Two more daughters were born, Mary, in 1847, and Helen in 1849. The first sorrow of their married life occurred in 1850, when on 9th April their little girl Catherine Jessy (born 1845) died of meningitis after a long and painful illness. In her Journal Mrs. Gladstone writes:
“Yes, to look at her face after death was a privilege. I dread lest the solemn remembrance of her loved face should in any way fade, so holy it was.
“My loved child, my own Jessy, to think that the quiet countenance in its deep repose is the same which but a few hours before seemed racked with pain. The hair waved softly on the marble forehead, the dark lashes fringing her cheeks, the little white hands folded across one another. We had placed roses and lilies of the valley about her. I could not describe the sublimity of her expression.”
In 1850, after the death of their second daughter, Catherine, Gladstone took his wife to Brighton to recruit, and although Mrs. Gladstone looked worn and found it difficult to join in general conversation, she felt as if a great calm had set in “after the storms before.”
Two more sons were born, Henry Neville in 1852, and Herbert John[71] in 1854. Thus between 1840 and 1854 Mrs. Gladstone became the mother of eight children, seven of whom survived. While never neglecting her duties as a mother, from the first she studied her husband and sought to secure him the quiet at home which he needed during the Parliamentary Session. He used to say to her, “It is always relief and always delight to see and to be with you.” Her sister Lady Lyttelton gave him the same sense of restfulness; the two sisters were as united after marriage as they had been before, and their close association was only broken by Lady Lyttelton’s death in 1857. Gladstone wrote at the time: “They so drew from their very earliest years and not less since marriage than before it, their breath, so to speak, in common.” Lady Lyttelton left twelve children, and Mrs. Gladstone, despite the cares of her own family, and the rest of her various pre-occupations, never ceased to look after these children as long as they needed her.
Mr. Gladstone was the soul of method, neatness, and punctuality; the girl he had married was exactly the reverse, and she used to tease her husband and tell him it was good for him to have an untidy, unmethodical wife, it made him more human. Many stories are told of her delinquencies. It is said that on one occasion when cards of invitation were being sent out for a great party, certain letters of the alphabet were mislaid and ultimately found after the party, hidden in the interstices of a sofa into which they had fallen. The deep offence of those persons who had received no invitation may be better imagined than described. Most of us have known the queer experience of the sudden disappearance of a pencil case or a pair of scissors, when sitting on a chair or sofa of a certain type of upholstery.
When Mrs. Gladstone was beginning philanthropic work and had charge of money connected with it, her husband told her that she must have a cash box to keep it in, and must take great care of the key. One day she triumphantly showed him the box with the key carefully fastened on to it! But be it said that where such casual ways would have been harmful to her husband’s interests, she was able to overcome them.
She managed all the details of their daily life; the meals were punctually served, the carriage at the door to the moment. Mr. Gladstone was never, through her instrumentality, kept waiting for anything. She contrived with what almost amounted to genius to have a hot dinner consisting of suitable food ready at any time between eight and twelve o’clock that Mr. Gladstone might come home from the House. It was always she who made the arrangements for journeys; she looked after all the details of, and carefully guarded him from, the tiresome inconveniences and annoyances inseparable from travel. She used laughingly to tell him that while he, no doubt, could govern the country admirably, arrangements for a railway journey were better left to her. She accompanied him to the House of Commons whenever he had an important speech to make, and from the Speaker’s little gallery listened to every word and watched every gesture. She herself mixed the egg-flip with which Mr. Gladstone provided himself when his voice was to undergo a prolonged strain. In 1847, when she canvassed for her husband at Oxford, she was described as a “potent canvasser.” At Newcastle in 1862 she told a friend that it had been the happiest day of her life, while her husband averred: “Catherine is a great part of the whole business everywhere,” and twenty years later she said, “I shall never forget that day! It was the first time that he was received as he deserved to be.”
Sometimes she would herself receive his callers on business and usher them into the library. Indeed, she shielded him from all the cares and worries that it was possible for her to take on herself. She looked after his health, and in her powers as physician Gladstone had an intense confidence. He often consulted his wife when there were difficulties between Ministers, and averred that her mother-wit often hit on a solution. Even in comparatively small matters she sought to save him physical fatigue. Every one who has held any kind of public office knows the pain incurred in shaking hands with hundreds of people. Mr. Gladstone used to stiffen his hand and to place his thumb against the palm so that people could not grasp it, but even so when his wife thought he had gone through enough fatigue of the kind, standing close behind him she would thrust her hand forward in place of his, and no one noticed the exchange.
She accompanied Gladstone on all his political campaigns, on all his recreative travels. When in 1891 he went into residence at All Souls’, Oxford, for a week, she invited herself to stay with Sir Henry Acland, and her husband was in and out of the house as often as he wished.
Sir Stephen Glynne’s taste for the study of ecclesiastical architecture[72] led him to rely on others for the management of his estates, and in 1851 it was discovered that their financial condition was in so bad a way, that it was feared Sir Stephen would have to leave Hawarden. Mr. Gladstone had just inherited a large sum of money from his father, and he devoted a portion of it to clearing off the debts that through the indiscretions of an agent, left too much to his own devices, encumbered the Hawarden estates. It was then arranged that Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and their young family should regard Hawarden as their country home, Sir Stephen Glynne still continuing to live there. He died suddenly in 1874; he was unmarried, and as his brother Henry, who died in 1872, left no male issue, it had been settled by will that the estates should pass to the eldest surviving son of his eldest sister, but that Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone were to have the use and enjoyment of Hawarden Castle and grounds for their lives. Thus Mr. William Henry Gladstone became the heir to the property, which descended on his death in 1891 to his eldest son, the late William Glynne Charles Gladstone. But Hawarden continued to their death to be the country home of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and their children.