Gladstone, William Ewart

Gladstone, William Ewart (1809–98). Statesman and author. Gladstone was one of the longest serving of British politicians and one of the most controversial. He was in office every decade from the 1830s to the 1890s, starting as a Tory, ending as a Liberal-radical prime minister. He was born in Liverpool on 29 December 1809, the son of Anne and John Gladstone, a merchant from Scotland who made his family's fortune in the Baltic and American corn trade. Gladstone was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and from the start was marked out for success in public life. Intensely religious, initially in the evangelical tradition taught him by his mother, he at first felt drawn to ordination in the Church of England, but not sufficiently to go against his father's objections. While president of the Oxford Union, he strongly opposed the Whigs' proposals for parliamentary reform and was elected to the Commons as a Tory in December 1832. Influenced by both Coleridge and the Oxford movement, he published The State in its Relations with the Church (1838) and Church Principles (1840) arguing that the Church of England should be the moral conscience of the state; Macaulay, in a savage refutation of Gladstone's arguments, called him ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending tories’. In Peel's government 1841–5 he was vice-president and then president of the Board of Trade. This experience made him a firm free trader. He resigned in 1845 over the Maynooth grant, returning in 1846 to be briefly colonial secretary and to support repeal of the Corn Laws (though he was not during that year in the Commons) and to become a leader of the Peelite group. In the 1840s Gladstone thus left the Tory Party and reorientated his political and religious position.

In 1839 he married Catherine Glynne, of an old north Wales family; between 1840 and 1854 they had eight children.

In 1852, as a member of the Aberdeen coalition, he began the first of his four terms as chancellor of the Exchequer (the others were 1859–66, 1873–4, and 1880–2); his greatest budgets were those of 1853 and 1860. Gladstonian finance emphasized a balanced budget (i.e. with no deficit), minimum central government spending, the abolition of all protective tariffs, and a fair balance between direct and indirect taxes (Gladstone hoped to abolish income tax, which he disliked, and to replace it with other direct taxes). In his 1853 budget he repealed about 140 duties; in 1860 he repealed duties on 371 articles, many of them as a consequence of the treaty with France which he planned and Richard Cobden negotiated. His plan for phased abolition of income tax was ruined by the costs of the Crimean War.

Gladstone saw the budget as the chief moment of the parliamentary year—a national commitment to sound finance. Finance was, he said, ‘the stomach of the country, from which all other organs take their tone’. He deliberately made the presentation of the budget a dramatic and controversial political event. His budgetary strategy was accompanied by the imposition of Treasury control on a more professional civil service (deriving from the Northcote–Trevelyan Report which Gladstone commissioned) and financial accountability through the Public Accounts Committee which he set up. Gladstone had an explosive political character, which occasionally spilled over into outburst; but his reputation for sound finance gave him a firm political bedrock.

In the 1850s and 1860s Gladstone emerged as a politician of clear national standing with a reputation for oratory. Though MP for Oxford University from 1847 to 1866, and though initially supporting the South in the American Civil War, he began to take increasingly radical positions, especially on questions like parliamentary reform, and his statement in 1864, that ‘any man who is not presumably incapacitated … is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution’, seemed to mark him out as the future leader of the party of progress. However, the modest Reform Bill proposed by Gladstone and Russell in 1866 led to the temporary disintegration of the Liberal Party and the resignation of the government. Gladstone responded with increasingly radical demands on other questions, such as the abolition of compulsory church rates and disestablishment of the Irish church. Campaigning on these questions, he led the Liberals to win the 1868 election and became prime minister in December 1868: on receiving the queen's telegram of summons he remarked, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’. In his first government, one of the greatest of British reforming administrations, he disestablished the Irish church (1869), passed an important Irish Land Bill (1870), but failed with his Irish University Bill (1873, when the government resigned, only for Disraeli to refuse to take office). This government also abolished purchase of commissions in the army and religious tests in the universities; it established the secret ballot and, for the first time, a national education system in England, Wales, and Scotland (1870–2). However, a series of scandals in 1873–4 damaged the government's standing. Gladstone called and lost a snap general election in January 1874 with a quixotic plan to abolish income tax; he then announced his retirement (often previously contemplated) from the party leadership.

Gladstone, 64 in 1874, expected a retirement of writing and scholarship. He was already an established if idiosyncratic authority on Homer with his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858) and a frequent book reviewer. In his lifetime he published over 30 books and pamphlets and about 200 articles, chiefly on classical, theological, literary, and contemporary political topics. His articles provided a useful source of income when out of office and enabled him to retain the centre of the political stage even when in opposition. Gladstone had that rare gift of being thought to be controversial even when at his most anodyne; no public figure has more easily kept a place in the limelight.

In his pamphlets of 1851–2 and a stream of subsequent works, Gladstone opposed the ‘temporal power’ of the papacy. He opposed the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 and denounced ‘Vaticanism’ in 1874–5. He nurtured links between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism as an antidote to Roman catholicism's hegemonic claims. Not surprisingly, therefore, he was swiftly drawn into the Bulgarian atrocities campaign in 1876. A series of speeches and pamphlets broadened into a general attack on ‘Beaconsfieldism’ and having fought the Midlothian campaign 1879–80 he was elected MP for Midlothian. He thus had a Scottish constituency, a Welsh home (his wife Catherine's house, Hawarden castle), and widespread English connections. He had become that very rare phenomenon, a fully ‘British’ politician. He again became prime minister in 1880. His second government passed an important Irish Land Act (1881) and, after initial rejection by the Lords, the Reform Act of 1884; but it failed to establish elected local government for Ireland or for Great Britain.

Since the 1860s, Gladstone had tried to pacify Ireland by accommodating Irish demands. He accompanied the concessionary Land Act (1881) with coercion, imprisoning C. S. Parnell, and breaking the power of the Irish Land League. From 1882, disregarding the set-back of the Phoenix Park murders, he sought to encourage the constitutional character of the Home Rule movement. His government resigned in 1885, unable to agree on local government for Ireland. Gladstone encouraged Parnell to bring forward a Home Rule proposal and fought the general election of November 1885 on a manifesto which carefully did not exclude it. In January 1886, his son Herbert having flown the ‘Hawarden Kite’ and Lord Salisbury having turned down Gladstone's proposal that the Tory government introduce a Home Rule measure with bipartisan support, Gladstone formed his third cabinet with ministers pledged to inquire into Home Rule. He had come to see devolution as the best means of maintaining Ireland within the United Kingdom, as well as having substantial advantages for the United Kingdom as a whole. He drew up a Home Rule Bill, providing for a legislature with two Houses in Dublin and with a generous financial settlement for the Irish, and he proposed to accompany it with a substantial Land Purchase Bill (to buy out the Anglo-Irish landowners). This bold settlement was too bold for his party and the Government of Ireland Bill was defeated in the Commons in June 1886, many Liberal Unionists defecting and eventually forming their own party. The government did, however, pass the Crofters' Act for Scotland, one of the few significant land-tenure reforms ever passed for the mainland. Gladstone called a general election and resigned on losing it. The 1886 proposal was probably the best chance the British had for a constitutional settlement which retained Ireland within the Union.

In foreign policy, Gladstone stood for an international order governed by morality and based on an updated Concert of Europe. To achieve this he was, unlike many free traders, ready to intervene diplomatically or if necessary militarily. His first government submitted the Alabama dispute to international arbitration and paid the consequent hefty fine, thus clearing the way for good relations with the USA. In the Midlothian campaign, Gladstone laid out ‘six principles’ of foreign policy, which recognized the equal rights of nations and the blessings of peace—these principles were extremely influential in world-wide liberal thought, and especially on President Woodrow Wilson and the liberals planning the League of Nations. In office in the 1880s, however, Gladstone found himself intervening in unpalatable ways; to maintain order, as he came to see it, in Egypt, he bombarded Alexandria in 1882 and then invaded Egypt in what was intended as a brief occupation to remove ‘extreme’ nationalists. Egypt proved, however, to be the ‘nest egg’ of Britain's north and central African empire. In 1881, war against the Boers in South Africa included the public-relations disaster of Majuba Hill. Order had also to be established in the Sudan and Gladstone, despite misgivings, failed to prevent Lord Hartington and others sending Charles Gordon to a Sudanese imbroglio partly of Gordon's own making; Gordon's death in 1885 was a further embarrassment to a beleaguered government. Gladstone always opposed imperial expansion and annexation, arguing—in a vein now common among economic historians—that expansion into tropical areas was a dangerous deflection from Britain's true economic and strategic interests (he was, however, a keen proponent of development of the ‘white’ empire). But he always lost the decision (if not the argument) and was an unwilling party to major imperial expansion in Africa and the Pacific.

Gladstone was aged 75 when his first Government of Ireland Bill was defeated. Now committed to campaigning for another attempt, he led the Liberal Party in opposition 1886–92 (his first period as formal opposition leader), winning the general election of 1892 despite the set-back of the split of the Home Rule party in 1890. In 1892 he formed his fourth and last government. In 1893 he successfully piloted his second Government of Ireland Bill through the Commons after 82 sittings; the Lords then brusquely rejected it, as they did many of the government's other proposals. Throughout his life Gladstone had battled to keep down defence expenditure. Already defeated in his attempt in 1892 to withdraw from Uganda, his final political struggle was an unsuccessful dispute with his own cabinet over naval expansion in 1893–4. His eyesight deteriorating, he finally resigned the premiership in March 1894, aged 84. He completed his edition of the works of Joseph Butler, the 18th-cent. theologian, and died on Ascension Day, 19 May 1898.

Gladstone stood 5 feet 10½ inches, with a large head and a powerful voice. He was always spry, his fitness maintained by long walks and his legendary tree-felling. Intense sexuality competed in his character with equally intense religious belief, and he had difficulty maintaining the two in balance when he undertook his ‘rescue’ work with prostitutes. These inner struggles combined with outward confidence to make him a very characteristic Victorian. His enduring governmental monument was the establishment of a tight code of financial principles, which remained influential long after the type of economy they were intended to serve had passed away. In British politics Gladstone was the most successful of non-Tory political leaders. Among executive politicians he has had few rivals in range and staying power, or in the capacity to meet new challenges with fresh policies. His use of speech-making and political meetings to bring great political questions before the people helped to integrate the mass electorate after 1867 and set a style which has influenced democratic countries ever since.

H. C. G. Matthew

Bibliography

Hammond, J. L. Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938);
Matthew, H. C. G. , Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986);
Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995);
Morley, J. , Life of Gladstone (3 vols., 1903);
Ramm, A. , William Ewart Gladstone (Cardiff, 1989);
Vincent, J. , The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857–68 (1966).