By RT Shannon
By the late 1890s there were only two Britons in public life enjoying incontrovertibly iconic status, in part because their extraordinarily long and eventful lives encompassed most of their century. One was Mr Gladstone (who would die in 1898); the other was Queen Victoria (who would outlive him by a mere three years). Perhaps that was why they detested each other so much. Ever since the 1870s, the Queen had been 'utterly disgusted' by Gladstone's radical demagoguery, and thought him a 'half-mad firebrand', who 'would ruin anything'. For his part, Gladstone regretted the Queen was 'one of the greatest Jingoes alive', and thought her interference in affairs of state was 'enough to kill any man'. In short, they were a well-matched pair: both old, opinionated, larger than life, self-absorbed - and both marvellous subjects for biographers.
On the whole, Gladstone's life after death (like that of the Queen-Empress) has been well and regularly and admiringly told. His first biographer, John Morley, had been a Cabinet colleague, and produced a classic three-volume account within a decade of Gladstone's death, depicting his mentor as a noble pilgrim, journeying from youthful Tory folly to mature Liberal enlightenment. With more scholarship and sophistication, this interpretation was endorsed and reaffirmed by Philip Magnus in 1954 and most recently by Roy Jenkins (who was able to draw on the 14 volumes of Gladstone's diaries published between 1968 and 1994) in 1995. Now R.T. Shannon has produced the most extensive account since Morley, completing with this volume a biography of which the first instalment appeared 15 years ago.
For all the large-scale biographies of Gladstone that have so far been written, this is by a considerable margin the most consistently critical. Shannon recognises that Gladstone's was an extraordinary nineteenth-century life: unrivalled gifts of head and heart, mind and spirit; more than 60 years an MP; Prime Minister on four separate occasions; and a unique amalgam of gifts as popular crusader, parliamentary performer, creative legislator and government administrator. But Shannon does not see Gladstone as a man whose character and achievements matched his charisma or reputation: the Gladstone depicted by Shannon is a colossus whose failings were on the same heroic scale as his virtues.
Just as Peel had divided and demoralised the Conservative Party in 1846 by repealing the Corn Laws, so Gladstone came close to wrecking the Liberal Party by his geriatric obsession with Home Rule nearly half a century later. Naturally, his contemporary Conservative critics, such as Disraeli, Lord Randolph Churchill and the Marquess of Salisbury, had regarded Gladstone as a monstrous hypocrite, obsessed with power, who embraced any policy, however unpatriotic, to get him back into government, while sanctimoniously claiming that he was doing God's work. But as Shannon shows, more fully than ever before, these hostile views were widely shared by Gladstone's erstwhile colleagues and supporters.
Lord Palmerston predicted Gladstone would end his days in an asylum. Sir Charles Dilke opined that he was 'a magnificent lunatic'. Lord Hartington believed his views on Ireland were 'extremely alarming'. And Edward Hamilton, his private secretary, found him prevaricating and Jesuitical. The Gladstone who emerges from Shannon's pages is by turns grudging, arrogant, dictatorial, vindictive, imperious, reckless, excitable, vainglorious, messianic, Cromwellian. Not surprisingly, then, he accomplished less in his years of power than he might have done. He failed to pass a Second Reform Bill in 1866, and was subsequently humiliated and outmanoeuvred by Disraeli. His first administration of 1868-74 was disappointing and divisive. His second, from 1880-85, witnessed disaster in the Sudan and South Africa, and passed a Third Reform Act which brought into being a new brand of urban democracy which Gladstone never understood. Nor did he understand Ireland: its people, or its history or its social structure.
This is scarcely the Gladstone of liberal legend, or admiring biographers, and as such it is a bracing corrective to those writers who have been too inclined to accept the grand old man at his grand old self-evaluation. Whether this hostile interpretation is convincingly expounded is another matter. The author scarcely does justice to the obstacles with which Gladstone had to contend: a Liberal Party always inclined to divisive disarray, an unruly Commons and hostile Lords, a deeply antagonistic sovereign. He pays inadequate attention to Gladstone's energy, optimism and range of mind. He seems uneager or unwilling or unable to recognise greatness when he is writing about it. And his prose is too heavy on detail and too light on polish. Queen Victoria would have loved this biography. But that is not necessarily as strong a recommendation as it might be.
