CHAPTER XII MR. GLADSTONE AND So the time was come when I should have to leave the great Prime Minister who was "not in the roll with common men"-who had won success almost from his cradle; at three years old, as he often told me, he had babbled out a few lisping words standing on his father's dining-table, on the occasion of Mr. Canning's successful election for Liverpool in 1812. At Eton, the friend of Lord Canning, Milnes Gaskell, Hope Scott, Gerald Wellesley, and Arthur Hallam, he had foreshadowed his future career; at Oxford, in competition with a larger body of distinguished men, he had taken the highest honors; when only twenty-three years of age he had entered Parliament on the Duke of Newcastle's recommendation, and after a hard fight had reconquered for the Tory party the borough of Newark. He soon attracted more attention than usually falls to the lot of the young members of the House of Commons, and Mrs. Gladstone told me of a letter written by William IV. to Lord Althorp and published in his Life, in which the King had noticed and admired an early speech of her husband's. In Peel's great government of 1841, Mr. Gladstone, who had been a Junior Lord of the Treasury in 1834-35, became Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and was informed by the Prime Minister that he would learn everything connected with the business of his department from the President, from whom. Mr. Gladstone has frequently told me. he learned absolutely nothing; but from his own application and labor he learned much, and among other things the blessings likely to accrue to the country by the abolition of protective duties on corn. At the Board of Trade some Chinese despatches came before him, in which the Prime Minister of that country argued that foreign ships should not be admitted to Chinese waters; but, he added, "some of these ships conveyed corn, and it would be madness to exclude what would cheapen the food of the people from their ports." And these words of Oriental wisdom had influenced Mr. Gladstone's mind in the direction of free-trade. In 1843 he first entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, a position which he resigned in 1845 on the Maynooth question, Disraeli declaring that his career was over. With advancing years, we learn, too late perhaps, the folly of all, particularly political, prophecies. In September of 1845 Mr. Gladstone - who had vacated his seat for Newark, disagreeing on the question of free-trade with the personage then called the Patron of the Borough, the Duke of Newcastle-re-entered the Cabinet as Secretary of State for the Colonies without a seat in Parliament. In 1847 he had become member for the University of Oxford. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the governments of Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, at whose death he had led the House of Commons; he had shown himself to be an accomplished orator: the mellowness and modulation of his voice, tinged with the slight Lancashire burr which never deserted him, had already delighted and fascinated the House of Commons. Lord Macaulay has told us how in the early morning, when Mr. Disraeli, having replied at the close of the de MR. GLADSTONE HIS OPPONENTS bate on the Budget of 1852, sat down, "one greater than he arose-Mr. Gladstone bounded on the floor amid a storm of cheers such as the walls of Parliament had never heard. His oration in a single day doubled his influence in Parliament and his popularity in the country "—all this was known to the veriest tyro in political knowledge; but, notwithstanding his great reputation, all his successes, and all his triumphs, he was still in 1868 looked upon by those who belonged to what were then called. "the governing families" of the country, with the notable exception of Lord Granville, and perhaps Lord Russell, as an "outsider," so to speak. I recollect one of them saying to me: "He is a wonderful man, no doubt; but so is a Japanese conjurer." A great Yorkshire squire described him in hunting slang as "not having been bred in their kennel.: "If Mr. Gladstone," wrote a Whig magnate, "thinks he can lead the House of Commons with the force of the millions without the good-will of the ten thousand, he will find his mistake." Mr. Bagehot, a keen political observer, had said it was impossible to calculate what his future course would be. His great Budget had been described by an old Whig as "Oxford on the surface, and Liverpool below." The Tories feared and hated him: the Church, with a few notable exceptions, opposed him: Oxford University had thrust him out; the old Whig party had not forgotten his opposition in past years; the Nonconformists disliked his Church views. Even in his financial triumph of 1860 they of his own household were opposed to him. The readers of Greville's Memoirs will recollect how "Clarendon shook his head, and pronounced against the French treaty, and the Times thundered against it." Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornwall Lewis were always secretly, when not openly, opposed to him on matters of finance. Charles Greville, himself no mean representative of the governing families, described him in 1860 as having "a fervent imagination which furnishes facts and arguments in support of them: he is an audacious innovator because he has an insatiable desire for popularity, and in his notions of government he is a far more sincere Republican than Bright, for his ungratified personal vanity makes him wish to subvert the institutions and the classes that stand in the way of his ambition." And yet so overwhelming was his personality and his force that he was in 1868, by the voice of the people, chosen to be Prime Minister by an enormous majority of the votes of his countrymen. As John Morley tells us, Dr. Johnson said of the elder Pitt, "he was a Minister given by the people to the King," and rarely as, we are told, it happens, "Parliamentary life admitted the autocratic supremacy of his original intellect." If this be true, Mr. Gladstone was only reaching his zenith at nearly sixty years of age; and at the time of his becoming the most powerful Prime Minister of our day, I had had the rare good fortune to be associated with him, and had the opportunity, at any rate, of seeing behind the veil of his wonderful and subtle character. From that hour there remained, and will ever remain with me, an intense love and admiration of his enormous powers, of his marvellous memory, of his splendid oratory, of his personal kindness, and of his touching modesty. It was soon after my first acquaintance with Mr. Gladstone that he told me how impossible it was for a Minister and his secretary adequately to perform their respective duties unless there was established between them such an absolute confidence as in a happy domestic life should exist between a man and his wife. I hope I have never betrayed that confidence which he so fully MR. GLADSTONE HIS CHARACTERISTICS bestowed on me, and which extended to the last days of his existence. After all the long years of close intimacy, private and official, I have never felt capable of adequately depicting a hundredth part of his complex character, so great and so vast that to understand it is necessary to divide it. Through every phase, in every action and every thought was abundantly apparent a deep sense of religion; indeed, it was to his life what the Nile is to Egypt, what sunshine is to the world. "Languor was not in his heart, Weakness was not in his word, He was possessed of an imperious vitality, and what Burke called a "quadrumanous activity" which penetrated into every office of the state; and through it all stood out his old conservatism in the truest sense of the word his devotion to old traditions and constitutional forms; his loyalty to the Crown; while with this devotion was joined a courtesy most reverential to the Queen, and an affection for the royal family which was most touching. The world perhaps does not know that it was largely owing to his negotiations as leader of the Liberal party that the royal grants were so satisfactorily arranged in the House of Commons in 1889. William Gurdon, who had been my colleague and knew him well, said that he approached every new question, first from a Tory point of view, and after some consideration would come round to see it from a Liberal point of view. Even in small details his conservatism was apparent. George Lefevre once told me that when, as First Commissioner of Works, he put before Mr. Gladstone his plan for the widening of Parliament Street, the latter deprecated very strongly the destruction of King |