‘Besides these workaday axes one may see several with silver heads, and among them one, especially valued, that was presented to Mr. Gladstone in 1884 by the workmen on the Forth Bridge. There are, too, miniature axes beautifully modelled in solid gold, kept among the jewels in the drawing-room; and a silver pencil, axe-shaped, which was presented to the G. O. M. by the Princess of Wales “for axing questions.”’
In 1870 Hayward writes: ‘I had an immensity of talk on all subjects with Gladstone. I strolled about with him for some hours yesterday. He takes whatever work he has to do easily enough here, and finds time for general reading into the bargain.’ In 1871 the same writer says: ‘Gladstone as he always is as a companion—conversation singularly rich and varied.’ Such seems to have been the common testimony of all who had the honour of spending a brief time with Mr. Gladstone at home.
It is idle, and would be tiresome, to give the history of the deputations of working-men who went to Hawarden. As an illustration, let me say that one December day a number of the working-men of Derby went to Hawarden to present Mr. Gladstone with a dessert-service of Derby china, specially manufactured at the Derby Crown Works for the occasion. When in 1882 Mr. Gladstone celebrated his political jubilee, addresses and telegrams came to him at Hawarden from all parts of the country. When in 1877 Hawarden was invaded by fourteen hundred members of the Bolton Liberal Club, he refused to see them, but quietly informed them that he and his son were about to fell a tree in the course of the day in the park, and thither the crowd repaired, where, after Mr. Gladstone had performed his task, he gave them an address. One of his great wood-cutting feats that year was his felling an enormous beech-tree—a task he performed in three hours. It was a tough job, considering that it measured thirteen feet in circumference, and was a good proof of the aged statesman’s muscular strength and activity. Hercules alone seems to have been his equal.
Perhaps one of the most enormous deputations ever received at Hawarden was in 1886, when the Irish deputations came over in great strength to Hawarden, one of them bearing an address signed by 600,000 Irish women. The others brought to him the freedoms of Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Clonmel. In acknowledging the addresses received, Mr. Gladstone dwelt upon the moderation with which the Home Rule agitation was carried on. He declared that it would ultimately succeed, and denied that the Irish demand involved separation. Yet at one time there were fears for Hawarden and Mr. Gladstone. In 1882 Lord Houghton, while staying there, wrote to his son:
‘Dear Robert,
‘You may be easy about my personal security. We have two detectives—one engaged to the cook; and Lord Spencer brought three more yesterday.’
Of the Hawarden Post-office a volume might be written. There could scarcely have been one more filled with important correspondence in all the empire. Everyone deemed it to be his duty to pester Mr. Gladstone with letters, and his replies in the shape of postcards were to be found carefully preserved everywhere. Even illness severe and protracted was no excuse. ‘One of the most painful incidents connected with Mr. Gladstone’s illness,’ writes the London correspondent of the Birmingham Daily Post, ‘is the persistence of uninvited spiritual advisers in addressing him. I am told that not a day, and scarcely a post, passes without some of these personages intruding themselves.
‘Chapters from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of Scriptural personages, isolated texts, hymns and religious books—in some cases the advice coming from the unknown authors themselves—have all been suggested for the veteran statesman’s “edification.”
‘In not a few instances poems on the same theme have been sent for his perusal, and, as the authors have generally put it, for his spiritual comfort and relief. I need hardly say that these effusions have never reached Mr. Gladstone, but they have in not a few instances, by their very suggestiveness of impending disaster, caused distress to his family.’
A representative of the Daily Mail added more on this subject: ‘Among people in touch with the Hawarden household it is being discussed with a good deal of indignant comment, and more than one well-known name is mentioned as having been appended to some of this correspondence. It is not so much the gratuitous impertinence of the amateur spiritual consoler which occasions the annoyance Mr. Gladstone’s relatives feel.
‘Mr. Gladstone has throughout his life loomed so large in the eyes of the religious public that he has always been a favourite target for the controversialists of every sect. He long ago grew accustomed to being bombarded with controversial pamphlets, and to being assailed with texts of Scripture bearing more or less obliquely upon some political question of the day. And whenever he has been suffering from some trifling indisposition, or has sustained any family loss or affliction, sackfuls of letters quoting texts of Scripture have been sent to him. It occasions neither surprise nor any great amount of annoyance, therefore, now that the sympathy of everyone is turned towards him, that in the case of fervid religionists it should find expression in passages of Scripture and extracts from devotional works from which the senders have themselves, in times of sorrow and affliction, derived comfort and consolation.