Gladstone: A Biography Read Online Free

easy-going and did not produce a sufficient fervour of hell-fire
preaching for their taste.
    As her health declined, which it did fairly steadily at least from 1815, Evangelical religion became the central feature of Anne Gladstone’s life. This did not separate her from her
husband, for he, although engaged in the most vigorous pursuit of mammon, professed an equal attachment. Furthermore, Anne Gladstone, unlike her predecessor, produced six children, all born between
1802 and 1814, rather liked entertaining provided she could spend most of her days reclining upon an invalid’s couch, and survived until the age of sixty-three.
    William Gladstone’s brothers and sisters had no qualities of personality, energy, intellect or success comparable with his own. As he was by any standards among a handful of outstanding
figures of the Victorian age this was hardly surprising. What was perhaps more so was that,although his three brothers were almost as drawn to politics (local Liverpool politics
in the case of the second) as he was himself, and although in theory at least he was naturally family minded, they constituted no continuing close-knit phalanx of support or even of companionship.
After his marriage in 1839 1 he saw far more of his wife’s family than he did of his own. This was not only true of her brother, Sir Stephen Glynne,
where there was the special factor of Gladstone’s gradual taking over of his Hawarden estate, although Glynne continued to live there, almost as a guest in his own house, until his death in
1874. It was also so with his wife’s sister’s husband, Lord Lyttelton, whose Hagley Hall outside Birmingham became almost a second country house for the Gladstones. An account of the
political and religious differences, and largely ineffective ambitions, of the other brothers belongs to later in the story, as does the tragedy of the surviving sister Helen Gladstone. William
Gladstone was mostly detached from them during their lives, although occasionally interfering and intolerant, particularly with his sister, and immensely solicitous at the times of their
deaths.
    When William Gladstone left Liverpool to go to Eton for the first time in 1821, his eldest brother Tom had been there for four and a half years, most of the time as unhappy as he was
unsuccessful, and his second brother Robertson had just been removed from the school after two years. So far the Gladstones were a determined rather than a successful Etonian family. Tom had
several times asked to be taken away. He was no good at composing Latin verse, which was the basis of the very limited curriculum. He quarrelled constantly with his ‘dame’ (house
matron) and with Keate, the famous flogging headmaster. He found the atmosphere harsh and irreligious, and he made few friends. But his father was determined that he should not leave. To do so
would mean that the Gladstone attempt to infiltrate the citadel of upper-class education had failed at the first encounter. So Tom accepted not merely that he could not leave voluntarily but that
he must submit to several Keate floggings in lieu of expulsion.
    Robertson was different. He was not the eldest son, and when it was decided, entirely with his own concurrence, that his future lay in continuing in Liverpool the mercantile tradition of the
family, he wassmartly removed from Eton. John Gladstone’s approach to education was strictly vocational. He was willing to pay to turn his sons into members of the ruling
class. But if they were going to become merchants rather than rulers there was no point in paying. And the cost was surprisingly high, particularly as Eton was not well run at the time, with too
few masters, and those that there were of uncertain quality. Its main advantage was the opportunity to make influential friends. For this the total cost in Tom’s case, according to the
meticulous Gladstone accounts, was £261 for a year, a figure which was somewhat above the average