The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli

by Richard Aldous

‘I don’t give my mind at all to politics,’ he told Selina dolefully, ‘the A.V. has carried everything before him.’ But that did not mean he would not give his mind to settling scores. ‘I believe he is engaged in writing something, but this he didn’t tell me,’ recorded Gower after his visit to Hughenden. That something was a roman-à-clef, whose anti-hero – Joseph Toplady Falconet – was recognisably William Gladstone. The name was artfully chosen. ‘Joseph’ was taken from Joseph Surface, the scheming hypocrite in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. ‘Toplady’ was the hymnist of the ‘Rock of Ages’, which it was known Gladstone had Latinised in 1839. There must surely too have been some innuendo hinting at the late-night excursions that so amused and baffled Gladstone’s contemporaries. The name ‘Falconet’ conjured up Gladstone’s appearance, both in the hawk-like intensity of his eyes and the beaky shape of his face. (‘The new members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the air’, Disraeli had written of Gladstone to the Queen in 1875.) Disraeli spared nothing in his portrait of the young Falconet as a clever yet unappealing character. It was his most sustained assessment of his great rival’s make-up: He was a grave boy, and scarcely ever known to smile, and this … from a complete deficiency in the sense of humour, of which he seemed quite debarred. His memory was vigorous, ready, and retentive; but his chief peculiarity was his disputatious temper, and the fl...