The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography. James Ewing Ritchie
it is really that exceptional thing – a soul-marriage. She alone has shared alike in his labours and his recreations, his triumphs and defeats, and, beyond all the incidents of their united lives, her unselfish devotion has been his staff and his support.
‘Mr. Gladstone’s manners, especially when addressing ladies, are very courtly. There is a fine stateliness, and at the same time an exquisite courtesy, in his address. In his manners, as well as in much else, Mr. Gladstone belongs distinctly to the older school which flourished before the Queen came to the throne, when society still preserved a certain distinctive style, which has suffered much in the rush and tumble of our new democracy.’
Mr. Gladstone’s ‘Church Principles and Government’ appeared in 1840. Macaulay writes to Napier: ‘I do not think it would be wise to review it. I observed in it very little that had reference to politics – very little, indeed, that could not consistently be said by a supporter of the voluntary principle. It is, in truth, a theological treatise, and I have no mind to engage in a controversy about the nature of the Sacraments, the operation of Holy Orders, the validity of the Church, and such points of learning, except where they are connected with questions of Government. I have no disposition to split hairs about the spiritual reception of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, or about baptismal regeneration.’ However, it was subsequently reviewed in the Edinburgh by Henry Roger, of Spring Hill College, Birmingham, in an article on the Right of Private Judgment. Dr. Arnold writes how he was disappointed with the book. Newman writes: ‘It is not open to the objections I feared; it is doctrinaire, and I think self-confident, but it will do good.’ Maurice thus criticised it: ‘His Aristotelianism is, it strikes me, more deeply fixed in him than before, and on that account I do not see how he can ever enter into the feeling and truths of Rationalism to refute it. His notion of attacking the Evangelicals by saying, Press your opinions to these results, and they become Rationalistic, is ingenious, and thought out, I think, with great skill and an analytical power for which I had not given him credit; but after all, it seems to me, an argument which is better for the courts than for a theological controversy.’ At Eton, about this time, he was almost worshipped. When he went there to examine the candidates for the Newcastle Scholarship, one of the candidates wrote: ‘I wish you to understand that Mr. Gladstone appeared not to me only but to others as a gentleman wholly unlike other examiners of school people. It was not as a politician we admired him, but as a refined Churchman deep also in political philosophy.’
In 1841 he accepted the office of Vice-President of the Board of Trade under Sir Robert Peel, afterwards becoming President as successor to Lord Ripon. In his address seeking re-election at Newark, he declared that the British farmer might rely upon two points – first, ‘that adequate protection would be given to him; secondly, that protection would be given him through the means of the sliding scale.’ In 1842 he was engaged in the preparation of the revised tariff, by which duties were either abolished or diminished on some twelve hundred articles. Greville writes in the March of that year that he had already displayed a capacity which made his admission into the Cabinet indispensable. In the course of the next year he became President of the Board of Trade and a member of the Cabinet, and the very first act he had to perform was to give his vote in favour of withdrawing the Bill providing for the education of children in factories, which had been violently opposed by the Dissenters on the plea that it was too favourable to the Established Church. In this connection we have the following curious story: A brusque but wealthy shipowner of Sunderland once entered the London office of Mr. Lindsay on business. ‘Noo, is Lindsay in?’ inquired the northern diamond in the rough. ‘Sir!’ exclaimed the clerk to whom the inquiry was addressed. ‘Well, then, is Mr. Lindsay in, seest thou?’ ‘He will be in shortly,’ said the clerk. ‘Will you wait?’ The Sunderland shipowner intimated that he would, and was ushered into an adjacent room, where a person was busily employed copying some statistics. Our Sunderland friend paced the room several times, and presently, walking to the table where the other occupant of the room was seated, took careful note of the writer’s doings. The copier looked up inquiringly, when the northerner said: ‘Thou writest a bonny hand, thou dost.’ ‘I am glad you think so,’ was the reply. ‘Ah! thou dost – thou maks thy figures well; thou’rt just the chap I want.’ ‘Indeed,’ said the Londoner. ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sunderland. ‘I’m a man of few words. Noo, if thou’lt coom o’er to canny auld Sunderland, thou seest, I’ll gie thee a hoondred and twenty pund a year, and that’s a plum thou doesn’t meet with every day in thy life, I reckon – noo then.’ The Londoner thanked the admirer of his penmanship most gratefully, and intimated that he would like to consult Mr. Lindsay upon the subject. ‘Ah, that’s reet!’ And in walked Mr. Lindsay, who cordially greeted his Sunderland friend, after which the gentleman at the desk gravely rose and informed Mr. Lindsay of the handsome appointment which had been offered him in the Sunderland shipowner’s office. ‘Very well,’ said Mr. Lindsay, ‘I should be sorry to stand in your way; a hundred and twenty pound is more than I can afford to pay you in the department in which you are at present placed. You will find my friend a good and kind master, and, under the circumstances, I think the sooner you know each other the better. Allow me, therefore, to introduce to you the Right Hon. W. Gladstone.’ Mr. Gladstone had been engaged in making a note of some shipping returns for his budget. The shipowner was, of course, a little taken aback, but he soon recovered his self-possession, and enjoyed the joke as much as Mr. Gladstone did. Very soon Sir Robert Peel proposed to establish non-sectarian colleges in Ireland, and to increase the grant to Maynooth. This led to Mr. Gladstone’s resignation in 1845, but not before he had completed a second revised tariff, carrying on still further the work of commercial reform. In the explanation which he gave for his resignation he was understood to say that the measure with regard to Maynooth was a departure from the principles he had contended for in his books.
Everyone was amazed, and the party he had left was very angry. Greville writes: ‘Gladstone’s explanation was ludicrous. Everybody said that he had only succeeded in showing that his explanation was quite uncalled for.’ It is perfectly clear that no one was able to understand the explanation. In a letter to Mr. W. E. Forster, Cobden wrote: ‘Gladstone’s speeches have the effect on my mind of a beautiful strain of music; I can rarely remember any clear unqualified expression of opinion on any subject outside his political, economical and financial statements. I remember on the occasion when he left Sir Robert Peel’s Government on the Maynooth question, and when the House sat in unusual numbers to hear his explanation, I sat beside Villiers and Ricardo for an hour listening with real pleasure to his beautiful rhetorical involutions and evolutions, and at the close turning round to one of my neighbours and exclaiming, “What a marvellous talent is this! Here have I been listening with pleasure for an hour to his explanation, and I know no more why he left the Government than when he commenced.”’
A little prior to this speech Mr. Gladstone had secured a follower in the person of Mr. Stafford Northcote, afterwards Lord Iddesleigh, as private secretary. ‘From what I know of Mr. Gladstone’s character,’ writes Mr. Northcote to his father, ‘there is no single statesman of the present day to whom I would more gladly attach myself; and I should think, from the talent he has shown for business since he came into office, there is no one more likely to retain his place unless any revolution takes place.’ To another friend, Mr. Northcote, on his acceptance of the office, writes: ‘With any other man than Gladstone I might have hesitated longer. But he is one whom I respect beyond measure; he stands almost alone as the representative of principles with which I cordially agree; and as a man of business, and one who, humanly speaking, is sure to rise, he is pre-eminent.’ A little later Mr. Northcote writes to a lady: ‘I look upon him’ (Gladstone) ‘as the representative of the party scarcely developed as yet, though secretly forming, which will stand by all that is dear and sacred, in my estimation, in the struggle which will come ere very long between good and evil, order and disorder, the Church and the world; and I see a very small band collecting around him, and ready to fight manfully under his leading.’
In a letter to a friend, Mr. Gladstone thus explains his retirement from office: ‘My whole purpose was to place myself in a position in which I should be free to consider my course without being liable to any just suspicion on the ground of personal interest. It is not profane if I say, “With a great price obtained I this freedom.” The political association in which I stood was to me, at the time, the Alpha and Omega of public life. The