Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins Page A

six and a quarter years without office. During much of this period he was concerned more with seeking a wife than with obtaining a department (and was considerably less
adept at the former pursuit). He had started so young that he could sustain this patch of slack water and still be a Privy Councillor at thirty-one and a Cabinet minister at thirty-three. He was
older at the time of Cabinet entry than Pitt or Harold Wilson, but younger than Canning or Peel or (by three weeks) Winston Churchill, and than all the other participants in the 250-year history of
British Cabinet government. His period of slack water between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-one cannot therefore be accounted as even an approach to a serious setback.
    Yet, if this conveys a sense of a favoured and carefree youth striding to triumphs which were as joyous as they were glorious, it is almost wholly misplaced. Palmerston and Churchill, to take
two statesmen who, like Gladstone, both succeeded early and lived long, got far more obvious pleasure out of life and politics than did Gladstone, perhaps ever, certainly as a young man. He was
tortured and he was somewhat awkward, both in movement and in words. He was frequently dissatisfied, alike with his performance and with the direction of his effort. Although by the late 1830s he
had moved far from the Evangelicalism of his youth, he always retained a legacy from his early Low Church instruction. Sin, condemnation and fear played a great part in his religion. God’s
mercy was always more problematical.
    Despite ease of material circumstance and reality of political achievement, the first half of Gladstone’s adult life had in it more of the nature of a painful pilgrimage through a vale of
sorrows (and temptations) than of a triumphal walk back to the cricket pavilion after scoring a debonairdouble century. Several of his aspects and attributes which made this so
showed themselves in his determined but flat-footed search for a wife which dominated the years from 1835 to 1839.
    Fragmentary but converging evidence strongly suggests that Gladstone had a sexual drive to match the flash of his eye, the force of his oratory and the vigour of his intellectual and physical
energy. It is also the view of Professor Matthew, the unmatched cicerone of Gladstone’s life and
œuvre
, that he was a virgin when he married. The conjuncture of these two
considerations must necessarily have introduced some urgency into his desire for matrimony. But they did not secure its rapid fulfilment.
    Gladstone as a young man appears to have been at once moderately susceptible to the attractions of women and singularly ill at ease in their company. The word ‘moderately’, usually
inappropriate to Gladstone, is appropriate here because of the paucity of references to girls in his diaries. There was no question of his falling happily in and out of love with the sisters of his
friends. In 1830 there were some references to the two daughters of a Leamington colonel, rather unpromisingly named Pocklington, whom he encountered on one of his Oxford-vacation visits to his
spa-waters-imbibing family. One sister, Jane Pocklington, aroused more interest than the other and as he curiously put it, he ‘got upon delicate ground [with her] about the Vicar’s
preaching’. How he escaped from this delicate ground is not recorded but his appallingly priggish (and syntactically awkward) summing up of this holiday foray does not suggest that it
produced many transports of joy for either side: ‘But it seems to me that female society, whatever the disadvantages may be, has just & manifold uses attendant upon it in turning the mind
away from some of its most dangerous & degrading temptations.’ 5 Then during his 1832 grand tour he was temporarily moved by the beauty of
Henrietta Milnes (the sister of Richard Monkton Milnes, later Lord Houghton), whom he encountered in Rome. But again it appears to have been no more than an