William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone (born December 29, 1809, Liverpool, England—died May 19, 1898, Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales) was a statesman and four-time prime minister of Great Britain (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94).

Early life

Gladstone was of purely Scottish descent. His father, John, made himself a merchant prince and was a member of Parliament (1818–27). Gladstone was sent to Eton, where he did not particularly distinguish himself. At Christ Church, Oxford, in 1831 he secured first classes in classics and mathematics.

He originally intended to take orders in the Church of England, but his father dissuaded him. He mistrusted parliamentary reform; his speech against it in May 1831 at the Oxford Union, of which he had been president, made a strong impression. One of his Christ Church friends, the son of the Duke of Newcastle, persuaded the Duke to support Gladstone as candidate for Parliament for Newark in the general election of December 1832; and the “Grand Old Man” of Liberalism thus began his parliamentary career as a Tory member.

His maiden speech on June 3, 1833, made a decided mark. He held minor office in Sir Robert Peel’s short government of 1834–35, first at the treasury, then as undersecretary for the colonies.

In July 1839 he married Catherine, the daughter of Sir Stephen Glynne of Hawarden, near Chester. A woman of lively wit, complete discretion, and exceptional charm, she was utterly devoted to her husband, to whom she bore eight children. This marriage gave him a secure base of personal happiness for the rest of his life. It also established him in the aristocratic governing class of the time.

The influence of Peel

Gladstone’s early parliamentary performances were strongly Tory; but time after time contact with the effects of Tory policy forced him to take a more liberal view. His conversion from conservatism to liberalism took place in prolonged stages, over a generation. Peel made Gladstone vice president of the Board of Trade, and Gladstone’s application astonished even hardworking colleagues.

He embarked on a major simplification of the tariff and became a more thoroughgoing free trader than Peel. In 1843 he entered the Cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. His Railway Act of 1844 set up minimum requirements for railroad companies and provided for eventual state purchase of railway lines. Gladstone also much improved working conditions for London dock workers. Early in 1845, when the Cabinet proposed to increase a state grant to the Irish Roman Catholic college at Maynooth, Gladstone resigned—not because he did not approve of the increase but because it went against views he had published seven years before. Later in 1845 he rejoined the Cabinet as secretary of state for the colonies, until the government fell in 1846. While at the Colonial Office, he was led nearer to Liberalism by being forced to consider the claims of English-speaking colonists to govern themselves.

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Private preoccupations

The Glynne family estates were deeply involved in the financial panic of 1847. For several years Gladstone was concerned with extricating them. He began charitable work, which was open to a great deal of misinterpretation; he often tried to persuade prostitutes to enter a “rescue” home that he and his wife maintained or in some other way to take up a different way of life.

Several of Gladstone’s closest Oxford friends were among the many Anglicans who converted to Roman Catholicism under the impact of the Oxford Movement. Gladstone had moved to a High Anglican position in Italy just after leaving Oxford. The suspicion that he was Catholic was used against him by his adversaries, of whom he had many in the University of Oxford, for which he was elected MP in August 1847. He scandalized many of his new constituents at once by voting for the admission of Jews to Parliament.

Gladstone made his first weighty speech on foreign affairs in June 1850, opposing foreign secretary Lord Palmerston in the celebrated Don Pacifico debate over the rights of British nationals abroad. That autumn he visited Naples, where he was appalled by the conditions that he found in the prisons. In July 1851 he published two letters to Lord Aberdeen describing the conditions, and appealing to all conservatives to set an iniquity right. The Neapolitan prisoners were treated even worse than before, and most conservatives, all over Europe, were deaf to his appeal. But Palmerston circulated the letters to all the British missions on the Continent, and they delighted every liberal who heard of them.

Financial policy

For nine years after Peel’s death in 1850, Gladstone’s political position was seldom comfortable. As one of the most eminent of the dwindling band of Peelites, he was mistrusted by the leaders of both parties and distrusted some of them—particularly Palmerston and Disraeli—in his turn. He refused to join Lord Derby’s government in 1852. At the end of that year, a brilliant attack on Disraeli’s budget brought the government down and Gladstone rose in public estimation. He then joined Aberdeen’s coalition as chancellor of the Exchequer. In his first budget speech he put forth a bold and comprehensive plan for large reductions in duties, proposed the eventual elimination of the income tax, and carried a scheme for the extension of the legacy duty to real property.

His budget provided the backbone of the coalition’s success in 1853, a year in which he spent much time devising a scheme for a competitive civil service system. He defended the Crimean War as necessary for the defense of the public law of Europe; but its outbreak disrupted his financial plans. Determined to pay for it as far as possible by taxation, he doubled the income tax in 1854. When Aberdeen fell in January 1855, Gladstone agreed to join Palmerston’s Cabinet; but he resigned three weeks later, with two other Peelites, rather than embarrass his party by accepting a committee of inquiry into the conduct of the Crimean War. He was, as a result, unpopular in the country; and he made himself more unpopular still by speeches in Parliament in the summer of 1855, in which he held that the war was no longer justified.

Gladstone helped to defeat Palmerston in the Commons by a speech on China in March 1857. He twice refused to join Derby’s government in 1858, in spite of a generous letter from Disraeli. In June 1859 Gladstone cast a vote for Derby’s Conservative government on a confidence motion and caused surprise by joining Palmerston’s Whig Cabinet as chancellor of the Exchequer a week later. His sole, but overwhelming, reason for joining a statesman he neither liked nor trusted was the critical state of the Italian question. The triumvirate of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone did indeed help, over the next 18 months, to secure the unification of almost all Italy.

Gladstone was constantly at issue with his prime minister over defense spending. By prolonged efforts, he managed to get the service estimates down by 1866 to a lower figure than that for 1859. A further abolition of import duties was achieved by his budget of 1860. His support of an Anglo-French trade treaty doubled the value of trade. He proposed the abolition of the duties on paper, which the House of Lords declined to do. In 1861 Gladstone included the abolition with all the other budget arrangements in a single finance bill that the Lords dared not amend, a procedure that has been followed ever since. Another useful step was the creation of the post office savings bank. These measures brought him increased popularity with the leaders of working class opinion, as did journeys around the main centres of industry.

In the general election of July 1865, Gladstone was defeated at Oxford but secured a seat in South Lancashire. When Palmerston died in October and Russell became prime minister, Gladstone took over the leadership of the House of Commons, while remaining at the Exchequer.

Convinced of the need for a further reform of Parliament, he introduced a bill for the moderate extension of the franchise in March 1866, but it foundered in June, and the whole government resigned. Next year Disraeli introduced a stronger Reform Bill that gave a vote to most householders in boroughs. Disraeli became prime minister early in 1868. Russell had resigned from active politics, and Gladstone was the Liberal mentor during the general election at the end of the year. Though Gladstone lost his Lancashire seat, he was returned for Greenwich; and the Liberal Party won handsomely in the country as a whole. His abilities had made him its indispensable leader, and when Disraeli resigned Queen Victoria called on him to form a government.