Changes

In 1892, Gladstone was re-elected Prime Minister for the fourth and final time. The following year he introduced his second Home Rule Bill. It passed by a small majority in the Commons, but then was defeated in the Lords.

In 1892, Gladstone was re-elected Prime Minister for the fourth and final time. The following year he introduced his second Home Rule Bill. It passed by a small majority in the Commons, but then was defeated in the Lords.

Soon after, with his eyesight and hearing failing him, Gladstone resigned at the age of 84. He would make one more speech in 1896 to denounce the [[Armenian atrocities]], but died in 1898 at the age of 88. He was given a state funeral and buried in [[Westminster Abbey]].

The third and final phase of his career was devoted to the Irish question. He sought repeatedly to pass a [[home rule]] bill but failed in 1886 and 1893. In 1869, however, he disestablished the [[Church of Ireland]] (that is the Protestant Anglican Church of the landowners, not the Catholic Church of the peasants), so that taxes were no longer collected for the Church. In 1870 he began to deal with the [[land tenure]] question. The [[Irish Land Act of 1870]] gave some security to Irish tenant farmers by preventing arbitrary eviction and giving the tenants financial rights to improvements they made. The agricultural depression of the 1870s soured the mood, and [[Charles Stewart Parnell]] set up the [[Irish Land League]] that used [[boycott]]s and violence against the landlords.  Gladstone's Land Act of 1881, called the “Magna Carta” of the Irish farmer, recognized the three F’s (fair rent, fixity of tenure, and freedom of sale) and provided a land commission to determine what was a "fair rent."  The [[Ashbourne Act of 1885]] and supplementary acts of 1887 and 1891 provided a loan fund of many millions of pounds for tenants who wished to purchase their lands.  Parnell mastered the arts of [[filibuster]]ing and parliamentary obstruction with 86 solid votes from Irish Nationalist MPs in Parliament he controlled.  They were elected thanks to Gladstone's [[Third Reform Bill of 1884]], which greatly extended the franchise and for the first time treated Ireland and Great Britain on equal terms, thus tripling the Irish electorate. Parnell's MP's brought down Gladstone's second government in June of 1885; he was replaced by the Conservatives under [[Lord Salisbury]].

The Irish land proposals in Gladstone's first [[Home Rule Bill of 1886]] was an unexpected shock to his supporters and brought down his third government in a matter of months. The bill gave all owners of Irish land a chance to sell to the [[state]] at a price equal to 20 years' purchase of the [[rent]]s and allowing [[tenant]]s to purchase the land. [[Republicanism#Ireland|Irish nationalist]] reaction was mixed, [[Ulster Unionism|Unionist]] opinion was hostile, and the election addresses during the 1886 election revealed English radicals to be against the bill also. Among the Liberal rank and file, several Gladstonian candidates disowned the bill, reflecting fears at the constituency level that the interests of the working people were being sacrificed to finance a rescue operation for the landed elite.<ref> Graham D. Goodlad, "The Liberal Party and Gladstone's Land Purchase Bill of 1886.'' ''Historical Journal'' 1989 32(3): 627-641. Issn: 0018-246x Fulltext: [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-246X%28198909%2932%3A3%3C627%3ATLPAGL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1  in Jstor]]</ref> 

 

Meanwhile serious confrontations continued between the the local magistrates (who represented the Protestant landowners) and the Irish National League, which replaced the suppressed [[National Land League]], and told tenants to withhold rents from extortionate [[landlord]]s. The Irish question transformed politics in Britain and was not finally settled until the 1920s.

 

Gladstone's long marriage (1839-1898) to Catherine Gladstone (1812-1900) reveals an ideal helpmeet and ideal Victorian wife, She was also motivated by a sense of mission; this led her to censor information her husband received, which kept him unaware of the true nature of public opinion, and her strong opposition to retirement, which kept Gladstone in office longer than he or his colleagues desired.

 

 

Gladstone retired in 1894 when he was 84 years old, after his fourth and last cabinet had revolted unanimously against his leadership. He had refused his consent to a modest increase in the Naval estimates and had called his colleagues "criminals" to their faces. That pathetic close to a great career was made more unhappy by his unkind reception at his final interview with Queen Victoria, when her longstanding dislike of him was made apparent. He brooded over it constantly and was inclined to attribute it to foul and lying stories carried to her ears by his enemies about his noble and selfless rescue work, performed one night a week throughout the whole of his life, among street-walking prostitutes in London.

Gladstone, who enjoyed superb health, was a beautifully proportioned man and a most impressive figure even in extreme old age. He was capable occasionally of unconscious self-deception, and his sense of humor, like his sense of proportion, was capricious; but he displayed always an extraordinary modesty and a delightful, old-world courtesy. His writings, which are mostly upon classical subjects with a strong religious undertone, are unlikely ever again to be widely read. He repeatedly tried to prove, for example, that the ancient Greeks were as much a chosen people as the Jews and that Homer had been inspired by God to foreshadow the Trinity. His speeches, although marvelously effective at the time of their delivery, are not of the highest or most enduring quality. They do not appeal like the Earl of Chatham's to elemental passions or like Edmund Burke's to elemental principles, and they contain few passages which gleam in the memory or which would be likely to bring a sparkle into the eye of a declaiming schoolchild. Deprived of the magic of his voice and gestures, the characteristic note of the printed texts is an expression of intellectualized sentiment.

Gladstone died at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, Wales, on May 19, 1898, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was survived for two years by his widow (Catherine Glynne), a much loved member of an aristocratic Whig family who had inherited the Hawarden property where her husband sank his roots. It was an ideally happy marriage, and it was widely appreciated that the Gladstones had lived their personal lives on a much more exalted and austere plane than that of their political contemporaries.

 

 

 

 

==Beliefs and political values==

==Beliefs and political values==

===Laissez-faire policy===

===Laissez-faire policy===