Sir Stephen Glynne died in 1815, and the care of the four children, two boys and two girls, all under six years old, devolved on the mother. She returned to her father, and she and the children lived with him in Berkeley Square, at Audley End, and at Billingbere. It was only after his death that she resided at Hawarden, where she was assisted in the duties connected with the estate by her brother, the Rev. the Hon. George Neville, to whom her husband, shortly before his death, had presented the living of Hawarden.
A journal is still in existence in which Lady Glynne made notes about her children during the years 1815–20. She describes Catherine as beautiful, high-spirited, and strong-willed.
Catherine Glynne was not highly educated in the sense in which that phrase is now understood. As a girl, she lived more out of doors than indoors, became a good horsewoman and proficient in all the athletic exercises, archery among them, then permitted to girls. She was not a great reader then nor later, but contact with the life of the village, the witnessing and even assisting in the schemes of improvement of her mother and uncle in regard to the cottagers and the education of their children, added to intercourse with people of intelligence in her own rank of life, taught her valuable lessons. Her training helped to lay the foundation of the excellent philanthropic work she accomplished on her own account after her marriage, and to develop the qualities which made her so admirable a companion for a great statesman. She could scarcely be called intellectual, but she possessed a natural intuition that never failed her, an equally natural shrewdness, and a keen sense of humour. Another quality that stood her in good stead was a capacity for making friends. One winter was spent at Hastings, and next door were staying Prince George of Cambridge and his cousin Prince George of Hanover. The young people speedily made acquaintance, and to the end of her life Mrs. Gladstone had no warmer friend and admirer than the Duke of Cambridge.
In 1829, when her daughters were about fifteen or sixteen, Lady Glynne took them to Paris for educational purposes, and, among other advantages, they enjoyed pianoforte lessons from Liszt. The sisters were girls of singular beauty, and attracted much admiration. Lord Douglas was so impressed that he induced his mother, the Duchess of Hamilton, to call on Lady Glynne, and persuade her to let the girls go to two or three balls at the Tuileries, the British Embassy, and the Duchess of Hamilton’s. Lady Glynne yielded, and the girls had a very enjoyable time.
Their brother Stephen, the head of the family, sat in the House of Commons as Liberal Member for Flint Burghs, and afterwards for Flintshire, from 1832 to 1847; his interests and tastes, however, lay rather in archæology than in politics. He was a man of great refinement and remarkable modesty, but he lacked the business capacity, as will be seen later, needed for managing landed estates. Among his friends at Oxford was W. E. Gladstone. The Glynnes, after the girls grew up, often went abroad, and once when Catherine was with her brother in Florence, they passed a gentleman who raised his hat. She asked Stephen who the handsome young man was. “Don’t you know him?” he replied. “That is young Gladstone, the Member for Newark, and the man who everybody says will one day be Prime Minister of England.” Catherine was first introduced to Gladstone at the house of Mr. Milnes Gaskell in London, and then they used to meet at Lady Theresa Lister’s musical parties and elsewhere. The two sisters were known as “the twin flowers of North Wales,” were greatly admired in London society, and received numerous proposals of marriage. They were, however, bound up in each other, and were determined that one could not be engaged or married without the other. Gladstone admired Catherine in silence, scarcely dreaming that he dared aspire to her hand. In 1835 he was invited by Glynne to pay a visit to Hawarden. But still he did not venture to speak. In the winter of 1838–39 he was suffering from overwork, and was ordered abroad. He had been a junior Lord of the Treasury, and also Under-Secretary for War under Sir Robert Peel, and had published his book on Church and State, and so was not without claims to distinction. In Rome in December he met Stephen Glynne and his sisters, and there found courage to propose to Catherine one moonlight night in the Coliseum. He had repeated to her Byron’s lines from “Manfred” beginning:
“I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,—upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum’s wall—”
Notwithstanding his eloquent appeal Miss Glynne refused him, and it was not until the following June at Lady Shelley’s garden party that she accepted him. About the same time her sister Mary became engaged to the fourth Lord Lyttelton.
When the two bridegrooms arrived at Hawarden for the wedding, they walked down the village street, “Gladstone, tall and upright in figure, pale and strong in face, with dark flashing eyes like an eagle’s; Lord Lyttelton, something of a rough and awkward youth of twenty-one, with rugged features, massive head, and intellectual brow; some one said, gazing at Gladstone, ‘Isn’t it easy to see which is the lord?’”
The double wedding took place on 25th July 1839, at Hawarden Parish Church, and was made the occasion for much festivity and rejoicing on the part of the family and their friends, and of the humble inhabitants of the district. Sir Francis Doyle was Gladstone’s best man, and he wrote a poem for the occasion entitled “To Two Sister Brides,” of which the following stanzas refer to Catherine: