Gladstone, William Ewart

Gladstone, William Ewart (1809–98). Statesman and author. Gladstone was in office every decade from the 1830s to the 1890s, starting as a Tory, ending as a Liberal‐radical. Born in Liverpool on 29 December 1809, the son of John Gladstone, a merchant from Scotland, Gladstone was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Intensely religious, 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, 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. He resigned in 1845 over the Maynooth grant, returning in 1846 to be briefly colonial secretary and to support repeal of the Corn Laws.

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, minimum government spending, the abolition of protective tariffs, and a fair balance between direct and indirect 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 In his 1853 budget he repealed about 140 duties; in 1860 he repealed duties on 371 articles, many of them as a consequence of the treaty with France which he planned and Richard Cobden negotiated.

In the 1850s and 1860s Gladstone emerged as a politician of national standing with a reputation for oratory. Though MP for Oxford University from 1847 to 1866, he began to take increasingly radical positions, especially on questions like parliamentary reform. 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. He led the Liberals to win the 1868 election and became prime minister in December 1868: on receiving the queen's telegram of summons, ‘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). His 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). Gladstone called and lost a snap general election in January 1874. He then announced his retirement from the party leadership.

Gladstone, 64 in 1874, expected a retirement of scholarship. In his lifetime he published over 30 books and pamphlets and about 200 articles. 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 nurtured links between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism as an antidote to Roman catholicism. 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 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 meet Irish demands. He accompanied the concessionary Land Act (1881) with coercion, imprisoning 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. He saw devolution as the best means of maintaining Ireland within the United Kingdom and drew up a Home Rule Bill, providing for a legislature with two Houses in Dublin. This was too bold for his party and the bill was defeated in the Commons in June 1886, many Liberal Unionists defecting and eventually forming their own party.

In foreign policy, Gladstone stood for an international order governed by morality. His first government submitted the Alabama dispute to international arbitration and paid the 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. In office in the 1880s, however, Gladstone found himself intervening in unpalatable ways; to maintain order in Egypt, he bombarded Alexandria in 1882 and then invaded Egypt in what was intended as a brief occupation. In 1881, war against the Boers in South Africa included the 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 was aged 75 when his first Government of Ireland Bill was defeated. Committed to campaigning for another attempt, he led the Liberal Party in opposition 1886–92, winning the general election of 1892. 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. His eyesight deteriorating, he finally resigned the premiership in March 1894, aged 84. He died on Ascension Day, 19 May 1898.

Gladstone was an impressive man with a large head and a powerful voice, his fitness maintained by long walks and his legendary tree‐felling. Intense sexuality competed with equally intense religious belief, and he had difficulty in balancing the two when he undertook his ‘rescue’ work with prostitutes. These inner struggles combined with outward confidence to make him a very characteristic Victorian.