CHAPTER XI

THE TRACTARIAN CATASTROPHE

(_1841-1846_)

The movement of 1833 started out o£ the anti-Roman feelings of the

Emancipation time. It was anti-Roman as much as it was

anti-sectarian and anti-erastian. It was to avert the danger of

people becoming Romanists from ignorance of church principles. This

was all changed in one important section of the party. The

fundamental conceptions were reversed. It was not the Roman church

but the English church that was put on its trial.... From this

point of view the object of the movement was no longer to elevate

and improve an independent English church, but to approximate it as

far as possible to what was assumed to be undeniable--the perfect

catholicity of Rome.--DEAN CHURCH.

The fall of Peel and the break-up of his party in the state coincided

pretty nearly with a hardly less memorable rupture in that rising party

in the church, with which Mr. Gladstone had more or less associated

himself almost from its beginning. Two main centres of authority and

leading in the land were thus at the same moment dislodged and

dispersed. A long struggle in secular concerns had come to a decisive

issue; and the longer struggle in religious concerns had reached a

critical and menacing stage. The reader will not wonder that two events

so far-reaching as the secession of Newman and the fall of Sir Robert,

coupled as these public events were with certain importunities of

domestic circumstance of which I shall have more to say by and by,

brought Mr. Gladstone to an epoch in his life of extreme perturbation.

Roughly it may be said to extend from 1845 to 1852.

At the time of his resignation in the beginning of 1845, he wrote to

Lord John Manners, then his colleague at Newark, a curious account of

his views on party life. Lord John was then acting with the Young

England group inspired by Disraeli, who has left a picture of them in

_Sybil_, the most far-seeing of all his novels.

_To Lord John Manners._

_Jan. 30, 1845._--You, I have no doubt, are disappointed as to the

working of a conservative government. And so should I be if I were

to estimate its results by a comparison with the anticipations

which, from a distance and in the abstract, I had once entertained

of political life. But now my expectations not only from this but

from any government are very small. If they do a little good, if

they prevent others from doing a good deal of evil, if they

maintain an unblemished character, it is my fixed conviction that

under the circumstances of the times I can as an independent member

of parliament, for I am now virtually such, ask no more. And I do

entertain the strongest impression that if, with your honourable

and upright mind, you had been called upon for years to consult as

one responsible for the movements of great parliamentary bodies, if

you thus had been accustomed to look into public questions at close

quarters, your expectations from an administration, and your

dispositions towards it, would be materially changed....

The principles and moral powers of government as such are sinking

day by day, and it is not by laws and parliaments that they can be

renovated.... I must venture even one step further, and say that

such schemes of regeneration as those which were propounded (not, I

am bound to add, by you) at Manchester,[181] appear to me to be

most mournful delusions; and their re-issue, for their real

parentage is elsewhere, from the bosom of the party to which we

belong, an omen of the worst kind if they were likely to obtain

currency under the new sanction they have received. It is most easy

to complain as you do of _laissez-faire_ and _laissez-aller_; nor

do I in word or in heart presume to blame you; but I should sorely

blame myself if with my experience and convictions of _the growing

impotence of government for its highest functions_, I were either

to recommend attempts beyond its powers, which would react

unfavourably upon its remaining capabilities, or to be a party to

proposed substitutes for its true moral and paternal work which

appear to me mere counterfeits.

RELIGION AT OXFORD

On this letter we may note in passing, first, that the tariff

legislation did in the foundations what the Young England party wished

to do in a superficial and flimsy fashion; and second, it was the tariff

legislation that drove back a rising tide of socialism, both directly by

vastly improving the condition of labour, and indirectly by force of the

doctrine of free exchange which was thus corroborated by circumstances.

Of this we shall see more by and by.

Throughout the years of Sir Robert Peel's government, Mr. Gladstone had

been keenly intent upon the progress of religious affairs at Oxford.

'From 1841 till the beginning of 1845,' he says in a fragmentary note,

'I continued a hardworking official man, but with a decided predominance

of religious over secular interests. Although I had little of direct

connection with Oxford and its teachers, I was regarded in common fame

as tarred with their brush; and I was not so blind as to be unaware that

for the clergy this meant not yet indeed prosecution, but proscription

and exclusion from advancement by either party in the state, and for

laymen a vague and indeterminate prejudice with serious doubts how far

persons infected in this particular manner could have any real capacity

for affairs. Sir Robert Peel must, I think, have exercised much

self-denial when he put me in his cabinet in 1843.' The movement that

began in 1833 had by the opening of the next decade revealed startling

tendencies, and its first stage was now slowly but unmistakeably passing

into the second. Mr. Gladstone has told us[182] how he stood at this

hour of crisis; how strongly he believed that the church of England

would hold her ground, and even revive the allegiance not only of the

masses, but of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies who were

supposed to exist only as a consequence of the neglect of its duties by

the national church. He has told us also how little he foresaw the

second phase of the Oxford movement--the break-up of a distinguished and

imposing generation of clergy; 'the spectacle of some of the most

gifted sons reared by Oxford for the service of the church of England,

hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; and along with

this strange deflexion on one side, a not less convulsive rationalist

movement on the other,--all ending in contention and estrangement, and

in suspicions worse than either, because less accessible and more

intractable.'

II

The landmarks of the Tractarian story are familiar, and I do not ask the

reader in any detail to retrace them. The publication of Froude's

_Remains_ was the first flagrant beacon lighting the path of divergence

from the lines of historical high churchmen in an essentially

anti-protestant direction. Mr. Gladstone read the first instalment of

this book (1838) 'with repeated regrets.' Then came the blaze kindled by

Tract Ninety (1841). This, in the language of its author and his

friends, was the famous attempt to clear the Articles from the glosses

encrusting them like barnacles, and to bring out the old catholic truth

that man had done his worst to disfigure and to mutilate, and yet in

spite of all man's endeavour it was in the Articles still. Mr.

Gladstone, as we have seen, regarded Tract Ninety with uneasy doubts as

to its drift, its intentions, the way in which the church and the world

would take it. 'This No. Ninety of _Tracts for the Times_ which I read

by desire of Sir R. Inglis,' he writes to Lord Lyttelton, 'is like a

repetition of the publication of Froude's _Remains_, and Newman has

again burned his fingers. The most serious feature in the tract to my

mind is that, doubtless with very honest intentions and with his mind

turned for the moment so entirely towards those inclined to defection,

and therefore occupying _their_ point of view exclusively, he has in

writing it placed himself quite outside the church of England in point

of spirit and sympathy. As far as regards the proposition for which he

intended mainly to argue, I believe not only that he is right, but that

it is an a b c truth, almost a truism of the reign of Elizabeth, namely

that the authoritative documents of the church of England were not meant

to bind _all_ men to every opinion of their authors, and particularly

that they intended to deal as gently with prepossessions thought to look

towards Rome, as the necessity of securing a certain amount of

reformation would allow. Certainly also the terms in which Newman

characterises the present state of the church of England in his

introduction are calculated to give both pain and alarm; and the whole

aspect of the tract is like the assumption of a new position.'

TRACTARIAN LANDMARKS

Next followed the truly singular struggle for the university chair of

poetry at the end of the same year, between a no-popery candidate and a

Puseyite. Seldom surely has the service of the muses been pressed into

so alien a debate. Mr. Gladstone was cut to the heart at the prospect of

a sentence in the shape of a vote for this professorship, passed by the

university of Oxford 'upon all that congeries of opinions which the rude

popular notion associates with the _Tracts for the Times_.' Such a

sentence would be a disavowal by the university of catholic principles

in the gross; the association between catholic principles and the church

of England would be miserably weakened; and those who at all sympathised

with the Tracts would be placed in the position of aliens, corporally

within the pale, but in spirit estranged or outcast. If the church

should be thus broken up, there would be no space for catholicity

between the rival pretensions of an ultra-protestantised or

decatholicised English church, and the communion of Rome. 'Miserable

choice!' These and other arguments are strongly pressed (December 3,

1841) in favour of an amicable compromise, in a letter addressed to his

close friend Frederic Rogers. In the same letter Mr. Gladstone says that

he cannot profess to understand or to have studied the Tracts on

Reserve.[183] He 'partakes perhaps in the popular prejudice against

them.' Anybody can now see in the coolness of distant time that it was

these writings on Reserve that roused not merely prejudice but fury in

the public mind--a fury that without either justice or logic extended

from hatred of Romanisers to members of the church of Rome itself. It

affected for the worse the feeling between England and Ireland, for in

those days to be ultra-protestant was to be anti-Irish; and it greatly

aggravated, first the storm about the Maynooth grant in 1845, and then

the far wilder storm about the papal aggression six years later.

THE JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC

Further fuel for excitement was supplied the same year (1841) in a

fantastic project by which a bishop, appointed alternately by Great

Britain and Prussia and with his headquarters at Jerusalem, was to take

charge through a somewhat miscellaneous region, of any German

protestants or members of the church of England or anybody else who

might be disposed to accept his authority. The scheme stirred much

enthusiasm in the religious world, but it deepened alarm among the more

logical of the high churchmen. Ashley and the evangelicals were keen for

it as the blessed beginning of a restoration of Israel, and the king of

Prussia hoped to gain over the Lutherans and others of his subjects by

this side-door into true episcopacy. Politics were not absent, and some

hoped that England might find in the new protestant church such an

instrument in those uncomfortable regions, as Russia possessed in the

Greek church and France in the Latin. Dr. Arnold was delighted at the

thought that the new church at Jerusalem would comprehend persons using

different liturgies and subscribing different articles,--his favourite

pattern for the church of England. Pusey at first rather liked the idea

of a bishop to represent the ancient British church in the city of the

Holy Sepulchre; but Newman and Hope, with a keener instinct for their

position, distrusted the whole design in root and branch as a betrayal

of the church, and Pusey soon came to their mind. With caustic scorn

Newman asked how the anglican church, without ceasing to be a church,

could become an associate and protector of nestorians, jacobites,

monophysites, and all the heretics one could hear of, and even form a

sort of league with the mussulman against the Greek orthodox and the

Latin catholics. Mr. Gladstone could not be drawn to go these lengths.

Nobody could be more of a logician than Mr. Gladstone when he liked, no

logician could wield a more trenchant blade; but nobody ever knew better

in complex circumstance the perils of the logical short cut. Hence,

according to his general manner in all dubious cases, he moved slowly,

and laboured to remove practical grounds for objection. Ashley describes

him (October 16) at a dinner at Bunsen's rejoicing in the bishopric, and

proposing the health of the new prelate, and this gave Ashley pleasure,

for 'Gladstone is a good man and a clever man and an industrious

man.'[184] While resolute against any plan for what Hope called

gathering up the scraps of Christendom and making a new church out of

them, and resolute against what he himself called the inauguration of an

experimental or fancy church, Mr. Gladstone declared himself ready 'to

brave misconstruction for the sake of union with any Christian men,

provided the terms of union were not contrary to sound principles.' With

a strenuous patience that was thoroughly characteristic, he set to work

to bring the details of the scheme into an order conformable to his own

views, and he even became a trustee of the endowment fund. Two bishops

in succession filled the see, but in the fulness of time most men agreed

with Newman, who 'never heard of any either good or harm that bishopric

had ever done,' except what it had done for him. To him it gave a final

shake, and brought him on to the beginning of the end.[185]

In the summer of 1842 Mr. Gladstone received confidences that amazed

him. Here is a passage from his diary:--

_July 31, 1842._--Walk with R. Williams to converse on the subject

of our recent letters. I made it my object to learn from him the

general view of the ulterior section of the Oxford writers and

their friends. It is startling. They look not merely to the renewal

and development of the catholic idea within the pale of the church

of England, but seem to consider the main condition of that

development and of all health (some tending even to say of all

life) to be reunion with the church, of Rome as the see of Peter.

They recognise, however, authority in the church of England, and

abide in her without love specifically fixed upon her, to seek the

fulfilment of this work of reunion. It is, for example, he said,

the sole object of Oakeley's life. They do not look to any defined

order of proceedings in the way of means. They consider that the

end is to be reached through catholicising the mind of the members

of the church of England, but do not seem to feel that this can be

done to any great degree in working out and giving free scope to

her own rubrical system. They have no strong feeling of revulsion

from actual evils in the church of Rome, first, because they do not

wish to judge; secondly, especially not to judge the saints;

thirdly, they consider that infallibility is somewhere and nowhere

but there. They could not remain in the church of England if they

thought that she dogmatically condemned anything that the church of

Rome has defined _de fide_, but they do and will remain on the

basis of the argument of Tract 90; upon which, after mental

conflict, they have settled steadily down. They regret what Newman

has said strongly against the actual system of the church of Rome,

and they could not have affirmed, though neither do they positively

deny it. Wherever Roman doctrine _de fide_ is oppugned they must

protest; but short of this they render absolute obedience to their

ecclesiastical superiors in the church of England. They expect to

work on in practical harmony with those who look mainly to the

restoration of catholic ideas on the foundation laid by the church

of England as reformed, and who take a different view as to reunion

with Rome in particular, though of course desiring the reunion of

the whole body of Christ. All this is matter for very serious

consideration. In the meantime I was anxious to put it down while

fresh.

POSITION OF NEWMAN

Now was the time at which Mr. Gladstone's relations with Manning and

Hope began to approach their closest. Newman, the great enchanter, in

obedience to his bishop had dropped the issue of the Tracts; had

withdrawn from all public discussion of ecclesiastical politics; had

given up his work in Oxford; and had retired with a neophyte or two to

Littlemore, a hamlet on the outskirts of the ever venerable city, there

to pursue his theological studies, to prepare translations of

Athanasius, to attend to his little parish, and generally to go about

his own business so far as he might be permitted by the restlessness

alike of unprovoked opponents and unsought disciples. This was the

autumn of 1843. In October Manning sent to Mr. Gladstone two letters

that he had received from Newman, indicating only too plainly, as they

were both convinced, that the foundations of their leader's anglicanism

had been totally undermined by the sweeping repudiation alike by

episcopal and university authority of the doctrines of Tract Ninety. Dr.

Pusey, on the other hand, admitted that the expressions in Newman's

letter were portentous, but did not believe that they necessarily meant

secession. In a man of the world this would not have been regarded as

candid. For Newman says, 'I formally told Pusey that I expected to leave

the church of England in the autumn of 1843, and begged him to tell

others, that no one might be taken by surprise or might trust me in the

interval.'[186] But Newman has told us that he had from the first great

difficulty in making Dr. Pusey understand the differences between them.

The letters stand in the _Apologia_ (chapter iv. § 2) to tell their own

tale. To Mr. Gladstone their shock was extreme, not only by reason of

the catastrophe to which they pointed, but from the ill-omened shadow

that they threw upon the writer's probity of mind if not of heart. 'I

stagger to and fro like a drunken man,' he wrote to Manning, 'I am at my

wit's end.' He found some of Newman's language, 'forgive me if I say it,

more like the expressions of some Faust gambling for his soul, than the

records of the inner life of a great Christian teacher.' In his diary,

he puts it thus:--

_Oct. 28, 1843._--S. Simon and S. Jude. St. James's 11 A.M. with a

heavy heart. Another letter had come from Manning, enclosing a

second from Newman, which announced that since the summer of 1839

he had had the conviction that the church of Rome is the catholic

church, and ours not a branch of the catholic church because not in

communion with Rome; that he had resigned St. Mary's because he

felt he could not with a safe conscience longer teach in her; that

by the article in the _British Critic_ on the catholicity of the

English church he had quieted his mind for two years; that in his

letter to the Bishop of Oxford, written most reluctantly, he, as

the best course under the circumstances, committed himself again;

that his alarms revived with that wretched affair of the Jerusalem

bishopric, and had increased ever since; that Manning's

interference had only made him the more realise his views; that

Manning might make what use he pleased of his letters; he was

relieved of a heavy heart; yet he trusted that God would beep him

from hasty steps and resolves with a doubting conscience! How are

the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!

With the characteristic spirit with which, in politics and in every

other field, he always insisted on espying patches of blue sky where

others saw unbroken cloud, he was amazed that Newman did not, in spite

of all the pranks of the Oxford heads, perceive the English church to be

growing in her members more catholic from year to year, and how much

more plain and undeniable was the sway of catholic principles within its

bounds, since the time when he entertained no shadow of doubt about it.

But while repeating his opinion that in many of the Tracts the language

about the Roman church had often been far too censorious, Mr. Gladstone

does not, nor did he ever, shrink from designating conversion to that

church by the unflinching names of lapse and fall.[187] As he was soon

to put it, 'The temptation towards the church of Rome of which some are

conscious, has never been before my mind in any other sense than as

other plain and flagrant sins have been before it.'[188]

Two days later he wrote to Manning again:--

_Oct. 30, 1843._-- ... I have still to say that my impressions,

though without more opportunity of testing them I cannot regard

them as final, are still and strongly to the effect that upon the

promulgation of those two letters to the world. Newman stands in

the general view a _disgraced man_--and all men, all principles,

with which he has had to do, disgraced in proportion to the

proximity of their connection. And further I am persuaded that were

he not spellbound and entranced, he could not fail to see the gross

moral incoherence of the parts of his two statements; and that were

I upon the terms which would warrant it, I should feel it my duty,

at a time when as now, _summa res agitur_, to tell him so, after

having, however, tried my own views by reference to some other

mind, for instance to your own. But surely it will be said that his

'committing himself again' was simply a deliberate protestation of

what he knew to be untrue. I have no doubt of his having proceeded

honestly; no doubt that he can show it; but I say that those two

letters are quite enough to condemn a man in whom one has no

[Greek: pistis êthikê]: much more then one whom a great majority of the

community regard with prejudice and deep suspicion.... With regard

to your own feelings believe me that I enter into them; and indeed

our communications have now for many years been too warm, free, and

confiding to make it necessary for me, as I trust, to say what a

resource and privilege it is to me to take counsel with you upon

those absorbing subjects and upon the fortunes of the church; to

which I desire to feel with you that life, strength, and all means

and faculties, ought freely to be devoted, and indeed from such

devotion alone can they derive anything of true value.[189]

WARD'S _IDEAL_

The next blow was struck in the summer of 1844 by Ward's _Ideal of a

Christian Church_, which had the remarkable effect of harassing and

afflicting all the three high camps--the historical anglicans, the

Puseyites and moderate tractarians, and finally the Newmanites and

moderate Romanisers.[190] The writer was one of the most powerful

dialecticians of the day, defiant, aggressive, implacable in his

logic, unflinching in any stand that he chose to take; the

master-representative of tactics and a temper like those to which Laud

and Strafford gave the pungent name of Thorough. It was not its

theology, still less its history, that made his book the signal for the

explosion; it was his audacious proclamation that the whole cycle of

Roman doctrine was gradually possessing numbers of English churchmen,

and that he himself, a clergyman in orders and holding his fellowship on

the tenure of church subscription, had in so subscribing to the Articles

renounced no single Roman doctrine. This, and not the six hundred pages

of argumentation, was the ringing challenge that provoked a plain issue,

precipitated a decisive struggle, and brought the first stage of

tractarianism to a close.

ARTICLE ON WARD

It was impossible that Mr. Gladstone even in the thick of his tariffs,

his committees and deputations, his cabinet duties, and all the other

absorbing occupations of an important minister in strong harness, should

let a publication, in his view so injurious, pass in silence.[191] With

indignation he flew to his intrepid pen, and dealt as trenchantly with

Ward as Ward himself had dealt trenchantly with the reformers and all

others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held

the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the

triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its

censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for

the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the

lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental

culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than to the whole range of Christian

divines. In a sentence, Ward 'had launched on the great deep of human

controversy as frail a bark as ever carried sail,' and his reviewer

undoubtedly let loose upon it as shrewd a blast as ever blew from the

Æolian wallet. The article was meant for the _Quarterly Review_, and it

is easy to imagine the dire perplexities of Lockhart's editorial mind in

times so fervid and so distracted. The practical issue after all was not

the merits or the demerits of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, nor the real

meaning of Hooker, Jewel, Bull, but simply what was to be done to Ward.

Lockhart wrote to Murray that he had very seriously studied the article

and studied Ward's book, and not only these, but also the Articles and

the canons of the church, and he could not approve of the _Review_

committing itself to a judgment on the line proper to be taken by the

authorities of church and university, and the expression of such a

judgment he suspected to be Mr. Gladstone's main object in writing. Mr.

Gladstone, describing himself most truly as 'one of those soldiers who

do not know when they are beat,' saw his editor; declared that what he

sought was three things, first, that the process of mobbing out by

invective and private interpretations is bad and should be stopped;

second, that the church of England does not make assent to the

proceedings of the Reformation a term of communion; and third, that

before even judicial proceedings in one direction, due consideration

should be had of what judicial proceedings in another direction

consistency might entail, if that game were once begun. As Ward himself

had virtually put it, 'Show me how any of the recognised parties in the

church can subscribe in a natural sense, before you condemn me for

subscribing in a non-natural.'[192] The end was a concordat between

editor and contributor, followed by an immense amount of irksome

revision, mutilation, and re-revision, reducing the argument in some

places 'almost to tatters'; but the writer was in the long run satisfied

that things were left standing in it which it was well to plant in a

periodical like the _Quarterly Review_.

We have a glimpse of the passionate agitation into which this great

controversy, partly theologic, partly moral, threw Mr. Gladstone:--

_Feb. 6._--Breakfast at Mr. Macaulay's. Conversation chiefly on

Aristotle's politics and on the Oxford proceedings. I grew hot, for

which _ignoscat Deus_. _Feb. 13._--Oxford 1-5. We were in the

theatre. Ward was like himself, honest to a fault, as little like

an advocate in his line of argument as well could he, and strained

his theology even a point further than before. The forms are

venerable, the sight imposing; the act is fearful [the degradation

of Ward], if it did not leave strong hope of its revisal by law.

To Dr. Pusey he writes (Feb. 7):--

Indignation at this proposal to treat Mr. Newman worse than a dog

really makes me mistrust my judgment, as I suppose one should

always do when any proposal seeming to present an aspect of

incredible wickedness is advanced. _Feb. 17._--I concur with my

whole heart and soul in the desire for repose; and I fully believe

that the gift of an interval of reflection is that which would be

of all gifts the most precious to us all, which would restore the

faculty of deliberation now almost lost in storms, and would afford

the best hope both of the development of the soundest elements that

are in motion amongst us, and of the mitigation or absorption of

those which are more dangerous.

In the proceedings at Oxford against Ward (February 13, 1845), Mr.

Gladstone voted in the minority both against the condemnation of the

book, and against the proposal to strip its writer of his university

degree. He held that the censure combined condemnation of opinions with

a declaration of personal dishonesty, and the latter question he held to

be one 'not fit for the adjudication of a human tribunal.'

All this has a marked place in Mr. Gladstone's mental progress. Though

primarily and ostensibly the concern of the established church, yet the

series of proceedings that had begun with the attack on Hampden in 1836,

and then were followed down to our own day by academical, ecclesiastical

and legal censures and penalties, or attempts at censure and penalty, on

Newman, Pusey, Maurice, Gorham, _Essays and Reviews_, Colenso, and

ended, if they have yet ended, in a host of judgments affecting minor

personages almost as good as nameless--all constitute a chapter of

extraordinary importance in the general history of English toleration,

extending in its consequences far beyond the pale of the communion

immediately concerned. It was a long and painful journey, often

unedifying, not seldom squalid, with crooked turns not a few, and before

it was over, casting men into strange companionship upon bleak and

hazardous shores. Mr. Gladstone, though he probably was not one of those

who are as if born by nature tolerant, was soon drawn by circumstance to

look with favour upon that particular sort of toleration which arose

out of the need for comprehension. When the six doctors condemned Pusey

(June 1843) for preaching heresy and punished him by suspension, Mr.

Gladstone was one of those who signed a vigorous protest against a

verdict and a sentence passed upon an offender without hearing him and

without stating reasons. This was at least the good beginning of an

education in liberal rudiments.

III

NEWMAN'S SECESSION

In October 1845 the earthquake came. Newman was received into the Roman

communion. Of this step Mr. Gladstone said that it has never yet been

estimated at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance.

The leader who had wielded a magician's power in Oxford was followed by

a host of other converts. More than once I have heard Mr. Gladstone tell

the story how about this time he sought from Manning an answer to the

question that sorely perplexed him: what was the common bond of union

that led men of intellect so different, of character so opposite, of

such various circumstance, to come to the same conclusion. Manning's

answer was slow and deliberate: '_Their common bond is their want of

truth._' 'I was surprised beyond measure,' Mr. Gladstone would proceed,

'and startled at his judgment.'[193]

Most ordinary churchmen remained where they were. An erastian statesman

of our own time, when alarmists ran to him with the news that a couple

of noblemen and their wives had just gone over to Rome, replied with

calm, 'Show me a couple of grocers and their wives who have gone over,

then you will frighten me.' The great body of church people stood firm,

and so did Pusey, Keble, Gladstone, and so too, for half a dozen years

to come, did his two closest friends, Manning and Hope. The dominant

note in Mr. Gladstone's mind was clear and it was constant. As he put it

to Manning (August 1,1845),--'That one should entertain love for the

church of Rome in respect of her virtues and her glories, is of course

right and obligatory; but one is equally bound under the circumstances

of the English church in direct antagonism with Rome to keep clearly in

view their very fearful opposites.'

Tidings of the great secession happened to find Mr. Gladstone in a

rather singular atmosphere. In the course of 1842, to the keen distress

of her relatives, his sister had joined the Roman church, and her

somewhat peculiar nature led to difficulties that taxed patience and

resource to the uttermost. She had feelings of warm attachment to her

brother, and spoke strongly in that sense to Dr. Wiseman; and it was for

the purpose of carrying out some plans of his father's for her

advantage, that in the autumn of 1845 (September 24-November 18), Mr.

Gladstone passed nearly a couple of months in Germany. The duty was

heavy and dismal, but the journey brought him into a society that could

not be without effect upon his impressionable mind. At Munich he laid

the foundation of one of the most interesting and cherished friendships

of his life. Hope-Scott had already made the acquaintance of Dr.

Döllinger, and he now begged Mr. Gladstone on no account to fail to

present himself to him, as well as to other learned and political men,

'good catholics and good men with no ordinary talent and information.'

'Nothing,' Mr. Gladstone once wrote in after years, 'ever so much made

me anglican _versus_ Roman as reading in Döllinger over forty years ago

the history of the fourth century and Athanasius _contra mundum_.' Here

is his story to his wife:--

_Munich, Sept. 30, 1845._--Yesterday evening after dinner with two

travelling companions, an Italian _negoziante_ and a German, I must

needs go and have a shilling's worth of the Augsburg Opera, where

we heard Mozart (_Don Juan_) _well_ played and very respectably

sung. To-day I have spent my evening differently, in tea and

infinite conversation with Dr. Döllinger, who is one of the first

among the Roman catholic theologians of Germany, a remarkable and a

very pleasing man. His manners have great simplicity and I am

astonished at the way in which a busy student such as he is can

receive an intruder. His appearance is, singular to say, just

compounded of those of two men who are among the most striking in

appearance of our clergy, Newman and Dr. Mill. He surprises me by

the extent of his information and the way in which he knows the

details of what takes place in England. Most of our conversation

related to it. He seemed to me one of the most liberal and catholic

in mind of all the persons of his communion whom I have known.

To-morrow I am to have tea with him again, and there is to be a

third, Dr. Görres, who is a man of eminence among them. Do not

think he has designs upon me. Indeed he disarms my suspicions in

that respect by what appears to me a great sincerity....

DR. DÖLLINGER

_Oct. 2._--On Tuesday after post I began to look about me; and

though I have not seen all the sights of Munich I have certainly

seen a great deal that is interesting in the way of art, and having

spent a good deal of time in Dr. Döllinger's company, last night

till one o'clock, I have lost my heart to him. What I like perhaps

most, or what crowns other causes of liking towards him, is that

he, like Rio, seems to take hearty interest in the progress of

religion in the church of England, apart from the (so to speak)

party question between us, and to have a mind to appreciate good

wherever he can find it. For instance, when in speaking of Wesley I

said that his own views and intuitions were not heretical, and that

if the ruling power in our church had had energy and a right mind

to turn him to account, or if he had been in the church of Rome I

was about to add, he would then have been a great saint, or

something to that effect. But I hesitated, thinking it perhaps too

strong, and even presumptuous, but he took me up and used the very

words, declaring that to be his opinion. Again, speaking of

Archbishop Leighton he expressed great admiration of his piety, and

said it was so striking that he could not have been a real

Calvinist. He is a great admirer of England and English character,

and he does not at all _slur_ over the mischief with which religion

has to contend in Germany. Lastly, I may be wrong, but I am

persuaded he in his mind abhors a great deal that is too frequently

taught in the church of Rome. Last night he spoke with such a

sentiment of the doctrine that was taught on the subject of

indulgences which moved Luther to resist them; and he said he

believed it was true that the preachers represented to the people

that by money payments they could procure the release souls from

purgatory. I told him that was exactly the doctrine I had heard

preached in Messina, and he said a priest preaching so in Germany

would be suspended by his bishop.

Last night he invited several of his friends whom I wanted to meet,

to an entertainment which consisted first of weak tea, immediately

followed by meat supper with beer and wine and sweets. For two

hours was I there in the midst of five German professors, or four,

and the editor of a paper, who held very interesting discussions; I

could only follow them in part, and enter into them still less, as

none of them (except Dr. D.) seemed to speak any tongue but their

own with any freedom, but you would have been amused to see and

hear them, and me in the midst. I never saw men who spoke together

in a way to make one another inaudible as they did, always

excepting Dr. Döllinger, who sat like Rogers, being as he is a much

more refined man than the rest. But of the others I assure you

always two, sometimes three, and once all four, were speaking at

once, very loud, each not trying to force the attention of the

others, but to be following the current of his own thoughts. One of

them was Dr. Görres,[194] who in the time of Napoleon edited a

journal that had a great effect in rousing Germany to arms.

Unfortunately he spoke more _thickly_ than any of them.[195]

At Baden-Baden (October 16) he made the acquaintance of Mrs.

Craven, the wife of the secretary of the Stuttgart mission, and

authoress of the _Récit d'une Soeur_. Some of the personages of that

alluring book were of the company. 'I have drunk tea several times

at her house, and have had two or three long conversations with

them on matters of religion. They are excessively acute and also

full of Christian sentiment. But they are much more difficult to

make real way with than a professor of theology, because they are

determined (what is vulgarly called) to go the whole hog, just as

in England usually when you find a woman anti-popish in spirit,

she will push the argument against them to all extremes.'

FURTHER ADVANCE

It was at the same time that he read Bunsen's book on the church.

'It is dismal,' he wrote home to Mrs. Gladstone, 'and I must write

to him to say so as kindly as I can.' Bunsen would seem all the

more dismal from the contrast with the spiritual graces of these

catholic ladies, and the ripe thinking and massive learning of one

who was still the great catholic doctor. At no time in Mr.

Gladstone's letters to Manning or to Hope is there a single

faltering accent in respect of Rome. The question is not for an

instant, or in any of his moods, open. He never doubts nor wavers.

None the less, these impressions of his German journey would rather

confirm than weaken his theological faith within the boundaries of

anglican form and institution. 'With my whole soul I am convinced,'

he says to Manning (June 23, 1850), 'that if the Roman system is

incapable of being powerfully modified in spirit, it never can be

the instrument of the work of God among us; the faults and the

virtues of England are alike against it.'

THE LADY HEWLEY CASE

I need spend no time in pointing out how inevitably these new currents

drew Mr. Gladstone away from the old moorings of his first book. Even in

1844 he had parted company with the high ecclesiastical principles of

good tories like Sir Robert Inglis. Peel, to his great honour, in that

year brought in what Macaulay truly called 'an honest, an excellent

bill, introduced from none but the best and purest motives.' It arose

from a judicial decision in what was known as the Lady Hewley case, and

its object was nothing more revolutionary or latitudinarian than to

apply to Unitarian chapels the same principle of prescription that

protected gentlemen in the peaceful enjoyment of their estates and their

manor-houses. The equity of the thing was obvious. In 1779 parliament

had relieved protestant dissenting ministers from the necessity of

declaring their belief in certain church articles, including especially

those affecting the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1813 parliament had

repealed the act of William III. that made it blasphemy to deny that

doctrine. This legislation, rendered Unitarian foundations legal, and

the bill extended to unitarian congregations the same prescriptions as

covered the titles of other voluntary bodies to their places of worship,

their school-houses, and their burial-grounds. But what was thus a

question of property was treated as if it were a question of divinity;

'bigotry sought aid from chicane,' and a tremendous clamour was raised

by anglicans, wesleyans, presbyterians, not because they had an inch of

_locus standi_ in the business, but because unitarianism was scandalous

heresy and sin. Follett made a masterly lawyer's speech, Sheil the

speech of a glittering orator, guarding unitarians by the arguments that

had (or perhaps I should say had not) guarded Irish catholics, Peel and

Gladstone made political speeches lofty and sound, and Macaulay the

speech of an eloquent scholar and a reasoner, manfully enforcing

principles both of law and justice with a luxuriance of illustration all

his own, from jurists of imperial Rome, sages of old Greece, Hindoos,

Peruvians, Mexicans, and tribunals beyond the Mississippi.[196] We do

not often enjoy such parliamentary nights in our time.

Mr. Gladstone supported the proposal on the broadest grounds of

unrestricted private judgment:--

I went into the subject laboriously, he says, and satisfied myself

that this was not to be viewed as a mere quieting of titles based

on lapse of time, but that the unitarians were the true lawful

holders, because though they did not agree with the puritan

opinions they adhered firmly to the puritan principle, which was

that scripture was the rule without any binding interpretation, and

that each man, or body, or generation must interpret for himself.

This measure in some ways heightened my churchmanship, but

depressed my church-and-statesmanship.

Far from feeling that there was any contrariety between his principles

of religious belief and those on which legislation in their case ought

to proceed, he said that the only use he could make of these principles

was to apply them to the decisive performance of a great and important

act, founded on the everlasting principles of truth and justice. Sheil,

who followed Mr. Gladstone, made a decidedly striking observation. He

declared how delighted he was to hear from such high authority that the

bill was perfectly reconcilable with the strictest and the sternest

principles of state conscience. 'I cannot doubt,' he continued, 'that

the right hon. gentleman, the champion of free trade, will ere long

become the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought.' Time

was to justify Sheil's acute prediction. Unquestionably the line of

argument that suggested it was a great advance from the arguments of

1838, of which Macaulay had said that they would warrant the roasting of

dissenters at slow fires.

IV

In this vast field of human interest what engaged and inflamed him was

not in the main place that solicitude for personal salvation and

sanctification, which under sharp stress of argument, of pious

sensibility, of spiritual panic, now sent so many flocking into the

Roman fold. It was at bottom more like the passion of the great popes

and ecclesiastical master-builders, for strengthening and extending the

institutions by which faith is spread, its lamps trimmed afresh, its

purity secured. What wrung him with affliction was the laying waste of

the heritage of the Lord. 'The promise,' he cried, 'indeed stands sure

to the church and the elect. In the farthest distance there is peace,

truth, glory; but what a leap to it, over what a gulf.' For himself, the

old dilemma of his early years still tormented him. 'I wish,' he writes

to Manning (March 8, 1846) good humouredly, 'I could get a synodical

decision in favour of my retirement from public life. For, I profess to

remain there (to myself) for the service of the church, and my views of

the mode of serving her are getting so fearfully wide of those generally

current, that even if they be sound, they may become wholly

unavailable.' The question whether the service of the church can be most

effectually performed in parliament was incessantly present to his mind.

Manning pressed him in one direction, the inward voice drew him in the

other. 'I could write down in a few lines,' he says to Manning, 'the

measures, after the adoption of which I should be prepared to say to a

young man entering life, If you wish to serve the church do it in the

sanctuary, and not in parliament (unless he were otherwise determined by

his station, and not always then; it must depend upon his inward

vocation), and should not think it at all absurd to say the same thing

to some who have already placed themselves in this latter sphere. For

when the end is attained of letting "the church help herself," and when

it is recognised that active help can no longer be given, the function

of serving the church in the state, such as it was according to the old

idea, dies of itself, and what remains of duty is of a character

essentially different.' Then a pregnant passage:--'It is the essential

change now in progress from the catholic to the infidel idea of the

state which is the determining element in my estimate of this matter,

and which has, I think, no place in yours. For I hold and believe that

when that transition has once been effected, the state never can come

back to the catholic idea by means of any agency from within itself:

that, if at all, it must be by a sort of re-conversion from without. I

am not of those (excellent as I think them) who say, Remain and bear

witness for the truth. There is a place where witness is ever to be

borne for truth, that is to say for full and absolute truth, but it is

not there.'[197]

He reproaches himself with being 'actively engaged in carrying on a

process of, lowering the religious tone of the state, letting it down,

demoralising it, and assisting in its transition into one which is

mechanical.' The objects that warrant public life in one in whose case

executive government must be an element, must be very special. True that

in all probability the church will hold her nationality in substance

beyond our day. 'I think she will hold it as long as the monarchy

subsists.' So long the church will need parliamentary defence, but in

what form? The dissenters had no members for universities, and yet their

real representation was far better organised in proportion to its weight

than the church, though formally not organised at all. 'Strength with

the people will for our day at least be the only effectual defence of

the church in the House of Commons, as the want of it is now our

weakness there. It is not everything that calls itself a defence that is

really such.'[198]

HOPES FOR THE CHURCH

Manning expressed a strong fear, amounting almost to a belief, that the

church of England must split asunder. 'Nothing can be firmer in my

mind,' Mr. Gladstone replied (Aug. 31, 1846), 'than the opposite idea.

She will live through her struggles, she has a great providential

destiny before her. Recollect that for a century and a half, a much

longer period than any for which puritan and catholic principles have

been in conflict within the church of England, Jansenist and

anti-Jansenist dwelt within the church of Rome with the unity of wolf

and lamb. Their differences were not absorbed by the force of the

church; they were in full vigour when the Revolution burst upon both.

Then the breach between nation and church became so wide as to make the

rivalries of the two church sections insignificant, and so to cause

their fusion.' Later, he thinks that he finds a truer analogy between

'the superstition and idolatry that gnaws and corrodes' the life of the

Roman church, and the puritanism that with at least as much countenance

from authority abides in the English church. There are two systems, he

says, in the English church vitally opposed to one another, and if they

were equally developed they could not subsist together in the same

sphere. If puritanical doctrines were the base of episcopal and

collegiate teaching, then the church must either split or become

heretical. As it is, the basis is on the whole anti-puritanic, and what

we should call catholic. The conflict may go on as now, and with a

progressive advance of the good principle against the bad one. 'That has

been on the whole the course of things during our lifetime, and to judge

from present signs it is the will of God that it should so continue.'

(Dec. 7, 1846.)

The following to Mr. Phillimore sums up the case as he then believed it

to stand (June 24, 1847):--

... The church is now in a condition in which her children may and

must desire that she should keep her national position and her

civil and proprietary rights, and that she should by degrees obtain

the means of extending and of strengthening herself, not only by

covering a greater space, but by a more vigorous organisation. Her

attaining to this state of higher health depends in no small degree

upon progressive adaptations of her state and her laws to her ever

enlarging exigencies; these depend upon the humour of the state,

and the state cannot and will not be in good humour with her, if

she insists upon its being in bad humour with all other communions.

It seems to me, therefore, that while in substance we should all

strive to sustain her in her national position, we shall do well on

her behalf to follow these rules: to part earlier, and more freely

and cordially, than heretofore with such of her privileges, here

and there, as may be more obnoxious than really valuable, and some

such she has; and further, not to presume too much to give

directions to the state as to its policy with respect to other

religious bodies.... This is not political expediency as opposed to

religious principle. Nothing did so much damage to religion as the

obstinate adherence to a negative, repressive, and coercive course.

For a century and more from the Revolution it brought us nothing

but outwardly animosities and inwardly lethargy. The revival of a

livelier sense of duty and of God is now beginning to tell in the

altered policy of the church.... As her sense of her spiritual work

rises, she is becoming less eager to assert her exclusive claim,

leaving that to the state as a matter for itself to decide; and she

also begins to forego more readily, but cautiously, her external

prerogatives.

FOOTNOTES:

[181] Some proceedings, I think, of Mr. Disraeli and his Young England

friends.

[182] Chapter of Autobiography: _Gleanings_, vii. pp. 142-3.

[183] On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge--Tracts 80 and 87.

(1837-40). With the ominous and in every sense un-English

superscription, _Ad Clerum_. Isaac Williams was the author.

[184] _Life of Shaftesbury_, i. p. 377. There is a letter from Bunsen

(p. 373), in which he exclaims how wonderful it is 'that the

great-grandson of Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, the friend of Voltaire,

should write thus to the great-grandson of Frederick the Great, the

admirer of both.' But not more wonderful than Bunsen forgetting that

Frederick had no children.

[185] See _Memoirs of J. R. Hope-Scott_, i. chapters 15-17. _Apologia_,

chapter 3, _ad fin._

[186] _Story of Dr. Pusey's Life_, p. 227.

[187] This letter of October 28 is in Purcell, _Manning_, i. p. 242.

[188] Mr. Gladstone to Dr. Hook, Jan. 30. '47.

[189] It was on the fifth of November, a week after this correspondence,

that Manning preached the Guy Fawkes sermon which caused Newman to send

J. A. Froude to the door to tell Manning that he was 'not at

home.'--Purcell, i. pp. 245-9.

[190] For a full account of this book and its consequences the reader

will always consult chapters xi., xii., and xiii., of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's

admirably written work, _William George Ward and the Oxford Movement_.

[191] It was in the midst of these laborious employments that Mr.

Gladstone published a prayer-book, compiled for family use, from the

anglican liturgy. An edition of two thousand copies went off at once,

and was followed by many editions more.

[192] _William George Ward_, p. 332.

[193] The story is told in Purcell, _Manning_, i. p. 318.

[194] Joseph Görres, one of the most famous of European publicists and

gazetteers between the two revolutionary epochs of 1789 and 1848. His

journal was the _Rhine Mercury_, where the doctrine of a free and united

Germany was preached (1814-16) with a force that made Napoleon call the

newspaper a fifth great power. In times Görres became a vehement

ultramontane.

[195] See Friedrich's _Life of Döllinger_, ii. pp. 222-226, for a letter

from Döllinger to Mr. Gladstone after his visit, dated Nov. 15, 1845.

[196] _Hansard_, June 6, 1844.

[197] To Manning, April 5, 1846.

[198] To Manning, April 19, 1846.

Book III

_1847-1852_

CHAPTER I

MEMBER FOR OXFORD

(_1847_)

There is not a feature or a point in the national character which

has made England great among the nations of the world, that is not

strongly developed and plainly traceable in our universities. For

eight hundred or a thousand years they have been intimately

associated with everything that has concerned the highest interests

of the country.--GLADSTONE.

In 1847 the fortunes of a general election brought Mr. Gladstone into

relations that for many years to come deeply affected his political

course. As a planet's orbit has puzzled astronomers until they discover

the secret of its irregularities in the attraction of an unseen and

unsuspected neighbour in the firmament, so some devious motions of this

great luminary of ours were perturbations due in fact to the influence

of his new constituency. As we have seen, Mr. Gladstone quitted Newark

when he entered the cabinet to repeal the corn law. At the end of 1846,

writing to Lord Lyttelton from Fasque, he tells him: 'I wish to be in

parliament but coldly; feeling at the same time that I ought to wish it

warmly on many grounds. But my father is so very keen in his protective

opinions, and I am so very decidedly of the other way of thinking, that

I look forward with some reluctance and regret to what must, when it

happens, place me in marked and public contrast with him.' The thing

soon happened.

I remained, he says, without a seat until the dissolution in June

1847. But several months before this occurred it had become known

that Mr. Estcourt would vacate his seat for Oxford, and I became a

candidate. It was a serious campaign. The constituency, much to its

honour, did not stoop to fight the battle on the ground of

protection. But it was fought, and that fiercely, on religious

grounds. There was an incessant discussion, and I may say

dissection, of my character and position in reference to the Oxford

movement. This cut very deep, for it was a discussion which each

member of the constituency was entitled to carry on for himself.

The upshot was favourable. The liberals supported me gallantly, so

did many zealous churchmen, apart from politics, and a good number

of moderate men, so that I was returned by a fair majority. I held

the seat for eighteen years, but with five contests and a final

defeat.

The other sitting member after the retirement of Mr. Estcourt was Sir

Robert Harry Inglis, who had beaten Peel by a very narrow majority in

the memorable contest for the university seat on the final crisis of the

catholic question in 1829. He was blessed with a genial character and an

open and happy demeanour; and the fact that he was equipped with a full

store of sincere and inexorable prejudices made it easy for him to be

the most upright, honourable, kindly, and consistent of political men.

Repeal of the Test acts, relief of the catholics, the Reform bill,

relief of the Jews, reform of the Irish church, the grant to Maynooth,

the repeal of the corn laws--one after another he had stoutly resisted

the whole catalogue of revolutionising change. So manful a record made

his seat safe. In the struggle for the second seat, Mr. Gladstone's

friends encountered first Mr. Cardwell, a colleague of his as secretary

of the treasury in the late government. Cardwell was deep in the

confidence and regard of Sir Robert Peel, and he earned in after years

the reputation of an honest and most capable administrator; but in these

earlier days the ill-natured called him Peel-and-water, others labelled

him latitudinarian and indifferent, and though he had the support of

Peel, promised before Mr. Gladstone's name as candidate was announced,

he thought it wise at a pretty early hour to withdraw from a triangular

fight. The old high-and-dry party and the evangelical party combined to

bring out Mr. Round. If he had achieved no sort of distinction, Mr.

Round had at least given no offence: above all, he had kept clear of all

those tractarian innovations which had been finally stamped with the

censure of the university two years before.

OXFORD SUPPORTERS

Charles Wordsworth, his old tutor and now warden of Glenalmond, found it

hard to give Mr. Gladstone his support, because he himself held to the

high principle of state conscience, while the candidate seemed more than

ever bent on the rival doctrine of social justice. Mr. Hallam joined his

committee, and what that learned veteran's adhesion was in influence

among older men, that of Arthur Clough was among the younger. Northcote

described Clough to Mr. Gladstone as a very favourable specimen of a

class, growing in numbers and importance among the younger Oxford men, a

friend of Carlyle's, Frank Newman's, and others of that stamp; well read

in German literature and an admirer of German intellect, but also a

still deeper admirer of Dante; just now busily taking all his opinions

to pieces and not beginning to put them together again; but so earnest

and good that he might be trusted to work them into something better

than his friends inclined to fear. Ruskin, again, who had the year

before published the memorable second volume of his _Modern Painters_

(he was still well under thirty), was on the right side, and the Oxford

chairman is sure that Mr. Gladstone will appreciate at its full value

the support of such high personal merit and extraordinary natural

genius. Scott, the learned Grecian who had been beaten along with Mr.

Gladstone in the contest for the Ireland scholarship seventeen years

before, wrote to him:--'Ever since the time when you and I received

Strypes at the hand of the vice-chancellor, and so you became my

[Greek: homomastigias

labôn agônos tas isas plêgas emoi,'][1]

I have looked forward to your being the representative of the

university.' Richard Greswell of Worcester was the faithful chairman of

his Oxford committee now and to the end, eighteen years off. He had

reached the dignity of a bachelor of divinity, but nearly all the rest

were no more than junior masters.

Routh, the old president of Magdalen, declined to vote for him on the

well-established ground that Christ Church had no business to hold both

seats. Mr. Gladstone at once met this by the dexterous proposition that

though Christ Church was not entitled to elect him against the wish of

the other colleges, yet the other colleges were entitled to elect him if

they liked, by giving him a majority not made up of Christ Church votes.

His eldest brother had written to tell him in terms of affectionate

regret, that he could take no part in the election; mere political

differences would be secondary, but in the case of a university,

religion came first, and there it was impossible to separate a candidate

from his religious opinions. When the time came, however, partly under

strong pressure from Sir John, Thomas Gladstone took a more lenient view

and gave his brother a vote.

The Round men pointed triumphantly to their hero's votes on Maynooth and

on the Dissenters' Chapels bill, and insisted on the urgency of

upholding the principles of the united church of England and Ireland in

their full integrity. The backers of Mr. Gladstone retorted by recalling

their champion's career; how in 1834 he first made himself known by his

resistance to the admission of dissenters to the universities; how in

1841 he threw himself into the first general move for the increase of

the colonial episcopate, which had resulted in the erection of eleven

new sees in six years; how zealously with energy and money he had

laboured for a college training for the episcopalian clergy in Scotland;

how instrumental he was in 1846, during the few months for which he held

the seals of secretary of state, in erecting four colonial bishoprics;

how the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, through the mouth of

the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, had thanked him for his services;

how long he had been an active supporter of the great societies for the

spread of church principles, the propagation of church doctrines, and

the erection of church fabrics. As for the Dissenters' Chapels bill, it

was an act of simple justice and involved no principles at issue between

the church and dissent, and Mr. Gladstone's masterly exposition of the

tendency of dissent to drop one by one all the vital truths of

Christianity was proclaimed to be a real service to the church. The

reader will thus see the lie of the land, what it meant to be member for

a university, and why Mr. Gladstone thought the seat the highest of

electoral prizes.

THE CONTEST

A circular was issued impugning his position on protestant grounds. 'I

humbly trust,' wrote Mr. Gladstone in reply (July 26), 'that its writers

are not justified in exhibiting me to the world as a person otherwise

than heartily devoted to the doctrine and constitution of our reformed

church. But I will never consent to adopt as the test of such doctrine,

a disposition to identify the great and noble cause of the church of

England with the restraint of the civil rights of those who differ from

her.' Much was made of Mr. Gladstone's refusal to vote for the

degradation of Ward. People wrote to the newspapers that it was an

admitted and notorious fact that a sister of Mr. Gladstone's under his

own influence had gone over to the church of Rome.[200] The fable was

retracted, but at once revived in the still grosser untruth, that he

habitually employed 'a Jesuitical system of argument' to show that

nobody need leave the church of England, 'because all might be had there

that was to be enjoyed in the church of Rome.' Maurice published a

letter to a London clergyman vigorously remonstrating against the

bigoted spirit that this election was warming into life, and fervently

protesting against making a belief in the Nicene creed into the same

thing as an opinion about a certain way of treating the property of

unitarians. 'One artifice of this kind,' said Maurice, 'has been

practised in this election which it makes me blush to speak of. Mr. Ward

called the reformation a vile and accursed thing; Mr. Gladstone voted

against a certain measure for the condemnation of Mr. Ward; therefore he

spoke of the reformation as a vile and accursed thing. I should not

have believed it possible that such a conclusion had been drawn from

such premisses even by our religious press.'

The worthy Mr. Round, on the other hand, was almost impregnable. A

diligent scrutiny at last dragged the dark fact to the light of day,

that he had actually sat on Peel's election committee at the time of

catholic emancipation in 1829, and had voted for him against Inglis. So

it appears, said the mocking Gladstonians, that the protestant Mr. Round

'was willing to lend a helping hand to the first of a series of measures

which are considered by his supporters as fraught with danger to the

country's very best interests.' A still more sinister rumour was next

bruited abroad: that Mr. Round attended a dissenting place of worship,

and he was constrained to admit that, once in 1845 and thrice in 1846,

he had been guilty of this blacksliding. The lost ground, however, was

handsomely recovered by a public declaration that the very rare

occasions on which he had been present at other modes of Christian

worship had only confirmed his affection and reverential attachment to

the services and formularies of his own church.

VICTORY AT THE POLL

The nomination was duly made in the Sheldonian theatre (July 29), the

scene of so many agitations in these fiery days. Inglis was proposed by

a canon of Christ Church, Round by the master of Balliol, and Gladstone

by Dr. Richards, the rector of Exeter. The prime claim advanced for him

by his proposer, was his zeal for the English church in word and deed,

above all his energy in securing that wherever the English church went,

thither bishoprics should go too. Besides all this, his master work, he

had found time to spare not only for public business of the

commonwealth, but for the study of theology, philosophy, and the

arts.[201] Then the voting began. The Gladstonians went into the battle

with 1100 promises. Northcote,[202] passing vigilant days in the

convocation house, sent daily reports to Mr. Gladstone at Fasque. Peel

went up to vote for him (splitting for Inglis); Ashley went up to vote

against him. At the close of the second day things looked well, but

there was no ground for over-confidence. Inglis was six hundred ahead of

Gladstone, and Gladstone only a hundred and twenty ahead of Round. The

next day Round fell a little more behind, and when the end came (August

3) the figures stood:--Inglis 1700, Gladstone 997, Round 824, giving

Gladstone a majority of 173 over his competitor.

Numbers were not the only important point. When the poll came to be

analysed by eager statisticians, the decision of the electors was found

to have a weight not measured by an extra hundred and seventy votes. For

example, Mr. Gladstone had among his supporters twenty-five

double-firsts against seven for Round, and of single first-classes he

had one hundred and fifty-seven against Round's sixty-six. Of Ireland

and Hertford scholars Mr. Gladstone had nine to two and three to one

respectively; and of chancellor's prizemen who voted he had forty-five

against twelve. Of fellows of colleges he had two hundred and eighteen

against one hundred and twenty-eight, and his majority in this class

was highest where the elections to fellowships were open. The heads of

the colleges told a different tale. Of these, sixteen voted for Round

and only four for Gladstone. This discrepancy it was that gave its

significance to the victory. Sitting in the convocation house watching

the last casual voters drop in at the rate of two or three an hour

through the summer afternoon, the ever faithful Northcote wrote to Mr.

Gladstone at Fasque:--

Since I have been here, the contest has seemed even more

interesting than it did in London. The effect of the contest itself

has apparently been good. It has brought together the younger men

without distinction of party, and has supplied the elements of a

very noble party which will now look to you as a leader. I think

men of all kinds are prepared to trust you, and though each feels

that you will probably differ from his set in some particulars,

each seems disposed to waive objections for the sake of the general

good he expects....

The victory is not looked upon as 'Puseyite'; it is a victory of

the masters over the Hebdomadal board, and as such a very important

one. The Heads felt it their last chance, and are said to have

expressed themselves accordingly. The provost of Queen's, who is

among the dissatisfied supporters of Round, said the other day, 'He

would rather be represented by an old woman than by a young man.'

It is not as a Maynoothian that you are dreaded here, though they

use the cry against you and though that is the country feeling, but

as a possible reformer and a man who thinks. On the other hand, the

young men exult, partly in the hope that you will do something for

the university yourself, partly in the consciousness that they have

shown the strength of the magisterial party by carrying you against

the opposition of the Heads, and have proved their title to be

considered an important element of the university. They do not seem

yet to be sufficiently united to effect great things, but there is

a large amount of ability and earnestness which only wants

direction, and this contest has tended to unite them. 'Puseyism'

seems rather to be a name of the past, though there are still

Puseyites of importance. Marriott, Mozley, and Church appear to be

regarded as leaders; but Church who is now abroad, is looked upon

as something more, and I am told may be considered on the whole

the fairest exponent of the feelings of the place. Stanley, Jowett,

Temple, and others are great names in what is nicknamed the

Germanising party. Lake, and perhaps I should say Temple, hold an

intermediate position between the two parties.... Whatever may have

been the evils attendant on the Puseyite movement, and I believe

they were neither few nor small, it has been productive of great

results; and it is not a little satisfactory to see how its

distinctive features are dying away and the spirit surviving,

instead of the spirit departing and leaving a great sham behind it.

PECULIARITY OF ELECTION

Of the many strange positions to which in his long and ardent life Mr.

Gladstone was brought, none is more startling than to find him, as in

this curious moment at Oxford, the common rallying-point of two

violently antagonistic sections of opinion. Dr. Pusey supported him;

Stanley and Jowett supported him. The old school who looked on Oxford as

the ancient and peculiar inheritance of the church were zealous for him;

the new school who deemed the university an organ not of the church but

of the nation, eagerly took him for their champion. A great

ecclesiastical movement, reviving authority and tradition, had ended in

complete academic repulse in 1845. It was now to be followed by an

anti-ecclesiastical movement, critical, sceptical, liberal, scornful of

authority, doubtful of tradition. Yet both the receding force and the

rising force united to swell the stream that bore Mr. Gladstone to

triumph at the poll. The fusion did not last. The two bands speedily

drew off into their rival camps, to arm themselves in the new conflict

for mastery between obscurantism and illumination. The victor was left

with his laurels in what too soon proved to be, after all, a vexed and

precarious situation, that he could neither hold with freedom nor quit

with honour.

Meanwhile he thoroughly enjoyed his much coveted distinction:--

_To Mrs. Gladstone._

_Exeter Coll., Nov. 2, 1847._--This morning in company with Sir R.

Inglis, and under the protection or chaperonage of the dean, I have

made the formal circuit of visits to all the heads of houses and

all the common-rooms. It has gone off very well. There was but one

reception by a head (Corpus) that was not decidedly _kind_, and

that was only a little cold. Marsham (Merton), who is a frank, warm

man, keenly opposed, said very fairly, to Inglis, 'I congratulate

you warmly'; and then to me, 'And I would be very glad to do the

same to you, Mr. Gladstone, if I could think you would do the same

as Sir R. Inglis.' I like a man for this. They say the dean should

have asked me to dine to-day, but I think he may be, and perhaps

wisely, afraid of recognising me in any very marked way, for fear

of endangering the old Christ Church right to one seat which it is

his peculiar duty to guard.

We dined yesterday in the hall at Christ Church, it being a grand

day there. Rather unfortunately the undergraduates chose to make a

row in honour of me during dinner, which the two censors had to run

all down the hall to stop. This had better not be talked about.

Thursday the warden of All Souls' has asked me and I _think_ I must

accept; had it not been a head (and it is one of the little party

of four who voted for me) I should not have doubted, but at once

have declined.

FOOTNOTES:

[199] _Frogs_, 756; the second line is Scott's own. An Aristophanic

friend translates:--

'Good brother-rogue, we've shared the selfsame beating:

At least, we carried off one Strype apiece.'

Strype was the book given to Scott and Gladstone as being good seconds

to the winner of the Ireland. See above p. 61.

[200] _Standard_, May 29, 1847.

[201] The proposer's Latin is succinct, and may be worth giving for its

academic flavour:--'Jam inde a pueritia literarum studio imbutus, et in

celeberrimo Etonensi gymnasio informatus, ad nostram accessit academiam,

ubi morum honestate, pietate, et pudore nemini æqualium secundus, indole

et ingenio facile omnibus antecellebat. Summis deinde nostræ academiæ

honoribus cumulatus ad res civiles cum magnâ omnium expectatione se

contulit; expectatione tamen major omni evasit. In senatûs enim domum

inferiorem cooptatus, eam ad negotia tractanda habilitatem, et ingenii

perspicacitatem exhibebat, ut reipublicæ administrationis particeps et

adjutor adhuc adolescens fieret. Quantum erga ecclesiam Anglicanam ejus

studium non verba, sed facta, testentur. Is enim erat qui inter primos

et perpaucos summo labore et eloquentiâ contendebat, ut ubicunque orbis

terrarum ecclesia Anglicana pervenisset, episcopatus quoque eveheretur.

Et quamdiu e secretis Reginæ fuit, ecclesia Anglicana apud colonos

nostros plurimis locis labefactam suâ ope stabilivit, et patrocinium

ejus suscepit. Neque vero publicis negotiis adeo se dedit quin

theologiæ, philosophiæ, artium studio vacaret. Quæ cum ita sint, si

delegatum, Academici, cooptare velimus, qui cum omni laude idem nostris

rebus decus et tutamen sit, et qui summa eloquentiæ et argumenti vi,

jura et libertates nostras tueri queat, hunc hodie suffragiis nostris

comprobemus.'

[202] Stafford Northcote had been private secretary to Mr. Gladstone at

the board of trade. On the appointment of his first private secretary,

Mr. Rawson, to a post in Canada in 1842, Mr. Gladstone applied to

Coleridge of Eton to recommend a successor. He suggested three names,

Farrer, afterwards Lord Farrer, Northcote, and Pocock. Northcote, who

looked to a political career, was chosen. 'Mr. Gladstone,' he wrote to a

friend, June 30, 1842, 'is the man of all others among the statesmen of

the present day to whom I should desire to attach myself.... He is one

whom I respect beyond measure; he stands almost alone as 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 preeminent.'--Lang's

_Life of Lord Iddesleigh_, i. pp. 63-67.

CHAPTER II

THE HAWARDEN ESTATE

(_1847_)

It is no Baseness for the Greatest to descend and looke into their

owne Estate. Some forbeare it, not upon Negligence alone, But

doubting to bring themselves into Melancholy in respect they shall

finde it Broken. But wounds cannot be cured without Searching. Hee

that cleareth by Degrees induceth a habit of Frugalitie, and

gaineth as well upon his Minde, as upon his Estate.--BACON.

I must here pause for material affairs of money and business, with

which, as a rule, in the case of its heroes the public is considered to

have little concern. They can no more be altogether omitted here than

the bills, acceptances, renewals, notes of hand, and all the other

financial apparatus of his printers and publishers can be left out of

the story of Sir Walter Scott. Not many pages will be needed, though

this brevity will give the reader little idea of the pre-occupations

with which they beset a not inconsiderable proportion of Mr. Gladstone's

days. A few sentences in a biography many a time mean long chapters in a

life, and what looked like an incident turns out to be an epoch.

Sir Stephen Glynne possessed a small property in Staffordshire of

something less than a hundred acres of land, named the Oak Farm, near

Stourbridge, and under these acres were valuable seams of coal and

ironstone. For this he refused an offer of five-and-thirty thousand

pounds in 1835, and under the advice of an energetic and sanguine agent

proceeded to its rapid development. On the double marriage in 1839, Sir

Stephen associated his two brothers-in-law with himself to the modest

extent of one-tenth share each in an enterprise that seemed of high

prospective value. Their interests were acquired through their wives,

and it is to be presumed that they had no opportunity of making a

personal examination of the concern. The adventurous agent, now

manager-in-chief of the business, rapidly extended operations, setting

up furnaces, forges, rolling-mills, and all the machinery for producing

tools and hardware for which he foresaw a roaring foreign market. The

agent's confidence and enthusiasm mastered his principal, and large

capital was raised solely on the security of the Hawarden fortune and

credit. Whether Oak Farm was irrationally inflated or not, we cannot

say, though the impression is that it had the material of a sound

property if carefully worked; but it was evidently pushed in excess of

its realisable capital. The whole basis of its credit was the Hawarden

estate, and a forced stoppage of Oak Farm would be the death-blow to

Hawarden. As early as 1844 clouds rose on the horizon. The position of

Sir Stephen Glynne had become seriously compromised, while under the

system of unlimited partnership the liability of his two brothers-in-law

extended in proportion. In 1845 the three brothers-in-law by agreement

retired, each retaining an equitable mortgage on the concern. Two years

later, one of our historic panics shook the money-market, and in its

course brought down Oak Farm.[203] A great accountant reported, a

meeting was held at Freshfield's, the company was found hopelessly

insolvent, and it was determined to wind up. The court directed a sale.

In April 1849, at Birmingham, Mr. Gladstone purchased the concern on

behalf of himself and his two brothers-in-law, subject to certain

existing interests; and in May Sir Stephen Glynne resumed legal

possession of the wreck of Oak Farm. The burden on Hawarden was over

£250,000, leaving its owner with no margin to live upon.

Into this far-spreading entanglement Mr. Gladstone for several years

threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force.

He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and

parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human

unreason, and year after year carried on a voluminous correspondence.

OAK FARM

There are a hundred and forty of his letters to Mr. Freshfield on Oak

Farm alone. Let us note in passing what is, I think, a not unimportant

biographic fact. These circumstances brought him into close and

responsible contact with a side of the material interests of the country

that was new to him. At home he had been bred in the atmosphere of

commerce. At the board of trade, in the reform of the tariff, in

connection with the Bank act and in the growth of the railway system, he

had been well trained in high economics. Now he came to serve an arduous

apprenticeship in the motions and machinery of industrial life. The

labour was immense, prolonged, uncongenial; but it completed his

knowledge of the customs, rules, maxims, and currents of trade and it

bore good fruit in future days at the exchequer. He manfully and

deliberately took up the burden as if the errors had been his own, and

as if the financial sacrifice that he was called to make both now and

later were matter of direct and inexorable obligation. These, indeed,

are the things in life that test whether a man be made of gold or clay.

'The weight,' he writes to his father (June 16, 1849), 'of the private

demands upon my mind has been such, since the Oak Farm broke down, as

frequently to disqualify me for my duties in the House of Commons.' The

load even tempted him, along with the working of other considerations,

to think of total withdrawal from parliament and public life. Yet

without a trace of the frozen stoicism or cynical apathy that sometimes

passes muster for true resignation, he kept himself nobly free from

vexation, murmur, repining, and complaint. Here is a moving passage from

a letter of the time to Mrs. Gladstone:--

_Fasque, Jan. 20, 1849._--Do not suppose for a moment that if I

could by waving my hand strike out for ever from my cares and

occupations those which relate to the Oak Farm and Stephen's

affairs, I would do so; I have never felt that, have never asked

it; and if my language seems to look that way, it is the mere

impatience of weakness comforting itself by finding a vent. It has

evidently come to me by the ordinance of God; and I am rather

frightened to think how light my lot would be, were it removed, so

light that something else would surely come in its place. I do not

confound it with visitations and afflictions; it is merely a drain

on strength and a peculiar one, because it asks for a kind of

strength and skill and habits which I have not, but it falls

altogether short of the category of high trials. Least of all

suppose that the subject can ever associate itself painfully with

the idea of you. No persons who have been in contact with it can be

so absolutely blameless as you and Mary, nor can _our_ relation

together be rendered in the very smallest degree less or more a

blessing by the addition or the subtraction of worldly wealth. I

have abundant comfort _now_ in the thought that at any rate I am

the means of keeping a load off the minds of others; and I shall

have much more hereafter when Stephen is brought through, and once

more firmly planted in the place of his fathers, provided I can

conscientiously feel that the restoration of his affairs has at any

rate not been impeded by indolence, obstinacy, or blunders on my

part. Nor can anything be more generous than the confidence placed

in me by all concerned. Indeed, I can only regret that it is too

free and absolute.

LETTER TO HIS SON

I may as well now tell the story to the end, though in anticipation of

remote dates, for in truth it held a marked place in Mr. Gladstone's

whole life, and made a standing background amid the vast throng of

varying interests and transient commotions of his great career. Here is

his own narrative as told in a letter written to his eldest son for a

definite purpose in 1885:--

_To W. H. Gladstone._

_Hawarden, Oct. 3, 1885._--Down to the latter part of that year

(1847), your uncle Stephen was regarded by all as a wealthy country

gentleman with say £10,000 a year or more (subject, however, to his

mother's jointure) to spend, and great prospects from iron in a

Midland estate. In the bank crisis of that year the whole truth was

revealed; and it came out that his agent at the Oak Farm (and

formerly also at Hawarden) had involved him to the extent of

£250,000; to say nothing of minor blows to your uncle Lyttelton and

myself.

At a conversation in the library of 13 Carlton House Terrace, it

was considered whether Hawarden should be sold. Every obvious

argument was in favour of it, for example the comparison between

the income and the liabilities I have named. How was Lady Glynne's

jointure (£2500) to be paid? How was Sir Stephen to be supported?

There was _no_ income, even less than none. Oak Farm, the iron

property, was under lease to an insolvent company, and could not be

relied on. Your grandfather, who had in some degree surveyed the

state of affairs, thought the case was hopeless. But the family

were unanimously set upon making any and every effort and sacrifice

to avoid the necessity of sale. Mr. Barker, their lawyer, and Mr.

Burnett, the land agent, entirely sympathised; and it was resolved

to persevere. But the first effect was that Sir Stephen had to

close the house (which it was hoped, but hoped in vain, to let); to

give up carriages, horses, and I think for several years his

personal servant; and to take an allowance of £700 a year out of

which, I believe, he continued to pay the heavy subvention of the

family to the schools of the parish, which was certainly counted by

hundreds. Had the estate been sold, it was estimated that he would

have come out a wealthy bachelor, possessed of from a hundred to a

hundred and twenty thousands pounds free from all encumbrance but

the jointure.

In order to give effect to the nearly hopeless resolution thus

taken at the meeting in London, it was determined to clip the

estate by selling £200,000 worth of land. Of this, nearly one-half

was to be taken by your uncle Lyttelton and myself, in the

proportion of about two parts for me and one for him. Neither of us

had the power to buy this, but my father enabled me, and Lord

Spencer took over his portion. The rest of the sales were effected,

a number of fortunate secondary incidents occurred, and the great

business of recovering and realising from the Oak Farm was

laboriously set about.

Considerable relief was obtained by these and other measures. By

1852, there was a partial but perceptible improvement in the

position. The house was reopened in a very quiet way by

arrangement, and the allowance for Sir Stephen's expenditure was

rather more than doubled. But there was nothing like ease for him

until the purchase of the reversion was effected by me in 1865. I

paid £57,000 for the bulk of the property, subject to debts not

exceeding £150,000, and after the lives of the two brothers, the

table value of which was, I think, twenty-two and a-half years.

From this time your uncle had an income to spend of, I think,

£2200, or not more than half what he probably would have had since

1847 had the estate been sold, which it would only have been

through the grievous fault of others.

The full process of recovery was still incomplete, but the means of

carrying it forward were now comparatively simple. Since the

reversion came in, I have, as you know, forwarded that process; but

it has been retarded by agricultural depression and by the

disastrous condition through so many years of coal-mining; so that

there still remains a considerable work to be done before the end

can be attained, which I hope will never be lost sight of, namely,

that of extinguishing the debt upon the property, though for family

purposes the estate may still remain subject to charges in the way

of annuity.

The full history of the Hawarden estate from 1847 would run to a

volume. For some years after 1847, it and the Oak Farm supplied my

principal employment[204]; but I was amply repaid by the value of

it a little later on as a home, and by the unbroken domestic

happiness there enjoyed. What I think you will see, as clearly

resulting from this narrative, is the high obligation not only to

keep the estate in the family, and as I trust in its natural course

of descent, but to raise it to the best condition by thrift and

care, and to promote by all reasonable means the aim of diminishing

and finally extinguishing its debt.

This I found partly on a high estimate of the general duty to

promote the permanence of families having estates in land, but very

specially on the sacrifices made, through his remaining

twenty-seven years of life, by your uncle Stephen, without a

murmur, and with the concurrence of us all....

Before closing I will repair one omission. When I concurred in the

decision to struggle for the retention of Hawarden, I had not the

least idea that my children would have an interest in the

succession. In 1847 your uncle Stephen was only forty; your uncle

Henry, at thirty-seven, was married, and had a child almost every

year. It was not until 1865 that I had any title to look forward to

your becoming at a future time the proprietor.--Ever your

affectionate father.

FINAL SETTLEMENT

The upshot is this, that Mr. Gladstone, with his father's consent and

support, threw the bulk of his own fortune into the assets of Hawarden.

By this, and the wise realisation of everything convertible to

advantage, including, in 1865, the reversion after the lives of Sir

Stephen Glynne and his brother, he succeeded in making what was left of

Hawarden solvent. His own expenditure from first to last upon the

Hawarden estate as now existing, he noted at £267,000. 'It has been for

thirty-five years,' he wrote to W. H. Gladstone in 1882, '_i.e._, since

the breakdown in 1847, a great object of my life, in conjunction with

your mother and your uncle Stephen, to keep the Hawarden estate together

(or replace what was alienated), to keep it in the family, and to

relieve it from debt with which it was ruinously loaded.'

In 1867 a settlement was made, to which Sir Stephen Glynne and his

brother, and Mr. Gladstone and his wife, were the parties, by which the

estate was conveyed in trust for one or more of the Gladstone children

as Mr. Gladstone might appoint.[205] This was subject to a power of

determining the settlement by either of the Glynne brothers, on repaying

with interest the sum paid for the reversion. As the transaction touched

matters in which he might be supposed liable to bias, Mr. Gladstone

required that its terms should be referred to two men of perfect

competence and probity--Lord Devon and Sir Robert Phillimore--for their

judgment and approval. Phillimore visited Hawarden (August 19-26, 1865)

to meet Lord Devon, and to confer with him upon Sir Stephen Glynne's

affairs. Here are a couple of entries from his diary:--

_Aug. 26._--The whole morning was occupied with the investigation

of S. G.'s affairs by Lord Devon and myself. We examined at some

length the solicitor and the agent. Lord D. and I perfectly agreed

in the opinion expressed in a memorandum signed by us both.

Gladstone, as might have been expected, has behaved very well.

_Sept. 19_ [_London_].--Correspondence between Lyttelton and

Gladstone, contained in Lord Devon's letter. Same subject as that

which Lord D. and I came to consult upon at Hawarden. _Sept.

24._--I wrote to Stephen Glynne to the effect that Henry entirely

approved of the scheme agreed upon by Lord D. and myself, after a

new consideration of all the circumstances, and after reading the

Lyttelton-Gladstone correspondence. I showed Henry Glynne the

letter, of which he entirely approved.

In 1874 the death of Sir Stephen Glynne, following that of his brother

two years before, made Mr. Gladstone owner in possession of the Hawarden

estate, under the transaction of 1865. With as little delay as possible

(April 1875) he took the necessary steps to make his eldest son the

owner in fee, and seven years after that (October 1882) he further

transferred to the same son his own lands in the county, acquired by

purchase, as we have seen, after the crash in 1847. By agreement, the

possession and control of the castle and its contents remained with Mrs.

Gladstone for life, as if she were taking a life-interest in it under

settlement or will.

FURTHER LETTERS TO HIS SON

Although, therefore, for a few months the legal owner of the whole

Hawarden estate, Mr. Gladstone divested himself of that quality as soon

as he could, and at no time did he assume to be its master. The letters

written by him on these matters to his son are both too interesting as

the expression of his views on high articles of social policy, and too

characteristic of his ideas of personal duty, for me to omit them here,

though much out of their strict chronological place. The first is

written after the death of Sir Stephen, and the falling in of the

reversion:--

_To W. H. Gladstone._

11 _Carlton House Terrace, April 5, 1875._--There are several

matters which I have to mention to you, and for which the present

moment is suitable; while they embrace the future in several of its

aspects.

1. I have given instructions to Messrs. Barker and Hignett to

convert your life interest under the Hawarden settlement into a fee

simple. Reflection and experience have brought me to favour this

latter method of holding landed property as on the whole the best,

though the arguments may not be all on one side. In the present

case, they are to my mind entirely conclusive. First, because I am

able thoroughly to repose in you an entire confidence as to your

use of the estate during your lifetime, and your capacity to

provide wisely for its future destination. Secondly, because you

have, delivered over to you with the estate, the duty and office of

progressively emancipating it from the once ruinous debt; and it is

almost necessary towards the satisfactory prosecution of this

purpose, which it may still take very many years to complete, that

you should be entire master of the property, and should feel the

full benefit of the steady care and attention which it ought to

receive from you.

2. I hope that with it you will inherit the several conterminous

properties belonging to me, and that you will receive these in such

a condition as to enjoy a large proportion of the income they

yield. Taking the two estates together, they form the most

considerable estate in the county, and give what may be termed the

first social position there. The importance of this position is

enhanced by the large population which inhabits them. You will, I

hope, familiarise your mind with this truth, that you can no more

become the proprietor of such a body of property, or of the portion

of it now accruing, than your brother Stephen could become rector

of the parish, without recognising the serious moral and social

responsibilities which belong to it. They are full of interest and

rich in pleasure, but they demand (in the absence of special cause)

residence on the spot, and a good share of time, and especially a

free and ungrudging discharge of them. Nowhere in the world is the

position of the landed proprietor so high as in this country, and

this in great part for the reason that nowhere else is the

possession of landed property so closely associated with definite

duty.

3. In truth, with this and your seat in parliament, which I hope

(whether Whitby supply it, or whether you migrate) will continue,

you will, I trust, have a well-charged, though not an

over-charged, life, and will, like professional and other

thoroughly employed men, have to regard the bulk of your time as

forestalled on behalf of duty, while a liberal residue may be

available for your special pursuits and tastes, and for

recreations. This is really the sound basis of life, which never

can be honourable or satisfactory without adequate guarantees

against frittering away, even in part, the precious gift of time.

While touching on the subject I would remind you of an old

recommendation of mine, that you should choose some parliamentary

branch or subject, to which to give special attention. The House of

Commons has always heard your voice with pleasure, and ought not to

be allowed to forget it. I say this the more freely, because I

think it is, in your case, the virtue of a real modesty, which

rather too much indisposes you to put yourself forward.

Yet another word. As years gather upon me, I naturally look forward

to what is to be after I am gone; and although I should indeed be

sorry to do or say anything having a tendency to force the action

of your mind beyond its natural course, it will indeed be a great

pleasure to me to see you well settled in life by marriage. Well

settled, I feel confident, you will be, if settled at all. In your

position at Hawarden, there would then be at once increased ease

and increased attraction in the performance of your duties; nor can

I overlook the fact that the life of the unmarried man, in this age

particularly, is under peculiar and insidious temptations to

selfishness, unless his celibacy arise from a very strong and

definite course of self-devotion to the service of God and his

fellow creatures.

The great and sad change of Hawarden [by the death of Sir Stephen]

which has forced upon us the consideration of so many subjects,

gave at the same time an opening for others, and it seemed to me to

be best to put together the few remarks I had to make. I hope the

announcement with which I began will show that I write in the

spirit of confidence as well as of affection. It is on this footing

that we have ever stood, and I trust ever shall stand. You have

acted towards me at all times up to the standard of all I could

desire. May you have the help of the Almighty to embrace as justly,

and fulfil as cheerfully, the whole conception of your duties in

the position to which it has pleased Him to call you, and which

perhaps has come upon you with somewhat the effect of a surprise;

that may, however, have the healthy influence of a stimulus to

action, and a help towards excellence. Believe me ever, my dear

son, your affectionate father.

DUTIES OF A LANDOWNER

In the second letter Mr. Gladstone informed W. H. Gladstone that he had

at Chester that morning (Oct. 23, 1882), along with Mrs. Gladstone,

executed the deeds that made his son the proprietor of Mr. Gladstone's

lands in Flintshire, subject to the payment of annuities specified in

the instrument of transfer; and he proceeds:--

I earnestly entreat that you will never, under any circumstances,

mortgage any of your land. I consider that our law has offered to

proprietors of land, under a narrow and mistaken notion of

promoting their interests, dangerous facilities and inducements to

this practice; and that its mischievous consequences have been so

terribly felt (the word is strong, but hardly too strong) in the

case of Hawarden, that they ought to operate powerfully as a

warning for the future.

You are not the son of very wealthy parents; but the income of the

estates (the Hawarden estates and mine jointly), with your prudence

and diligence, will enable you to go steadily forward in the work I

have had in hand, and after a time will in the course of nature

give considerable means for the purpose.

I have much confidence in your prudence and intelligence; I have

not the smallest fear that the rather unusual step I have taken

will in any way weaken the happy union and harmony of our family;

and I am sure you will always bear in mind the duties which attach

to you as the head of those among whom you receive a preference,

and as the landlord of a numerous tenantry, prepared to give you

their confidence and affection.

A third letter on the same topics followed three years after, and

contains a narrative of the Hawarden transactions already given in an

earlier page of this chapter.

_To W. H. Gladstone._

_Oct. 3, 1885._--When you first made known to me that you thought

of retiring from the general election of this year, I received the

intimation with mixed feelings. The question of money no doubt

deserves, under existing circumstances, to be kept in view; still I

must think twice before regarding this as the conclusive question.

I conceive the balance has to be struck mainly between these two

things; on the one hand, the duty of persons connected with the

proprietorship of considerable estates in land, to assume freely

the burden and responsibility of serving in parliament. On the

other hand, the peculiar position of this combined estate, which in

the first place is of a nature to demand from the proprietor an

unusual degree of care and supervision, and which in the second

place has been hit severely by recent depressions in corn and coal,

which may be termed its two pillars.

On the first point it may fairly be taken into view that in serving

for twenty years you have stood four contested elections, a number

I think decidedly beyond the average.... I will assume, for the

present, that the election has passed without bringing you back to

parliament. I should then consider that you had thus relieved

yourself, at any rate for a period, from a serious call upon your

time and mind, mainly with a view to the estate; and on this

account, and because I have constituted you its legal master, I

write this letter in order to place clearly before you some of the

circumstances which invest your relation to it with a rather

peculiar character.

I premise a few words of a general nature. An enemy to entails,

principally though not exclusively on social and domestic grounds,

I nevertheless regard it as a very high duty to labour for the

conservation of estates, and the permanence of the families in

possession of them, as a principal source of our social strength,

and as a large part of true conservatism, from the time when

Aeschylus wrote

[Greek: archaioploutôn despotôn pollê charis].[206]

But if their possession is to be prolonged by conduct, not by

factitious arrangements, we must recognise this consequence, that

conduct becomes subject to fresh demands and liabilities.

In condemning laws which tie up the _corpus_, I say nothing

against powers of charge, either by marriage settlement or

otherwise, for wife and children, although questions of degree and

circumstance may always have to be considered. But to mortgages I

am greatly opposed. Whether they ought or ought not to be

restrained by law, I do not now inquire. But I am confident that

few and rare causes only will warrant them, and that as a general

rule they are mischievous, and in many cases, as to their

consequences, anti-social and immoral. Wherever they exist they

ought to be looked upon as evils, which are to be warred upon and

got rid of. One of our financial follies has been to give them

encouragement by an excessively low tax; and one of the better

effects of the income-tax is that it is a fine upon mortgaging.

FOOTNOTES:

[203] For an account of the creditors' meeting held at Birmingham on

Dec. 2, 1847, see the _Times_ of Dec. 3, 1847.

[204] To Lord Lyttelton, July 29, 1874: 'I could not devote my entire

life to it; and after 1852 my attention was only occasional.'

[205] This settlement followed the lines of a will made by Sir Stephen

in 1855, devising the estate to his brother for life, with the remainder

to his brother's sons in tail male; and next to W. H. Gladstone and his

sons in tail male, and then to W. E. Gladstone's other sons; and in

default of male issue of W. E. Gladstone, then to the eldest and other

sons of Lord Lyttelton, and so forth in the ordinary form of an entailed

estate.

[206] _Agam._ 1043, 'A great blessing are masters with, ancient riches.'

CHAPTER III

PARTY EVOLUTION--NEW COLONIAL POLICY

(_1846-1850_)

I shall ever thankfully rejoice to have lived in a period when so

blessed a change in our colonial policy was brought about; a change

which is full of promise and profit to a country having such claims

on mankind as England, but also a change of system, in which we

have done no more than make a transition from misfortune and from

evil, back to the rules of justice, of reason, of nature, and of

common sense.--GLADSTONE (1856).

The fall of Peel and the break up of the conservative party in 1846 led

to a long train of public inconveniences. When Lord John Russell was

forming his government, he saw Peel, and proposed to include any of his

party. Peel thought such a junction under existing circumstances

unadvisable, but said he should have no ground of complaint if Lord John

made offers to any of his friends; and he should not attempt to

influence them either way.[207] The action ended in a proposal of office

to Dalhousie, Lincoln, and Sidney Herbert. Nothing came of it, and the

whigs were left to go on as they best could upon the narrow base of

their own party. The protectionists gave them to understand that before

Bentinck and his friends made up their minds to turn Peel out, they had

decided that it would not be fair to put the whigs in merely to punish

the betrayer, and then to turn round upon them. On the contrary, fair

and candid support was what they intended. The conservative government

had carried liberal measures; the liberal government subsisted on

conservative declarations. Such was this singular situation.

PEELITES AND PROTECTIONISTS

The Peelites, according to a memorandum of Mr. Gladstone's, from a

number approaching 120 in the corn law crisis of 1846, were reduced at

once by the election of 1847 to less than half. This number, added to

the liberal force, gave free trade a very large majority: added to the

protectionists it just turned the balance in their favour. So long as

Sir Robert Peel lived (down to June 1850) the entire body never voted

with the protectionists. From the first a distinction arose among Peel's

adherents that widened, as time went on, and led to a long series of

doubts, perturbations, manoeuvres. These perplexities lasted down to

1859, and they constitute a vital chapter in Mr. Gladstone's political

story. The distinction was in the nature of political things. Many of

those who had stood by Peel's side in the day of battle, and who still

stood by him in the curious morrow that combined victorious policy with

personal defeat, were in more or less latent sympathy with the severed

protectionists in everything except protection.[208] Differing from

these, says Mr. Gladstone, others of the Peelites 'whose opinions were

more akin to those of the liberals, cherished, nevertheless, personal

sympathies and lingering wishes which made them tardy, perhaps unduly

tardy, in drawing towards that party. I think that this description

applied in some degree to Mr. Sidney Herbert, and in the same or a

greater degree to myself.'[209]

Shortly described, the Peelites were all free trade conservatives, drawn

by under-currents, according to temperament, circumstances, and all the

other things that turn the balance of men's opinions, to antipodean

poles of the political compass. 'We have no party,' Mr. Gladstone tells

his father in June 1849, 'no organisation, no whipper-in; and under

these circumstances we cannot exercise any considerable degree of

permanent influence as a body.' The leading sentiment that guided the

proceedings of the whole body of Peelites alike was a desire to give to

protection its final quietus. While the younger members of the Peel

cabinet held that this could only be done in one way, namely, by

forcing the protectionists into office where they must put their

professions to the proof, Peel himself, and Graham with him, took a

directly opposite view, and adopted as the leading principle of their

action the vital necessity of keeping the protectionists out. This broad

difference led to no diminution of personal intercourse or political

attachment.

Certainly this was not due, says Mr. Gladstone, to any desire (at

least in Sir R. Peel's mind) for, or contemplation of, coalition

with the liberal party. It sprang entirely from a belief on his

part that the chiefs of the protectionists would on their accession

to power endeavour to establish a policy in accordance with the

designation of their party, and would in so doing probably convulse

the country. As long as Lord George Bentinck lived, with his iron

will and strong convictions, this was a contingency that could not

be overlooked. But he died in 1848, and with his death it became a

visionary dream. Yet I remember well Sir Robert Peel saying to me,

when I was endeavouring to stir him up on some great fault (as I

thought it), in the colonial policy of the ministers, 'I foresee a

tremendous struggle in this country for the restoration of

protection.' He would sometimes even threaten us with the

possibility of being 'sent for' if a crisis should occur, which was

a thing far enough from our limited conceptions. We were flatly at

issue with him on this opinion. We even considered that as long as

the protectionists had no responsibilities but those of opposition,

and as there were two hundred and fifty seats in parliament to be

won by chanting the woes of the land and promising redress, there

would be protectionists in plenty to fill the left hand benches on

those terms.

RELATIONS WITH PEEL

The question what it was that finally converted the country to free

trade is not easy to answer. Not the arguments of Cobden, for in the

summer of 1845 even his buoyant spirit perceived that some precipitating

event, and not reasoning, would decide. His appeals had become, as

Disraeli wrote, both to nation and parliament a wearisome iteration, and

he knew it. Those arguments, it is true, had laid the foundations of the

case in all their solidity and breadth. But until the emergency in

Ireland presented itself, and until prosperity had justified the

experiment, Peel was hardly wrong in reckoning on the possibility of a

protectionist reaction. Even the new prosperity and contentment of the

country were capable of being explained by the extraordinary employment

found in the creation of railways. As Mr. Gladstone said to a

correspondent in the autumn of 1846, 'The liberal proceedings of

conservative governments, and the conservative proceedings of the new

liberal administration, unite in pointing to the propriety of an

abstinence from high-pitched opinions.' This was a euphemism. What it

really meant was that outside of protection no high-pitched opinions on

any other subject were available. The tenets of party throughout this

embarrassed period from 1846 to 1852 were shifting, equivocal, and

fluid. Nor even in the period that followed did they very rapidly

consolidate.

Mr. Gladstone writes to his father (June 30, 1849):--

I will only add a few words about your desire that I should

withdraw my confidence from Peel. My feelings of admiration,

attachment, and gratitude to him I do not expect to lose; and I

agree with Graham that he has done more and _suffered_ more than

any other living statesman for the good of the people. But still I

must confess with sorrow that the present course of events tends to

separate and disorganise the small troop of the late government and

their adherents. On the West Indian question last year I, with

others, spoke and voted against Peel. On the Navigation law this

year I was saved from it only by the shipowners and their friends,

who would not adopt a plan upon the basis I proposed. Upon

Canada--a vital question--I again spoke and voted against him.[210]

And upon other colonial questions, yet most important to the

government, I fear even this year the same thing may happen again.

However painful, then, it may be to me to differ from him, it is

plain that my conduct is not placed in his hands to govern.

We find an illustration of the distractions of this long day of party

metamorphosis, as well as an example of what was regarded as Mr.

Gladstone's over-ingenuity, in one among other passing divergences

between him and his chief. Mr. Disraeli brought forward a motion (Feb.

19, 1850) of a very familiar kind, on the distress of the agricultural

classes and the insecurity of relief of rural burdens. Bright bluntly

denied that there was a case in which the fee of land had been

depreciated or rent been permanently lowered. Graham said the mover's

policy was simply a transfer of the entire poor rate to the consolidated

fund, violating the principles of local control and inviting prodigal

expenditure. Fortune then, in Mr. Disraeli's own language, sent him an

unexpected champion, by whom, according to him, Graham was fairly

unhorsed. The reader will hardly think so, for though the unexpected

champion was Mr. Gladstone, he found no better reason for supporting the

motion, than that its adoption would weaken the case for restoring

protection. As if the landlords and farmers were likely to be satisfied

with a small admission of a great claim, while all the rest of their

claim was to be as bitterly contested as ever; with the transfer of a

shabby couple of millions from their own shoulders to the consolidated

fund, when they were clamouring that fourteen millions would hardly be

enough. Peel rose later, promptly took this plain point against his

ingenious lieutenant, and then proceeded to one more of his elaborate

defences, both of free trade and of his own motives and character. For

the last time, as it was to happen, Peel declared that for Mr. Gladstone

he had 'the greatest respect and admiration.' 'I was associated with him

in the preparation and conduct of those measures, to the desire of

maintaining which he partly attributes the conclusion at which he has

arrived. I derived from him the most zealous, the most effective

assistance, and it is no small consolation to me to hear from him,

although in this particular motion we arrive at different conclusions,

that his confidence in the justice of those principles for which we in

common contended remains entirely unshaken.'[211]

ON HIS POSITION

On this particular battle, as well as on more general matter, a letter

from Mr. Gladstone to his wife (Feb. 22,1850) sheds some light:--:

_To Mrs. Gladstone._

Indeed you do rise to very daring flights to-day, and suggest many

things that flow from your own deep affection which, perhaps,

disguises from you some things that are nevertheless real. I cannot

form to myself any other conception of my duty in parliament except

the simple one of acting independently, without faction, and

without subserviency, on all questions as they arise. To the

formation of a party, or even of the nucleus of a party, there are

in my circumstances many obstacles. I have been talking over these

matters with Manning this morning, and I found him to be of the

opinion which is deliberately mine, namely, that it is better that

I should not be the head or leader even of my own contemporaries;

that there are others of them whose position is less embarrassed,

and more favourable and powerful, particularly from birth or wealth

or both. Three or four years ago, before I had much considered the

matter, and while we still felt as if Peel were our actual chief in

politics, I did not think so, but perhaps thought or assumed that

as, up to the then present time, I had discharged some prominent

duties in office and in parliament, the first place might naturally

fall to me when the other men were no longer in the van. But since

we have become more disorganised, and I have had little sense of

union except with the men of my own standing, and I have _felt_

more of the actual state of things, and how this or that would work

in the House of Commons, I have come to be satisfied in my own mind

that, if there were a question whether there should be a leader and

who it should be, it would be much better that either Lincoln or

Herbert should assume that post, whatever share of the mere work

might fall on me. I have viewed the matter very drily, and so

perhaps you will think I have written on it.