William Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) was a British statesman and four-time Prime Minister (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886 and 1892–1894) of the British Liberal Party. He is best known for his extensive political reforms and skilled oratory. A scholar as well as a politician, he was the primary political rival of Benjamin Disraeli. Still considered to be one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers, Gladstone was the inspiration for Winston Churchill and others.

Early career to 1868

Gladstone was born on Dec. 29, 1809, at Liverpool, of Scottish parents. His father, Sir John Gladstone, rose from a humble Scottish origin to be Liverpool's foremost citizen after making a huge fortune in commerce during the Napoleonic wars, based on transatlantic corn and tobacco trade with the United States and on the slave-labour sugar plantations they owned in the West Indies. William was the youngest of four sons. He attended Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. A brilliant student, he learned oratory as well as English literature, history and theology. He was proficient at Greek and Latin, passing at French, poor at mathematics, and ignorant of science. At this time, he began the first of 25,000 diary entries that comprise a remarkable personal record continuing to the week of his death. Gladstone's political genius was recognized at an early age; when he was 22 the Duke of Newcastle, a Conservative party activist, provided him a "rotten borough" and he entered Parliament. Gladstone's maiden speech as a young Tory was a defense of the rights of West Indian sugar plantation magnates — slave-owners — among whom his father was prominent.

Becoming Scottish

Although a son of Scottish parents, Gladstone was not initially considered a Scot, for he had been born and brought up in England and had only represented English constituencies. Of Walter Scott's political admirers, Gladstone was possibly the most ardent, genuine and significant. Scott's poems and novels were among the earliest texts Gladstone read, and were seminal in the formation of his private identity, both individual and familial, including much of his self-concept, his understanding of family, and his sense of home. Scott's works crucially influenced Gladstone's political understanding of the Scottish nation and its people, and his notions of how to best serve their political interests. In 1880, he became the Liberal MP for Midlothian and his election campaigns there gave him a Scottish profile. Consequently he was depicted by cartoonist Tenniel, in Punch, as both a Highlander and "The McGladstone"..

Religion

His mother, intensely religious, was an evangelical of Scottish Episcopal origins, and his father joined the Church of England, having been a Presbyterian when he first settled in Liverpool. The boy was baptized into the Church of England. He had previously experienced and ignored, from motives of worldly ambition, a call to enter the Church and become an Anglican priest, and his conscience tormented him for the rest of his life. He made amends by attempting to force his political career into conformity with the pietistic religion in which he fervently believed. In 1838 Gladstone nearly wrecked his career when he tried to force a religious mission upon the Conservative Party. He published a book which argued that the State had neglected its duty to the Church of England; and he coolly suggested that, as that Church possessed a monopoly of religious truth, Nonconformists and Roman Catholics ought to be excluded from all official employments. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and other critics tore his arguments to shreds, and Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone's chief, was outraged. Peel was greatly attached, however, to his high-minded and extraordinarily good-looking young protégé, and he succeeded in diverting Gladstone's attention from theology to finance.

Gladstone altered his approach to religious problems, which always held first place in his mind. Before entering Parliament he had already substituted a High Church Anglican attitude, with its dependence upon authority and tradition, for the narrow evangelical outlook of his boyhood, with its reliance upon the direct inspiration of the Bible. Now in middle life he decided that the individual conscience would have to replace authority as the inner citadel of the Church. That view of the individual conscience affected his political outlook and changed him gradually from a Conservative into a Liberal.

Gladstone was a devout Christian throughout his life; religion had a profound impact on his political actions. In his early career he was intent on maintaining relations between Church and State, although he later realised that this was too idealistic and advocated 'greater autonomy' for the Anglican Church and toleration of other faiths and denominations.

Gladstone insited on a high moral purpose in his politics, and was generally true to this commitment. This may explain his later conversion to more radical politics; campaigning for social justice and welfare for those less fortunate as a moral responsibility. It is also shown in his mission to 'pacify Ireland' in 1868, and his denunciation of the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire on Bulgarian Christians in the late 1870s.

Gladstone's evangelical stance often attracted criticism from his opponents and alienated sections of his own party. Luckily for Gladstone however, his moral crusades were generally supported by an enthusiastic political public.

Another aspect of Gladstone’s religious mission was his work in rescuing prostitutes from the streets. He would aim to find them alternative employment and rehabilitate them back into mainstream society. His work was seen as controversial and criticised by many, but he continued this practice with the full support of his wife even when he was Prime Minister.

Parliament

Gladstone lost his parliamentary seat in 1845 because of his free trade views but in 1847 was elected to represent the University of Oxford. He left the Tory Party along with Sir Robert Peel in 1846, and during the next few years he moved slowly in the direction of liberalism. In 1852 he brought about the fall of the ministry of Lord Derby by his unpremeditated but brilliant attack on the budgets of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli.

Gladstone served as President of the Board of Trade (1843-44) during the second ministry of Robert Peel. He resigned in 1845 over the Maynooth Grant issue, but returned in December as Colonial Secretary. Peel’s government fell in 1846, and Gladstone followed his leader in separation from the Conservative Party. After Peel’s death in 1850, Gladstone became leader of this ‘Peelite’ faction in the House of Commons.

In 1852 Gladstone became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Aberdeen's ministry (1852-55). The government resigned in 1855 over the Crimean War and Gladstone spent the next four years in the political wilderness, refusing to join Derby’s Conservative Ministry on the grounds that he did not want to work with Benjamin Disraeli.

Finance

Gladstone became Chancellor of the Exchequer again in Lord Palmerston's ministry (1859-66), when he became one of the leaders of the newly renamed Liberal Party. He cut the income tax on the rich from 5% to 2%. His modest parliamentary reform bill was defeated in 1866, but his speeches did much to mold Disraeli's Reform Bill of 1867. His reputation is outstanding as a highly effective Chancellor who raised the visibility and power of the position.

Gladstone took readily to finance and achieved his greatest success in that field. He promoted balancing the budget, limiting public expenditure, and paying off national debt. His rhetoric of fiscal responsibility helped to unify the Liberal Party and differed significantly from the Conservatives in advocating fiscal simplicity, reduced government size, and direct taxation. When he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1853 he made that office, for the first time, the second most important in the government. He inaugurated an era of unexampled prosperity by applying the creed of laissez-faire to the nation's economic problems and by setting individuals free from a multitude of crippling and obsolete fiscal restrictions. His annual budget statements were eagerly awaited, and the crowning moments of the first phase of his career were the great budgets of 1853 and 1860. He popularized finance and moralized it, arguing that self-discipline in freedom is the essential condition of human strength and happiness.

Conservative to Liberal

In an historic move, Gladstone joined Palmerston’s new Liberal government in 1859 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this post, Gladstone was steadily able to reduce income tax during his time in office. He had originally opposed further electoral reform, but by 1865, was in favour of extending the franchise to the working classes in the towns.

Liberal Leader

Palmerston died in 1865 and was replaced by John Russell, who in turn retired in 1867. Gladstone became leader of the Liberal Party. The Liberals won the 1868 general election and Gladstone became Prime Minister, in a government described as ‘the greatest of the 19th century’. A number of important reforms were passed, such as the disestablishment of the unpopular Church of Ireland in 1869, the Forster Education Act of 1870, which provided free primary education for all, and the 1872 Ballot Act, which ensured a secret ballot in all future elections.

However, not all of the new legislation was popular with the voting public. Gladstone was defeated in the 1874 general election by his Conservative counterpart Benjamin Disraeli, and soon after resigned as Liberal leader. However, Disraeli’s aggressive foreign policy (particularly in the Middle East) spurred Gladstone back into frontline politics as he launched an extensive campaign against the Conservative government, (known as the ‘Midlothian Campaign’) in 1879 and 1880.

Later Years

The Liberal Party won the 1880 general election and Gladstone resumed his position as Prime Minister. He set about disengaging Britain from a series of colonial wars and passed the 1884 Reform Act, which further extended the franchise. However, this government was to become known as the ‘Ministry of Troubles’, with problems both at home and abroad. He was forced to resign in 1885 after the death of General Gordon in Khartoum, for which Gladstone was held indirectly responsible.

In 1886, Gladstone was able to defeat Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government through an alliance with Irish Nationalists and introduced his Home Rule Bill for Ireland. The issue split the Liberal Party and the Bill was defeated at the second reading. The government then lost the 1886 general election to be replaced by Lord Salisbury’s Conservative Ministry.

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.

Democracy

In May 1864, Gladstone transformed overnight his standing in the country by declaring in the House of Commons that every man is entitled to a vote who is not disqualified by considerations of personal unfitness. That plea for something like universal suffrage infuriated his chief, the Liberal Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, and cost Gladstone, to his abiding grief, the parliamentary representation of Oxford University. The great world denounced him as an unscrupulous demagogue, but he won wide popular support.

Gladstone was no demagogue; he had convinced himself that the masses who hung upon his words were less exposed than the upper and middle classes to motives of material self-interest; and he started to appeal to the masses accordingly as the highest tribunal. He held that they were entitled to be enfranchised, not because he regarded the franchise as an abstract natural right, but because the respectable way of life of the artisan class proved that it had earned the right to vote and govern as a result of having subjected itself to a rigorous preliminary process of moral self-enfranchisement, through moral self-improvement. He won the confidence of the artisans by appealing not to their self-interest but to their self-respect, and he thereby completed in the political field the work of spiritual emancipation that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had begun a century before. Despite his subsequent disillusionment with the masses, Gladstone always ridiculed the blindness and selfishness of the the upper ten thousand and the House of Lords.

The British working class, however, misunderstood Gladstone. They, too, became disillusioned when he failed to become a champion of their material aspirations, to which he never gave a thought. He was committed to laissez-faire. He preferred to rely on private charity; he gave away during his lifetime the greater part of his private fortune and begged others to do the same.

Gladstone's belief that God's purpose could best be divined by consulting the uncorrupted minds and hearts of the masses was the secret of his ascendancy as well as the intense distrust which he inspired. He derived great strength from the working class and it derived great strength from him, so that each for a time became necessary to the other; the strong Christian temper of British popular democracy was the result.

When he became prime minister in 1868 he held that his principal task was to discover a series of high moral missions. He had great moral authority when he tried to rescue the Balkans from Ottoman misrule, and Ireland from British misrule. He set those missions before the nation in the confident belief that every individual would respond to the voice of God appealing to his conscience — but he did not invariably distinguish quite clearly enough between the voice of the prime minister and that of God.

Principles

• Gladstone believed in the ‘laissez-faire’ philosophy that good government does not interfere much in the affairs of individuals. His thrifty personal habits were reflected in his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He saw excess government expenditure as ‘a great moral evil’.

• He was opposed to war and despised the cost of military activity, reminding parliament that he ‘uniformly opposed militarism’ throughout his career.

• Was a firm supporter of free trade--with no tariffs on imports into Britain--believing that international peace and domestic prosperity could best be maintained by removing barriers to reciprocal trade between nations.

• Believed that success was the result of hard work and that failure showed a lack of moral spirit. He therefore believed that the poor should help themselves to alleviate their own condition.

• A strong supporter of the British monarchy, despite Queen Victoria’s dislike of him. She never liked his serious demeanour, and complained: "He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting."

• Described himself as a ‘man in politics’ rather than a politician. He only wanted to do useful work for the good of the country and could never understand his popularity.

Gladstone on the American affairs

Originally, Gladstone had held a strong prejudice against Americans, calling them ‘a dishonest, unprincipled people’ in 1844. He was especially critical of the money-grabbing Northern Yankee tradesmen and farmers, and shared the prejudiced view of the English upper-class that the Southern planters, with their cultivated drawl, were the closest thing America had to gentlemen.

However, he did not believe that a permanent division of the American Union would be in Britain’s best interests, and the violence of the Civil War sickened him. He believed that the North would never be able to restore the Union by force, and was prepared to offer diplomatic recognition to the Southern Confederacy if they prevailed.

In October 1862, Gladstone caused controversy by uttering the words: “There is no doubt that Jefferson Davis, and other leaders of the South have made an army. They are making, it appears, a Navy. And they have made – what is more than either – they have made a Nation.”

Gladstone shocked his Liberal colleagues by appearing to support the Southern Confederacy. John Bright commented: 'He is for union and freedom in Italy, and for disunion and bondage in America!' Gladstone detested slavery, but saw no point in denouncing it when he believed the anti-slavery cause was lost.

His unguarded comment caused some harm to Anglo-American relations for many years, but the unexpected victory of the Northern States had an important effect on Gladstone’s outlook. His prejudice slowly disappeared, and eventually came to regard American democracy as one of humanity’s supreme achievements. He later described the American Constitution as: 'the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.'

see also

• British Liberal Party

Biographies

• John Morley, The Life of Gladstone (1903)
• D.W. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone
• Eric Brad, William Gladstone
• Osbert Burdett, W. E. Gladstone (1928)
• F. Birrell, Gladstone (1933)
• E. Eyck, Gladstone (1938)
• Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (1954)
• E.G. Collieu, Gladstone (1968)
• H.C. Matthew, Gladstone: 1809-98 (1995)
• Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (1995) (ISBN 0-333-66209-1)