Mary Gladstone

Mary Drew (née Gladstone; 23 November 1847–1 January 1927), was a political secretary, writer and hostess. She was the daughter of the British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and achieved notability as his advisor, confidante and private secretary. She also attained a fair degree of political influence by controlling access to him.

The Gladstones were a large and eccentric family. Mary's mother (née Catherine Glynne) and her mother's sister Mary, Lady Lyttelton, married on the same day in the same church, and often kept both families in the same house. Lord Lyttelton, Mary's uncle, recalled finding "seventeen children upon the floor, all under the age of twelve, and consequently all inkstands, books, carpets, furniture, ornaments, in intimate intermixture and in every form of fracture and confusion". In all, there were seven Gladstone and twelve Lyttelton children.

Mary's father's rescue work amongst the prostitutes of London is well known and was considered by many contemporaries unbecoming of a Prime Minister. His sister went insane after converting to Roman Catholicism, and subsequently used tracts written by Protestant theologians as lavatory paper, an act which incensed the zealously Anglican Prime Minister.

She and her sister lived a privileged life and she and Helen had their own maid named Auguste Schlüter. Gladstone, growing up against this outré background, was her father's favourite, a plain girl and studious, but with little serious education. Her considerable gumption, however, won her the nickname Von Moltke. After a few infatuations with several uninterested men, she resigned herself to life as a spinster. In 1880, on becoming Prime Minister for a third term at the age of seventy, her father created her one of his Downing Street secretaries. Thus began her political career: she soon became the door to her father. It was a powerful position in which she delighted.

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