The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli

by Richard Aldous

Sex was one of many frustrations for the Gladstones. Between 1840 and 1854, Catherine bore William eight children and had at least one miscarriage. Her pregnancies were often very difficult; on at least one occasion she almost died giving birth. The convention of the day was that husbands did not sleep with their wives during pregnancy. Gladstone, between the births of his first and last children, was therefore excluded from the marital bed for prolonged periods in nine out of fourteen years. His late thirties and early forties thus entailed his own ‘period of confinement’. The result was implosion. Crisis revealed itself through a cycle of sexual temptation, sin and reproach. The young Gladstone had been tortured by guilt about his obsession with masturbation. Later he enjoyed a ‘long and shameful experience of the snares of sin’ after becoming fixated on pornography. This fascination was so overwhelming that in 1845, while in Baden-Baden in Germany, he had drawn up a memorandum of his own sexual depravity. In painstaking if opaque detail Gladstone listed the ways in which he was open to ‘my chief besetting sin’. The resulting self-portrait is of a man in the grip of a mania about sex. The ‘channels’ through which it came included ‘1. Thought, 2. Conversation, 3. Hearing, 4. Seeing, 5. Touch, 6. Company’. Temptation was irresistible when he was bored or else found himself confronted by the unfamiliar. He was particularly receptive, he deduced, in times of ‘1. Idleness, 2....