Gladstone: A Biography (20 page)

The Judicial Committee pronounced on 8 March 1850, and it was another thirteen months before Manning and Hope-Scott were received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Gorham judgement was
nonetheless a crucial cause of their action. Gladstone was never tempted to move with them, greatly though he felt the severance, particularly from Hope-Scott. Nevertheless the traumatic effect of
the judgement was probably greater upon him than upon them. It marked the final stage of his disillusionment with the view that the Church could and should live in the bosom of the state. At the
time of his 1838 book he had believed that such a partnership should impose the doctrines of the Church upon everyone who wished to be a full citizen. During the 1840s he had come to see that as
impractical, and maybe indefensible. But Gorham made him apprehend that a Church which looked for privileges from the state was likely to have to pay for them by depending for its doctrine more
upon Acts of Parliament and judgements of lay legal luminaries than upon apostolic truth. In reality this was a liberation for him, because it opened the way to his accepting first Irish and then
Welsh Church disestablishment for the very good reason that he was henceforward only half happy with establishment even in England. But at the time it left him floundering, yet unwilling to strike
out for the shore of Roman certainties which welcomed Manning and Hope-Scott.

The second reason why Gorham became a peculiarly unhappy issue for him was that he failed to go through with the wave of opposition
which he originally helped to mount. There
were plans for a declaration of protest to be signed by the most prominent Anglo-Catholic laymen and to be addressed jointly to the bishops. Although the plans were partly hatched at meetings in
his own house on 12 and 14 March, Gladstone began to hedge. Manning thought it was because he became doubtful whether, as a Privy Councillor, he ought to sign a denunciation of the Council’s
Judicial Committee. But that did not appear to be his motive. It was a more general and uncharacteristic sense of caution and tactics. Manning and Hope-Scott thought that he had blown
unsatisfactorily hot and cold, and forty-five years later Purcell, Manning’s combative and unreliable biographer, delicately compared Gladstone’s role in the whole affair to that of
Judas Iscariot. This produced a vehement denial from Gladstone (then aged eighty-six) of Manning’s whole version of events. But what cannot be denied is that it was the beginning of his
separation from his two closest religious associates (one of whom was also his closest friend at the time). As a result he suffered full dismay at the Gorham judgement without having the
compensating stimulus of treating it as a call to arms. ‘It was a terrible time,’ he wrote in 1894, ‘aggravated for me by heavy cares and responsibilities of a nature quite
extraneous: and far beyond all others by the illness and death of a much-loved child, with great anxieties about another. My recollection of the conversations before the declaration [which he
declined to sign] are little but a mass of confusion and bewilderment.’
¹⁸
And at the time he wrote (in Italian) on 19 August 1851 of
‘these two terrible years . . . [which] may yet succeed in bringing about my ruin, body and soul’.
¹⁹

L
ADIES OF THE
N
IGHT

T
HE MID-CENTURY YEARS
of 1850 and 1851, and the period of preliminary vicissitudes which led up to them, were not only terrible, they were also
frenzied. Between October 1845 and July 1851 (that is from his thirty-sixth to his forty-second years) Gladstone experienced four religio-sexual emotional crises, which were perhaps exceptional
more for the abjectness of the guilt which they produced than for the strength of the temptation. But temptation and guilt in combination indisputably produced high states of neurotic tension.

The first was at Baden-Baden, during the long, dismal and solitary sojourn which he sustained in the autumn of 1845 in the hope of being able to bring his sister back to England, and when the
circumstances therefore provided considerable excuse for any aberrations of either behaviour or thought. He had been for a couple of days of sightseeing to Strasbourg, where he had looked at
everything in a jaundiced light (‘I was disappointed with the Cathedral except the West front and the stained glass. There is no proportion between the Western mass and the building in
general; even the spire has not the harmony of our best: the transepts add nothing . . . the arches of the nave want elevation’),
¹
and returned to
Baden on the Saturday evening with the prospect of a depressing Sunday ahead of him. The English service occupied him for no less than four hours from 11.15 to 3.15. One feels he must have been
like a cinema-goer who saw the film several times round, for it is difficult to believe that even in that age of relative fervour there were many subjects of Her Majesty who in a fashionable and
pleasure-seeking foreign spa town required that length of devotion. Then he got down to the construction of a remarkable table of introspection. It was separate from and folded into the diary for
that day. Additions to it must have been made up to four and a half years later, but it started life on that German October Sunday.

It was Gladstone’s habit to set everything down. But it was also his habit to do so in forms so obscure that the meaning was often incomprehensible. And sometimes it was not only the mode
of
expression but the thought itself which was so cloudy as to defy rational interpretation. When he went into Italian, which he frequently did when dealing with
‘delicate’ subjects, he was generally clear enough. It was in English that obfuscation became an art form. This was peculiarly so in parts of this budget of guilt which he set out at
Baden. It was divided into four sections, which were entitled ‘Channels’, ‘Incentives’, ‘Chief actual dangers’ and ‘Remedies’. The
‘Channels’ section is impenetrable. In both the heading and the contents perfectly simple words seem to be used in a way and an order which render them meaningless. The next section
‘Incentives’ is comparatively lucid and sets out the factors which particularly exposed him to temptation. They are listed as ‘1. Idleness; 2. Exhaustion; 3. Absence from usual
place; 4. Interruption of usual habits of time; 5. Curiosity of knowledge a) as such. b)
[in respect of things of a certain kind, an
Aristotelian term which Gladstone habitually used for erotically stimulating subjects]; 6. Curiosity of sympathy.’ It may be thought that the meaning of the first three is perfectly clear,
that of the fourth a little elusive, the fifth somewhat curiously expressed, and the sixth back to the higher meaninglessness of ‘Channels’. However, the fourth section on
‘Remedies’ has for most of its length something of the naive clarity of a primitive painting, although even here cryptic elements enter towards the end:

It is something of an anti-climax to know that the sins which were obsessing Gladstone when he wrote out this elaborate schedule of
temptation and guilt and possible cures
were almost exclusively those of reading pornography. And the sense of anti-climax is increased, although perhaps this is balanced by a diminution of dismay at the contrast between his secret vice
and his public persona, when it is realized how very restrictive was the frontier over which he felt he ought not to step. Restoration poetry, some classical authors and what he refers to as the
Fabliaux
were all treated by him as most dreadful black holes of temptation and sin.

Thus on 13 May 1848, he described (in Italian) how he had encountered the several volumes of
Fabliaux et contes des poètes français du XI–XV siècles
:

Then five days later, after another go at the
Fabliaux
, he wrote:

Nine months later, in February 1849, however, he was back at the
Fabliaux
, just as in July 1848 he had stumbled upon ‘two vile poems’ of Rochester’s. Although he had
avoided (‘I believe’, he rather doubtfully added) reading some earlier objectionable material, he nonetheless read these ‘with disgust I hope but certainly with a corrupt
sympathy’ and under the pretext ‘of acquiring a knowledge of the facts of nature and the manners of men’.
⁵

It all appears venial and rather pathetic, the picture of this ex-Cabinet minister, already of commanding presence and authority, two-thirds accusing himself and one-third excusing himself over
the guilty reading
of the most marginally salacious material. Yet the weakness and for him the sin depended not on the objective strength of the pornographic content of what he
read, but on his having decided he ought not to do it, and nonetheless succumbing time after time to the recurring temptation; and also on mild depravities being obviously sufficient to arouse in
his mind the most lustful thoughts. Thus, in April 1849, he accused himself of committing ‘adultery in the heart’, and also of ‘that which is well called
delectatio morosa
[enjoying thinking of evil without the intention of action]’.
⁶

His recurring but not very frequent surrenders to temptation are shown by one of the two lists which he subsequently and gradually added to his 1845 schema. Twenty days, one in 1845, one in
1846, three in 1847, ten in 1848, and five in the first four months of 1849, were marked with an ×, the symbol which made the ‘black mark against the day’, already exemplified by
13 May 1848. That there were no dates recorded subsequent to April 1849 does not mean that a ‘cure’ was then effected, although it could be that this was nominally so. It could equally
be that he merely gave up keeping records on that particular piece of paper, which also contained another list, and was becoming full.