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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Gladstone: God and Politics

God and the GOM

Jane Ridley reviews Richard Shannon's latest book on Gladstone

Ever since John Morley’s great biography of 1903 Gladstone’s life has been seen as a heroic political journey from the Tory darkness of his youth towards the Liberal light. Morley ignored Gladstone’s difficult and clotted religious thinking, and most biographers have followed him. Roy Jenkins and Professor Colin Matthew constructed Gladstone as the leader of an intellectual elite: the winner of Oxford’s glittering prizes, Gladstone matured into a razor-sharp Treasury mind, a man with enormous powers of work and an unfortunate but forgivable weakness for fallen women. Neither Jenkins nor Matthew had any time for Gladstone’s religious beliefs, but Shannon contends that you can’t really understand what made Gladstone tick without looking at his religion.

Shannon constructs Gladstone as the ‘great beast’ of the Victorian political jungle, a man of dark, unresolved tensions. His father, a dour Scottish patriarch and Liverpool merchant, made a fortune which derived largely from slave plantations in Demerara. As an Evangelical, however, the young Gladstone was brought up to abhor slavery, and this conflict was never resolved. Gladstone always pretended that his vocation was to enter the church, but allowed himself to be easily persuaded to choose politics and ambition. Aged 23 he was an MP, aged 32 he was a successful junior minister in Peel’s government of 1841-6. In spite of his stellar success, he still hankered after the religious life. Politics for Gladstone became a questing, not for Liberalism, but for divine providence, which was revealed to him in a series of quasi-religious missions.

Gladstone was personally unpopular, overbearing and eccentric. Much of his thinking on politics was incoherent and confused. His work on Homer, which purported to trace secretions of Christianity in the pagan text, was, says Shannon, a ‘scandal’ of wrong-headed classical scholarship. He tormented himself over his encounters with fallen women and not-so-fallen women, such as the fascinating Mrs Thistlethwayte, who was a courtesan turned born-again Christian. His breakthrough came when he learned to displace his pent-up excitement and sexual frustration into brilliant emotional attacks on Disraeli and his budgets. His speeches gave an impression of technical virtuosity, but in fact this was all theatre — Shannon calls it the ‘melodrama of finance’ — driven by his crazed conviction that Disraeli embodied all that was rotten in politics.

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