Background

William Ewart Gladstone was born on December 29, 1809 in Liverpool, England. His father, Sir John Gladstone, was descended from the Gledstanes of Lanarkshire; he had moved to Liverpool and become a wealthy merchant. He was little influenced by his invalid mother.

Education

William Gladstone was educated from 1816 to 1821 at a preparatory school at the vicarage of St Thomas's Church at Seaforth, close to his family's residence, Seaforth House.

In 1821 William followed in the footsteps of his older brothers and attended Eton College before matriculating in 1828 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Classics and Mathematics, although he had no great interest in mathematics. In December 1831 he achieved the double first-class degree he had long desired.

Career

Gladstone began his parliamentary career as a Tory member. His maiden speech in June 1833 was a defense of West Indian slave owners with examples drawn from his father's plantations. Peel made Gladstone vice president of the Board of Trade, and Gladstone’s application astonished even hardworking colleagues.

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.

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 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.

He headed his first administration from 1868 to 1874. Among the legislation passed were the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland; the Irish Land Act of 1870, which gave some security to Irish tenant farmers; the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which provided England with an adequate system of elementary schools for the first time and required attendance; the abolition of the purchase of commissions in the army, and of religious tests for admission to Oxford and Cambridge; the introduction of the secret ballot in elections; the legalization of trade unions; and the reorganization of the judiciary in the Judicature Act. The Liberals were defeated in the elections of 1874, and in 1875 Gladstone relinquished leadership of the Liberal Party.

He returned as prime minister in 1880, and his government lasted until 1885.

Legislation passed included the Land Act of 1881 for Ireland, and the third parliamentary Reform Act of 1884. His foreign policy, which was one of avoidance of entanglements, lacked consistency and distinction.

The third and final phase of his career was devoted to the Irish question; the culminating moments were the rejection of his Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893.

This last phase of Gladstone's career generated such heat that the country was plunged into an enervating ferment of excitement. Nevertheless, the Liberal Party's future was prejudiced by its leader's intransigence.

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.

Achievements

• Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister; he resigned for the final time when he was 84 years old and he served as Prime Minister four separate times more than any other person.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Studies On Homer and the Homeric Age, Volume 1

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Odes of Horace

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • On Books and the Housing of Them

Religion

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, who was a Presbyterian when he first settled in Liverpool.

Gladstone's strong religious sense was an integral part of his political and social policies.

He had 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.

His book "The State in its Relations" with the Church argued that England had neglected its great duty to the Church of England. He announced that since that church possessed a monopoly of religious truth, nonconformists and Roman Catholics ought to be excluded from all government positions.

Politics

Gladstone was a member of the following political parties throughout his life: Tory (1828–34), Conservative (1834–46), Peelite (1846–59), Liberal (1859–98).

Gladstone served as President of the Oxford Union, where he developed a reputation as an orator, which followed him into the House of Commons. At university Gladstone was a Tory and denounced Whig proposals for parliamentary reform.

Gladstone began his parliamentary career as a Tory member. His maiden speech in June 1833 was a defense of West Indian slave owners with examples drawn from his father's plantations. Peel made Gladstone vice president of the Board of Trade, and Gladstone’s application astonished even hardworking colleagues.

He had seceded from 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 was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Aberdeen's ministry and again in Lord Palmerston's ministry, when he became one of the leaders of the newly renamed Liberal Party (formerly the Whigs).

He held that the national character and prosperity would both be destroyed if the state were to undertake to do work which individuals had a duty to do for themselves; and he held that a race between the Great Powers toward war or bankruptcy would quickly get out of hand if Great Britain were to condescend to rearm, or if she were to seek to expand her overseas empire in compensation for her increasing relative weakness in Europe. The policy of the Conservative Party was adjusted to meet those new currents of opinion, and the root cause of Gladstone's hatred of Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader, was his belief that his rival was deliberately corrupting the minds of the masses upon whose disinterestedness Gladstone had relied.

Views

The condition of the poor demanded special attention; labour should receive adequate remuneration; and he thought favourably of the "allotment of cottage grounds." He regarded slavery as sanctioned by Holy Scripture, but the slaves ought to be educated and gradually emancipated. The owners of emancipated slaves were entitled to receive compensation from parliament, because it was parliament that had established this description of property. "By the legislature it is granted, and by the legislature it is destroyed."

His ambition had nothing in common with the vulgar eagerness for place and pay and social standing. Rather it was a resolute determination to possess that control over the machine of state which should enable him to fulfil without let or hindrance the political mission with which he believed that Providence had charged him. His love of power was supported by a splendid fearlessness. No dangers were too threatening for him to face, no obstacles too formidable, no tasks too laborious, no heights too steep. The love of power and the supporting courage were allied with a marked imperiousness.

But the imperiousness showed itself in the more effectual form of action; in his sudden resolves, his invincible insistence, his recklessness of consequences to himself and his friends, his habitual assumption that the civilized world and all its units must agree with him, his indignant astonishment at the bare thought of dissent or resistance, his incapacity to believe that an overruling Providence would permit him to be frustrated or defeated.

But so absolute was his lifelong self-mastery that he was hardly ever betrayed into saying that which, on cooler reflection, needed to be recalled.

It was easy enough to see the " vulnerable temper " as it worked within, but it was never suffered to find audible expression.

His natural bias was to respect things as they were.

In his eyes, institutions, customs, systems, so long as they had not become actively mischievous, were good because they were old.

His whole life was spent in unlearning the prejudices in which he was educated.

His love of freedom steadily developed, and he applied its principles more and more courageously to the problems of government.

Quotations: "My political or public life is the best part of my life: it is that part in which I am conscious of the greatest effort to do and avoid as the Lord Christ would have me do and avoid. "

Gladstone wrote:

"With reference to rumours which I believe were at one time afloat, though I know not with what degree of currency: and also with reference to the times when I shall not be here to answer for myself, I desire to record my solemn declaration and assurance, as in the sight of God and before His Judgement Seat, that at no period of my life have I been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed."

Personality

Gladstone 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. Gladstone, who enjoyed superb health, was a beautifully proportioned man and a most impressive figure even in extreme old age.

After a careful survey of Mr Gladstone's life, it is inevitable to attempt some analysis Character character. First among his moral attributesmust be placed his religiousness. A second characteristic, scarcely less prominent than the first, was his love of power.

Physical Characteristics: In his prime Gladstone was just six feet high, but his inches diminished as his years increased, and in old age the unusual size of his head and breadth of his shoulders gave him a slightly top-heavy appearance.

His features were strongly marked; the nose trenchant and hawk-like, and the mouth severely lined.

His flashing eyes were deep-set, and in colour resembled the onyx with its double band of brown and grey.

His complexion was of an extreme pallor, and, combined with his jet-black hair, gave in earlier life something of an Italian aspect to his face.

Since his retirement from office Gladstone's physical vigour, up to that time unequalled, had shown signs of impairment. Towards the end of the summer of 1897 he began to suffer from an acute pain, which was attributed to facial neuralgia, and in November he went to Cannes.

Quotes from others about the person

• George Holyoake recalled in 1865:
  
  "When Mr Gladstone visited the North, you well remember when word passed from the newspaper to the workman that it circulated through mines and mills, factories and workshops, and they came out to greet the only British minister who ever gave the English people a right because it was just they should have it ... and when he went down the Tyne, all the country heard how twenty miles of banks were lined with people who came to greet him. Men stood in the blaze of chimneys; the roofs of factories were crowded; colliers came up from the mines; women held up their children on the banks that it might be said in after life that they had seen the Chancellor of the People go by. The river was covered like the land. Every man who could ply an oar pulled up to give Mr Gladstone a cheer. When Lord Palmerston went to Bradford the streets were still, and working men imposed silence upon themselves. When Mr Gladstone appeared on the Tyne he heard cheer no other English minister ever heard ... the people were grateful to him, and rough pitmen who never approached a public man before, pressed round his carriage by thousands ... and thousands of arms were stretched out at once, to shake hands with Mr Gladstone as one of themselves."
  
  Historian Walter L. Arnstein concludes:
  
  "Notable as the Gladstonian reforms had been, they had almost all remained within the nineteenth-century Liberal tradition of gradually removing the religious, economic, and political barriers that prevented men of varied creeds and classes from exercising their individual talents in order to improve themselves and their society. As the third quarter of the century drew to a close, the essential bastions of Victorianism still held firm: respectability; a government of aristocrats and gentlemen now influenced not only by middle-class merchants and manufacturers but also by industrious working people; a prosperity that seemed to rest largely on the tenets of laissez-faire economics; and a Britannia that ruled the waves and many a dominion beyond."

Connections

Gladstone married Catherine Glynne in 1835, to whom he remained married until his death 59 years later. They had eight children together. 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.

Father:

John Gladstone

1st Baronet, FRSE, Scottish merchant, philanthropist, Member of Parliament. Born in Leith, in Midlothian, John Gladstones was the eldest son of Thomas Gladstones (1732–1809) and Helen Neilson (1739–1806). John was the second of the family's sixteen children.

Mother:

Ann Robertson Gladstone

Wife:

Catherine Glynne Gladstone

1812–1900

Sister:

Ann MacKenzie Gladstone

1802–1829

Brother:

Thomas Gladstone

2nd Baronet, a Tory (later Conservative) politician in the United Kingdom.

Brother:

John Neilson Gladstone

1807–1863

Sister:

Helen Jane Gladstone

1814–1880, Roman Catholic convert. She was the second daughter, and youngest of the six children, of Sir John Gladstone, first baronet (1764-1851), and his second wife, Anne, nee Robertson (1771/2-1835). William Gladstone, the future prime minister, was the next youngest child.

Son:

William Henry Gladstone

1840–1891

Daughter:

Helen Gladstone

1849–1925

Son:

Henry Neville Gladstone

1852–1935

Son:

Herbert John Gladstone GLADSTONE

First Governor-General of South Africa from May 1910 until September 1914.

Gladstone previously served as Home Secretary (1905-1910). He recieved the title Viscount Gladstone in 1910.

Friend:

James Hope

The Tracts for the Times were saturating England with new influences. Its influence had reached him through his friendships, notably with two Fellows of Merton-Mr James Hope, who became Mr. Hope-Scott of Abbotsford, and the Rev. H. E. Manning, afterwards cardinal archbishop.

Friend:

Henry Edward Manning

Henry Edward Manning (15 July 1808 – 14 January 1892) was an English Cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, and the second Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 until his death in 1892.

References

• The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli
• William Ewart Gladstone
• William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Library of Religious Biography Series)
• Gladstone
• William Ewart Gladstone - Life and Public Services: With pleasant recollections of happy service in the ranks of the great leader
• The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (Vol 2 of 3)
• Correspondence On Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, Volume 1
• The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859