Part 12

Although Mrs. Gladstone was never a great social force, her grace and charm of manner won her a large circle of attached friends. When the occasion called for it, she could be the _grande dame_, and could act with great dignity. Beneath her simplicity of manner lay great cleverness. She disliked bores, and showed peculiar skill in extricating herself from them without their perceiving her manœuvre. With importunity, however, she had no patience; she would then summon all her dignity, and would put the sinner in his place without ado. She scarcely practised the social arts in the technical sense of the term. She was indifferent in the choice of guests, and seldom troubled to make sure that they would amalgamate. The Thursday 10 a.m. breakfasts became deservedly famous, because they comprised most of the celebrities of the day--a prima donna, a popular actor, an editor, Mme de Novikoff, Canon Liddon, a great Whig peeress. Dinners would include a mixed company of Members of Parliament and a few non-political friends. At Hawarden the great Whig nobles of the party, like Lord Spencer, Lord Rosebery, and Lord Aberdeen, were chiefly entertained, at whose houses also the Gladstones stayed. Life at Hawarden, even with visitors in the house, was simple; food was good but plain, the hours regular and early. Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone always attended the eight o’clock service at the parish church, a walk of three-quarters of a mile, returning to breakfast, which was enlivened with brilliant talk. It was with difficulty that in later years they could be persuaded to use a pony carriage for the early attendance at church, and at last to substitute attendance at evensong at five o’clock three times a week. Gladstone’s library was known as the “Temple of Peace,” and when the books overflowed into the adjoining lobby, that was christened the “Chapel of Ease.”

Punctuality was a rule of the house for all. Dinner was at 8 p.m., and no late-comer was waited for, unless he or she happened to be some distinguished stranger. As soon as three were assembled Mr. Gladstone would cry, “Quorum! Quorum!” and march into the dining-room.

Gladstone always notified where he himself wished to be entertained, and Mrs. Gladstone showed great dexterity and tact in arranging such invitations. She was similarly skilful in the general management of her husband. She secured that he should enjoy all his little peculiarities, such as eating slowly, and supplying him with the glass of good port he liked to drink after dinner, and allowing him to see the friends he preferred, both men and women--an excellent way, if wives in general would only believe and practise it, to keep husbands young and fresh.

They were both fond of walking, and very often walked home after dining out. Mrs. Gladstone was indifferent to dress, and her general untidiness and absence of method in minor matters occasionally got her into trouble. But she managed dexterously to escape it. Mr. Gladstone used to say, “My wife has a marvellous faculty for getting into scrapes, but also a marvellous faculty for getting out of them.” She had a regal carriage, and her movements were swift and light. Her eyes were of a deep sapphire blue, long in shape, set well apart, in expression according to her mood, merry or tender or mischievous. Abundant soft brown hair waved on her forehead.

After the first few years of married life, when children were born in quick succession and her health was therefore somewhat delicate, she enjoyed for the rest of her existence wonderfully fine health. She took a daily cold bath until the year of her death. One winter, when she was over eighty, a mission was held at Hawarden. As the service began at 4 a.m. she consented to sleep at the Rectory. Her son, the Rector, got up at three, made some water hot, and took it to his mother’s room. She opened her door fully dressed and ready, having taken her cold bath as usual.

One reason of Mrs. Gladstone’s ability to resist fatigue and to get through so large an amount of work was her practice of sleeping for short periods. She could lie down on a sofa and go to sleep at will for ten or fifteen minutes, and awake perfectly refreshed. Sometimes, too, in the House of Commons, during one of her husband’s long speeches, she would take a short nap, for as she always sat with her head bent and eyes looking down on Mr. Gladstone, her companions never detected that she was asleep, and indeed were lost in admiration at the rapt way in which she listened, and the manner in which she endured the fatigue of sitting there so many hours.

Amid all her activities she found time for much letter-writing, and corresponded with numbers of interesting people. With the slightest materials she contrived to get an atmosphere into her letters that made them delightful reading.

One who knew Mrs. Gladstone well writes:

“Helpfulness, that was the note of her character; in any difficulty, in the most impossible case, Mrs. Gladstone would plan, contrive, arrange, enlist others, and never rest until the difficulty was solved, and the persons put in the way of helping themselves--nay more, supported, befriended, encouraged, till they could stand alone. Perhaps few persons were so often consulted and appealed to as was Mrs. Gladstone. It might be young girls entering on life in the first joy of a marriage engagement, or young beauties to whom she would gently suggest thoughts that were unworldly. Very often it would be some hard-worked London priest toiling single-handed amongst his thousands, and thinking no one cared, who found in Mrs. Gladstone a listener not only sympathetic but suggestive, one who did not forget, but would forward his plans, and who had the rare gift of setting other people to work.

“Mrs. Gladstone had the genius of charity. _Good_ or to be helped to be good, that was the essence of it all. Religion not forced, not obtruded, but as natural and vital as fresh air, was, not an adjunct of life, but life itself. In her own devotions, in the daily services of the Church, in many a Eucharist did Catherine Gladstone renew her soul’s life, and increase the charity and the delightful gaiety of her temperament, and from the spirit of wisdom learn those intuitions which so rarely failed her. It seemed but natural that her last spoken words were, ‘I must not be late for Church.’”

In these days of storm and stress and feverish excitement and unrest among women, it is well to recall the life of a woman like Mrs. Gladstone who, in a period when such mechanical aids to activity as motor-cars and telephones were non-existent, yet contrived to be a devoted wife, smoothing her husband’s path in every direction, accompanying him everywhere, an equally devoted mother, as well as a charming hostess of country-house parties at Hawarden and of the more formal entertainments in London consequent on her position as the wife of a great Minister of State. In addition to such domestic and social duties she engaged in philanthropic work, and in no dilettante spirit; she visited hospitals, founded convalescent homes, and refuges and orphanages; she played her part in the public political work then undertaken by women. She accomplished all these things without an idea that she was doing anything worthy of note or of record, and yet quietly, unostentatiously, and unconsciously leaving an ineffaceable mark on every phase of life with which she came in contact.

VII

LADY SALISBURY

Lord Salisbury was the last of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, and she has left it on record that she thought him the ablest of them all. Lady Salisbury was Georgiana, daughter of Lord Alderson, Baron of the Exchequer. Lord Alderson was a man of great intellect, whose career, though honourable and useful, never quite fulfilled the expectations of his friends. At Cambridge University he was Senior Wrangler, Smith’s prizeman, and Senior Chancellor’s medallist, which is almost a unique record. The Aldersons belonged to what was called “the Norwich set,” a group of families living near that city who made it into an intellectual centre. It is curious to learn, in connection with the history of some of his descendants, that in his early days Lord Alderson was a Unitarian, and was descended from Mrs. Opie, the well-known Quaker. He himself, however, became a member of the Church of England, and the family were well known as advanced Tractarians.

Every year the Alderson family (which consisted of ten children besides Georgiana) used to spend their summer holidays at Lowestoft, where were other friends with young families, conspicuously the Palgraves. Of the Palgraves the best known was Francis, afterwards the editor of the _Golden Treasury_. There is in existence a little green-covered book called _Lays of Lowestoft_, which consists of parodies of mediæval ballads and heroic couplets something like the _Ingoldsby Legends_, though it is perhaps unfair to call into comparison these high-spirited, but naturally immature, productions with that brilliant collection of satirical verse. The jokes and allusions are rather obscure to the outsider, but the whole volume gives an impression of zest and great enjoyment. Georgiana opens the volume with a lively account of a cricket match, and there are descriptions of picnics and excursions of all sorts, to which the family drove in a donkey-cart, with tea, umbrellas, and “Tennyson’s poems our hearts to affect.” On another occasion they are all depicted as lying on the heather singing glees and part-songs (the Aldersons were very musical) while the sun went down. Two verses are sufficiently characteristic:

“Now sparkling hock and sparkling wit Are vying with each other, And one bright flash of repartee Is followed by another.

And grave ecclesiastics too, With lawyers shrewd and cunning, Contend with squires and ladies fair In the gay art of punning.”

The whole book is full of the atmosphere of the irresponsible years between childhood and maturity. One feels it must all have been great fun.

Georgiana “came out,” like other girls, when she grew up, and is generally believed to have enjoyed that also. Indeed, she might have taken as one of her secondary mottoes in life the old couplet:

“Pastime and good company I love and shall until I die,”

with perhaps the rider that good company was the pastime best worth having. She had great vitality and a brilliant wit, and both made her such good company that a friend paraphrased Wilke’s famous boast on her behalf and said that, given ten minutes’ lead (to make up for her want of looks, for she was not considered pretty), she could be backed against the loveliest of her contemporaries. Undeniably some people found her formidable, for she was a person of very strong emotions and decided opinions, and was liable to come out suddenly with emphatic expression of her views in a way that less decisive natures found startling.

There are in existence some serious poems written by Miss Alderson at this date at which she used to laugh in later life, and which she was perhaps a little unreasonably proud of never having published. They are described as being characterised by a “sweet sentimental melancholy,” which was a quality no one would have suspected in her. But she probably had her “summer of green-sickness” like other people, and one of her daughters describes her as liking “to give lip-service to a pretty sentiment, though always ready to laugh at herself for the indulgence.”

Among Georgiana Alderson’s greatest friends was Mary, Lady Salisbury (later Lady Derby), and it was at her house she met Lord Robert Cecil, Lady Salisbury’s stepson. In appearance at any rate Lord Robert was very different from the massive figure familiar to the older of present-day politicians. Angular, thin, and rather ungainly, for the dozen years before he took office in 1866 he sat below the gangway in the House of Commons, the freest of free-lances, assailing his own leaders quite as often as the Liberal Government, with a bitterness and violence of language which rather scandalised his fellow-members. His elder brother, Lord Cranborne, being still alive, no one ever thought of his succeeding his father, while his constituency was one of the last of the pocket boroughs, so that he enjoyed every condition of irresponsibility and independence. Another element emphasised his detachment. The tendency of politics is to absorb the politician completely, and to shut out other interests and other questions. To Lord Robert politics was an occupation, while what old-fashioned people used to call philosophy--abstract thought on theology and science--was his abiding interest. He also was an advanced Tractarian, and this was probably the chief thing that first attracted him and Georgiana to each other.

The marriage was an extremely happy one. Both were deeply and devoutly religious; both were much interested in the philosophical questions that centred in religious controversy; both had keen, alert, and daring intelligences. Lady Robert, though a year or two older than her husband, was generally held to have the younger mind, and, if power to enjoy is the attribute of youth, then she certainly had a younger temperament. They were married in 1857, and lived in a little house in Half Moon Street. They were not at all well off, and Lord Robert supplemented a small income with his pen, writing in the _Quarterly_ and the _Saturday Review_. Lady Robert also wrote in the _Saturday_, a fact considered more unusual then than it would be now. Owing to their both writing anonymously, rumour of course embellished the fact, and Lady Robert was credited with some of the political articles (of the type known as “trenchant”) which, as a matter of fact, were written by her husband, she having performed only the important rôle of critic. Lady Robert’s own articles, unfortunately never collected, were chiefly on literary subjects.

Their eldest son was not born till 1861, to be followed by a long family of four more sons and two daughters. The relations of the mother with her children were thoroughly characteristic. To outsiders she seemed to exercise very little restraint on them, and to give them a degree of liberty of action that most children do not get. They were also treated by both parents far more as equals than is usual, and allowed to take part and have their say in any discussion that was on foot, provided they put their points well and discussed fairly. But if she did not work her authority hard there could be no doubt of the strength of her influence, especially in the case of her sons. She was in their confidence, and her opinion had great weight with them to the end of her life. A very familiar sight in later years was Lady Salisbury driving in a high barouche with one or other of her sons, by that time grown men and public figures, absolutely absorbed in talk and both enjoying themselves.

The free-lance days came to an end in 1865, when Lord Robert’s elder brother, Lord Cranborne, died and put him in the direct succession for a great fortune and one of the historical peerages of England. Further, in 1866 the Liberal Government fell, and, when the Conservatives came in under Lord Derby, the new Lord Cranborne was made Secretary of State for India. It was an interesting Parliament, the outstanding subject of interest being Reform. The career of the Government might indeed be described as more exciting than dignified. They came in disposed to pass no Reform Bill; they rapidly discovered that the country was determined to have some Reform Bill. They started with timid and limited measures, and were hustled from one halting-place to another, until the Bill they finally passed, amid clamorous denunciations and acclamations alike, was as wide as any Liberal had ever dreamed of.

It was when one of these limitations was removed, which in his opinion made the franchise dangerously wide, that Lord Cranborne and two of his colleagues, Lord Carnarvon and General Peel, resigned in 1867. Every one sincerely respected them for their sacrifice to their principles, but it made and could make no difference to the Bill, there being only one Bill possible under the circumstances. On the other hand a comment of Lady Cranborne’s was felt to have some ground. She sat next Lord Derby at a dinner-party, and he asked her good-humouredly whether she was lying awake at night doing addition sums to see how many voters were coming in under the Bill, like her husband? “No; do you know, my sums are all subtraction,” was Lady Cranborne’s reply, “and I have come to the conclusion that three from twelve leaves nothing.” Twelve was the number of the Derby Cabinet which, after a jolting and precarious career and a change of leadership from Lord Derby to Mr. Disraeli, fell to cureless ruin in 1868 after the new election.

Lord Cranborne had hardly been a year in office, but he had greatly increased in reputation. He had shown that when he was given responsibility he could rise to it, and his Parliamentary manner was admirable. He shot up automatically from the position of a lone hand, about whose prospects men shook their heads, to that of a coming man and a coming leader, and many regretted profoundly when his father’s death in 1868 withdrew him from the House of Commons. One of the most interesting of minor political speculations is the consideration of what might have happened if his elder brother had lived and he had been compelled to pass his career in the comparative rough-and-tumble of the Commons. He was always of a very detached and aloof temperament, and might have absolutely refused to face the passion and blatancy of an ordinary contested election, as opposed to the foreseen “walks-over” of his elections at Stamford. But had he undergone it and been forced into more direct contact with the general mind of the people, it is impossible not to believe that this detachment might have been modified--and with advantage. As a leader he was always a good deal of an enigma even to his closest associates, and a complete puzzle to the rank and file of his party. In the House of Lords he seldom had to face real opposition, and the consciousness of a foregone conclusion to the discussions imparted a degree of languor to debate. Lord Salisbury himself complained that they were all too much of one mind. At any rate, for one reason or another, he grew more and more to despise public opinion because it was public opinion, an attitude very attractive to certain types of mind, but which is apt to leave a politician the dismal choice whether he will acquiesce or resign when overborne by a public opinion formed by some one else.

Lady Salisbury, as she now became, was very conscious of the drawbacks of this attitude, and set to work to try and modify them by taking on herself a large share of the duties of political hostess. The short sitting of the House of Commons in those days was on Wednesday, and she used to have parties in her house in Arlington Street on Wednesdays for members and their wives. She was a great believer in keeping in touch with members’ wives as a means of keeping their husbands politically “straight.” In addition, of course, she gave big garden-parties in the beautiful grounds at Hatfield, which were now her own, and these entertainments formed one of the outstanding social functions of each year. With only short intervals Lord Salisbury was in office for nearly thirty years, the intervals being, of course, 1880-85 and 1892-95, when Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister. Consequently the work of “keeping the party together” was continuous. Lady Salisbury played her part entirely by entertaining. So far as I can find out she never made a speech on a platform in her life, and did not look with any approval on the political associations for women which began to form in her later years. In the sense that “everybody who was anybody” always came to her parties, they were, of course, extremely successful. Yet she can hardly be described as a born political hostess. Political entertaining is inevitably a rather wholesale business, and demands a certain amount of facile amiability that did not suit her direct and decisive personality, and she was a person of strong preferences which she was not always successful in concealing from the people that she did not prefer. In addition, she was very easily led into any conversation that interested her, and it was not an uncommon sight to see her shaking hands with head averted, absorbed in a discussion going on at her other elbow. (It is interesting to note that although her husband was twice Prime Minister she never lived at the historic No. 10 Downing Street.)

Lord Salisbury himself was a decidedly reluctant partner in these activities. He hated indiscriminate sociabilities, partly because his eyesight was bad and he had a difficulty in remembering faces. “Why should I spend my evening being trampled on by the Conservative party,” he was heard to complain audibly one night while standing at the head of the stairs receiving his guests. Both were a great deal happier in their house-parties at Hatfield, where they could receive their personal friends. Here they could be in close touch with every one, and enjoy the play of minds which was the favourite entertainment of both. Lady Salisbury herself was a brilliant talker, quick, spontaneous, and epigrammatic, without any suggestion of premeditation. The element about her talk that most struck outsiders was perhaps its remorseless pressing home of her points, coupled with complete good temper when points were pressed equally hard against her. She never took offence at a shrewd hit, and greatly preferred a foeman worthy of her steel to a limp and unintelligent ally. One characteristic was very marked--gossip played small part in her talk, and “spicy” gossip none at all. The reason for this was not prudery. The terms are on record with which she rebuked some unlucky scandalmonger, and they are of an eighteenth-century plainness. She was fond of the saying that “nice” people are people with nasty minds, and altogether had a fine disgust for the prying censoriousness and debased curiosity which besets a certain form of conventional piety.

Convention, in fact, was her bane, and independence the prevailing colour of her mind. She was deeply and sincerely religious, and her religion was her touchstone for all conduct. But her inferences from her creed she held herself free to make independently, and she acted, approved, disapproved, and recommended on completely individual lines. Laid down as they were by a reckless and almost appallingly rational mind, they were no doubt sufficiently perplexing to many ordinary people. She saw no necessity to agree with every one she liked (nor, it may be added, to like every one with whom she agreed), and her friends were of every type and every shade of opinion. Dr. Liddon was one of the greatest, and with him she corresponded frequently, but she was also close friends with Dr. Tait, afterwards Primate, with Professor Tyndall, and with the late Duke of Devonshire, with all of whom Liddon probably disagreed as emphatically as possible. She had also many friends in the Liberal camp, notably Lady Rosebery. She had very strong affections, and her friendships went very deep.