Free Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins Page B

were on the surface a period of vaulting success for Gladstone. In politics it was mostly a Whig decade, but nonetheless one in which the cohesion and reforming zeal of the 1832 majority
gradually dissipated themselves, and the Tories, although requiring three general elections over which to do so, came back from the rump of 160 among whom Gladstone first sat to a party of
approximately 360 with a majority of 80. Each of the general elections had gone smoothly for Gladstone. In 1835 and 1837 he was unopposed at Newark, and in 1841 he was top of the poll, with Lord
John Manners, his new running mate, three votes behind him, and the sole Whig challenger nowhere near either of them.
    Gladstone had also got as early (and substantial) a bite at office as the minority position of his party made possible. At the end of 1834, when William IV rashly dismissed his Whig ministers,
Peel hurried back from a Roman holiday to form a government. He took several weeks on the journey, for the railway age was still just over the horizon. After his arrival, however, he quickly sent
for Gladstone, who was also inconveniently placed in Edinburgh, but who managed to get back to London in time to accept a junior lordship of the Treasury on Christmas Eve. The January election
brought a gain of nearly a hundred seats but no majority for the new government and a fortuitous outcome for Gladstone. The Under-Secretary for War and the Colonies (J. S. Wortley) was defeated in
Forfar and Peel gave Gladstone the vacancy.
    This was a desirable slot because the Secretary of State was Lord Aberdeen, and the under-secretaryship therefore carried the sole spokesmanship for a major department in the Commons. It also
fitted Gladstone well. It matched what he thought of as his continuing ‘Liverpool’ interests (there was also room for embarrassment there, but the government did not last long enough
for them to develop), and he formed a lasting affection and respect for Aberdeen, whom he had not previously met. Aberdeen, in turn, was equally impressed, although hestated
his first approbation in terms which failed to do justice to Gladstone’s force and turbulence. ‘He appears to be so amiable that personally I am sure I shall like him,’ he
wrote. 1 Aberdeen quickly corrected the blandness of this view and became an affectionate and occasionally amused connoisseur of the eccentricities and
extravagances of Gladstone’s genius. Their lives were closely intertwined for a quarter of a century, and Aberdeen’s political influence upon Gladstone was second in intensity only to
that of Sir Robert Peel. Furthermore he was able to exercise it for ten years after Peel had fallen off his horse.
    George Gordon, fourth Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860) is the most elusive of all the post-1832 Prime Ministers. He was cultivated, pacific and public-spirited, with a withdrawn charm. His
reclusiveness was perhaps to be explained by a combination of his lonely childhood and grief-ridden second twenty-five years. His father died when he was seven, his mother when he was eleven. His
grandfather, the third Earl, neglected both his heir and his estate and was not on speaking terms with his daughter-in-law, who when widowed had migrated with George (who had then become Lord
Haddo) and her other sons to England. After her death Haddo was taken into the London household of Dundas (later Lord Melville), the legendary manipulator of Scottish patronage under Pitt, and saw
much of both Prime Minister and proconsul. They, rather than the reprobate and remote third Earl, procured his education, first at Harrow and then at St John’s College, Cambridge.
    He saw little of Scotland, however, which he never visited between the ages of eight and twenty-one, even though he had succeeded to the earldom, Haddo Castle and large surrounding tracts of
land when he was seventeen. When he did see them, in 1805, he was appalled, disliking equally the house, the neglected bog-ridden