to enter. Each can produce a magnificent record ; but I should think an unbiassed observer might be inclined one way or the other, according as his taste and temperament led him to the scientific, or to what I may call the literary and historical, field of study.

Certainly Mr. Gladstone seems to me absolutely in his place as a student in Oxford. He was a hard student during his career as an undergraduate, and he led a very temperate life. He did not object to a supper or a wine party, but he was distinctly abstemious in the use of wine, and his example in this way produced a good effect, not only on those who worked with him, but also on some of those who came after him. Naturally, he took a leading part in the proceedings of the Union Debating Society, of which he first became Secretary and afterwards President. In the days of Arthur Pendennis self-conceited members of the Union Debating Society lived in the firm belief that the Prime Minister of the time watched with keen attention the doings of the youths in the Union, with the object of picking out fit persons to become Cabinet Ministers.

The Premier at the time when Gladstone deHvered his maiden speech in the Oxford Union might, with great judgment, have turned his attention in that direction. Predictions after the event are, as we all know, of little account; but Bishop Charles Wordsworth, as he afterwards was, who heard the speech, said that " it made me, and I doubt not others also, feel no less sure than of my own existence that Gladstone, our then Christchurch undergraduate, would one day rise to be Prime Minister of England."

The University of Oxford is a world in itself, and might in Gladstone's early days be described as a world all to itself. Its general principles were those of devotion to the State Church and to Toryism — a Toryism which, as Mr. George Russell says, was of a romantic and old-fashioned type, as far as possible removed from the utilitarian Conservatism of a later day. " The claims of rank and birth," says Mr. Russell, "were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the birthright of the few. The people had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them." Mr. Gladstone himself, a great many years after, when speaking at the opening of a Liberal club in Oxford in the December of 1878, said: "I trace in the education of Oxford of my own time one great difference. Perhaps it was my own fault, but I must admit that 1 did not learn when at Oxford that which I have learned since, to set a due value on the imperishable and the inestimable principles of human liberty. The temper which I think too much prevailed was that liberty was regarded with jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with." Still, as will be easily understood, there were as many different phases of Toryism at Oxford, even then, as there were minds and temperaments. In a great centre of education there cannot possibly be that stolid monotony of opinion and of conviction which may be found sometimes among the church-goers and the Tories of some country village. Then, again, each of the colleges in Oxford, as in Cambridge, had its own peculiarities, its own traditions, its own class, and its own aspirations. Christchurch College in Oxford was, perhaps, the most aristocratic in its members and in its tastes. It seems to have become, for some unknown reason, a trainingschool for Prime Ministers. Its history would well have justified the ideas of Arthur Pendennis and his friends. Christchurch College gave during the century seven Prime Ministers, not including Mr. Gladstone himself, to English government. Among these were Lord Liverpool, George Canning, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Rosebery, Gladstone's own successor in the office of Prime Minister.

In his second term Mr. Gladstone was elected a member of the Oxford Union Debating Society, in which he made the speech so glowingly commended by Bishop Wordsworth in the words we have already quoted. He defended Catholic emancipation in the debates of the Union, but he GEORGE Canning opposed the removal of Jewish disabilities, and he argued against the immediate abolition of slavery, although he urged that every preparation ought to be made for its gradual extinction by the teaching and training of the slaves so as to fit them for self-mastery and for citizenship. These views, as we shall see, he afterwards expressed in Parliament when he came to be a member of the House of Commons. In the debates of the Union he again and again opposed the very moderate movements towards political reform which at that time were held by many people to be well-nigh revolutionary. Yet even in young Gladstone's strongest speeches against the reform movement he seems to have taken good care not to commit himself to any unqualified objection to reform as a principle. His mind, indeed, would appear to have been a sort of mirror of the general mind of Oxford — a veneration for the past, a love of tradition, a romantic sentiment of reverence for the ancient institutions of the country, and yet a mind open to see the inevitable tendencies of the future.

Gladstone worked very hard for the Oxford Union, of which he became first the Secretary and afterwards the President. He was studying hard for classical honors and for divinity. He studied Hebrew as well. He worked for four hours in the early day and then went out for exercise, chiefly walking and boating, with also a certain amount of what we now call athletic training — more, at least, than he had taken in his Eton days. Then he attended classes and lectures and resumed his solitary readings for many later hours. He always read for two or three hours before bedtime. Nothing whatever was allowed to interfere with the course of his reading and his studies.

Not content with his studies and the work of the Union Debating Society, he founded and organized a debating society all of his own device and construction, which he named the Oxford Essay Club, but which became after a while colloquially named the " Weg," a title taken, as will readily be seen, from Gladstone's own initials. Frederick Denison Maurice, afterwards famous in English Church history, mentioned in 1870 that " the circumstance of belonging to a small society at Cambridge brought me into a similar one at Oxford, founded by Mr. Gladstone, to which otherwise I never should have been admitted." " The members of the Weg," says Mr. Alfred F. Robbins in his " Early Public Life of Mr. Gladstone,"

" assembled in each other's rooms in turn to hear an essay from its occupant, and it is owing to this circumstance that so excelfrederick denison lent an idea has been preserved ,^ ' ^ ^ ,, of what Mr. Gladstone was like

(iTom a photograph by

Gladstone also studied hard in mathematics, but the study seems to have left less impression on his style of thought than any other of his readings and his trainings. Of the original members of the Weg, I believe Mr. Gladstone himself and his friend. Sir Thomas Acland, to be the only survivors. At one of the meetings of this society Gladstone read an essay which endeavored to explain and define the belief of Socrates in immorality.

I have heard quite lately that Mr. Gladstone himself was rather disposed to underrate the amount of interest which he took, while at Oxford, in out-of-door pursuits. One or two of his few surviving contemporaries may have been heard to declare that Gladstone held as good a place among the Oxford athletes of his time as he did among the hard-working students. It is possible enough that in later days the mind of the great statesman and the great student may have lost its memory of the physical exercises which were less a passion of his temperament and his nature than the working of the intellect and the development of the brain. One can only say that it is hard to believe in Mr. Gladstone turning his attention to anything, physical or intellectual, without becoming more or less successful in the attempt.

It is a curious fact that when his ofhce of President of the Oxford Union came to an end he was succeeded by his friend, afterwards Cardinal Manning. It is a curious fact, too, not unworthy of record, that among the friendships which he made at Oxford was that of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper. The general public now has lost all memory of Mr. Tupper. Tupper was, however, a man well known in his day. He was the author of a book called " Proverbial Philosophy," a book which probably had at one time a larger circulation than any of the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, or the writings of Carlyle, or even the essays of Lord Macaulay. It was a book composed altogether of gentle platitudes, each platitude carrying with it a well-meaning moral purpose. The genial platitudes ceased to interest after a time, and Tupper faded out of the minds of even the dullest among us. I remember a friend telling me, many years ago, that he had just come from a literary party where he had been sitting between the two extremes of poetry: between Alfred Tennyson on the one hand and Martin Tupper on the other. Tupper first adored Gladstone and wrote poems to him, then for a while he turned against him, and afterwards went back to his first love. Gladstone was always kind to Tupper, invited him to his house, always read and answered his letters (which must have been terribly boring work), and proved that he had never forgotten his old associates at the University.

In December, 1831, Gladstone took his double first class.

CHAPTER III Gladstone's introduction to public life

Gladstone was an earnest student of the Bible and of patristic literature in those boyish days, as he continued to be down to his latest years. He left Oxford before the full influence of the movement led by the late Cardinal Newman had begun to assert itself in the place. His strong inclination then was to enter the Church, and he pressed his father hard to allow him to become a clergyman. But Sir John Gladstone, shrewd and keen-eyed man of the world as he was, saw, no doubt, in the genius of his son something different from that which could find its best course in the career of an ecclesiastic. In Mr. Gladstone's time strict obedience to the wish of a father was an essential part of a son's duty. Gladstone gave up his desire to enter the Church, but, as every one knows, he has taken during all his life a deep interest in Church history and in subjects of theological controversy. Early in 1832 he left Oxford and went to Italy for the first time — to that Italy which in after years he loved so much and served