Gladstone: A Biography (23 page)

He again looked for her unsuccessfully on 12 July, and on the 13th: ‘Went with a note to E.C.’s – received (unexpectedly) and remained 2 hours: a strange and humbling scene
– returned to
.’ The next day was something of an anti-climax, except for its diary entry encapsulating the
contradictions of his life: ‘Saw Bp of Oxford – Ld Aberdeen. H of C [where he spoke] 5–7¼ and at home in evg. except a short time looking for E.C.’ So was the next
day’s, although ending less quietly: ‘Attended the Dentist and saw the D[owage]r. Dss of Beaufort. Mr and Mrs Gaskell dined with me. Corrected proofs. Fell in with E.C.
and another mixed scene somewhat like of 48 hours before –
afterwards.’
²⁸

The day after that P. Lightfoot created a diversion from Elizabeth Collins; on this occasion his conversation with her seems to have been confined to her conditions of life. On 19 July he looked
unsuccessfully for Elizabeth Collins, and on the 21st he found her: ‘Saw E.C. again in the same [?] manner: and did not
afterwards: thinking there was a change.’
²⁹
On the 23rd there was a dinner at the Clarendon Hotel in New Bond Street for the American Minister
(Lawrence) and Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary and already by no means a favourite of Gladstone’s. Gladstone spoke, as did several others, but ‘At half past twelve I came away: the
first to do so. I then in a singular way hit upon E.C.: two more hours, strange, questionable, or more: followed by
. Whether or not
I have been deluded in the notion of doing good by such means, or whether I have sought it through what was unlawful I am not clear. God grant however not for my sake that the good may be
done.’
³⁰

That was the trough of his mid-century crisis of nerves and sex. He was away at Hagley and Hawarden for the first half of August. He wrote to Elizabeth Collins on the 17th and again on the 19th.
He looked for her unsuccessfully that evening having returned to London in the afternoon, saw her alone on the following evening for two and a quarter hours and wrote extensively in Italian after
this meeting. But the tension sounded in some way relaxed. He moved on easily from describing the meeting – ‘Things went partly as before’ – to her relations with a
prospective husband, to his relations with God and to the devastation caused in him by the defections of Manning and Hope-Scott. On the 20th he left London for five months, spent mostly at
Fasque.

Throughout the 1850s (and for decades beyond) he continued with sporadic rescue work. In 1859 he got considerably involved with a courtesan called Marion Summerhayes. He found it necessary to
write of their relations, ‘My thoughts of S. require to be limited and purged,’
³¹
but everything was then, and had been for seven or eight
years past, on a somewhat quieter plane. The frenzy of 1845, 1848, 1849, 1850 and above all 1851 was never repeated.

Did Gladstone believe that he was doing much good with his rescue efforts? Probably not, for although sometimes priggish he was not basically hypocritical. In 1854 he recorded that, in differing
circumstances, he had over five years or so engaged with between eighty and
ninety prostitutes of whom ‘there is but one of whom I know that the miserable life has been
abandoned
and
that I can fairly join that fact with influence of mine’.
³²
He was perfectly aware that his motives were mixed and that his
obsession must be explained by temptation and could not be justified by results.

What did his involvements amount to on the occasions when he was filled with remorse and even felt it necessary to apply physical correction to himself? The
locus classicus
for this is
the 1896 statement which he made to his clergyman son Stephen, who together with the Bishop of St Andrews was his main pastoral confidant at the end of his life. This was that he had never
‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’.
³³
The denial was obviously both precise and limited,
and while this may have carried conviction it also led to a decision, on counsel’s advice, at the time of the Wright–Herbert Gladstone trial in 1927, that more harm than good would be
done if the statement were put in as evidence.

One reason why the tide of mid-century madness, which at its height threatened to engulf Gladstone, began to recede after the summer of 1851 was that he became more engaged politically, although
the future for him as a Peelite, a disciple without a messiah, a Conservative (just) who had lost his faith in most Conservative causes, remained hazardous.

T
HE
T
REMENDOUS
P
ROJECTILE

G
LADSTONE
’
S PREOCCUPATIONS
and derangements of 1850 and 1851 did not prevent his making occasional major political forays.
Indeed it could be argued that it was during these two years that he made the breakthrough, both at home and abroad, from being merely a figure of promise and interest, of whom there were perhaps
thirty in the House of Commons, to being one of a handful of four or five whose names had world resonance. Yet it was a confusing time for him politically as well as emotionally. He was losing a
lot of old moorings while only tentatively edging towards new ones, and making the crossing among the swirling waters of both political and religious uncertainties. As a result some of his forays
pointed to his future Liberalism while one or two pointed back to the Toryism of his early years in Parliament. It was a period when he came to justify Morley’s famous description of his
‘formidable powers of contention and attack which were before long [Morley was writing of 1843] to resemble some tremendous projectile, describing a path the law of whose curves and
deviations, as they watched its journey through the air in wonder and anxiety for its shattering impact, men found it impossible to calculate’.
¹

The first of these forays owed more to old Toryism than to new Liberalism. In April 1850 a motion for the setting up of a Royal Commission to enquire into the affairs of Oxford and Cambridge was
brought before the House of Commons by a Radical backbencher. Gladstone was at this stage strongly opposed to the proposal, despite the hopes that he had aroused among the University reformers in
1847. Rather surprisingly, he did not speak in this debate, but left it to Inglis to fulminate for Oxford obscurantism. He had been brought ‘very reluctantly to town’ (from Brighton,
where Catherine Gladstone with the younger children was convalescing after the death of Jessy) and applied himself to caballing against the proposal, including a call on the Duke of Wellington as
Chancellor of the University.

However, the Prime Minister of the day was more important to the issue than one of twenty-one years before, even if a field-marshal as well
as a duke. Lord John Russell was
persuaded by the debate and, a few months later, announced the setting up of such an enquiry. Gladstone then intervened heavily but ineffectively. On 18 July he delivered himself of one and a half
hours of the most intransigent opposition, but was as unavailing as Inglis had been. The Commission was appointed in August, began work in October and produced by May 1852 a report which was as
expeditious as it was effective. Its competent chairman was Samuel Hinds, the dry and donnish Bishop of Norwich, and its secretary was the future Dean Stanley (then a fellow of Balliol). Among its
members were Tait, then Dean of Carlisle and later Archbishop of Canterbury; Liddell, then headmaster of Westminster and later one of the most famous of Christ Church deans; Jeune, then Master of
Pembroke College, Oxford, and later Bishop of Peterborough; and Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford and grandfather of the future Chief Scout.

Its report converted Gladstone. The ‘tremendous projectile’ swooped into an awesome curve. Gladstone then devoted the equivalent of what for most men would have been a major part of
their energies (but could not be for him as he was a particularly active Chancellor of the Exchequer over most of the relevant period) to devising and carrying through Parliament a bill
implementing its main recommendations. In the two years over which this secondary activity was spread his correspondence on the issue amounted to 520 letters of substance. This might be thought to
be natural. He had a peculiarly literate constituency and the subject was of most vital and direct interest to his electors. But what was not natural was that Gladstone wrote 350 of them (in his
own hand) and that only 170 came from the Heads of Houses, professors, fellows and outside ecclesiastical dignitaries who made up the collectivity of his constituency. This inversion of the normal
proportion illustrated one facet of the qualities which made Gladstone unique.