William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), A Scot who was great Liberal prime minister of Britain's golden age of parliamentary government, opposed by his great rival the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli/

Early Career to 1868

He was born on Dec. 29, 1809, at Liverpool, and was of pure Scottish descent. He was little influenced by his invalid mother but worshipped his father, Sir John Gladstone, who rose from a humble origin to be Liverpool's foremost citizen after making a huge fortune out of commerce during the Napoleonic wars. William, the youngest of four sons, went to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and entered Parliament at the age of 22 as an extreme Tory from a "rotten borough."

Gladstone's maiden speech as a young Tory was a defense of the rights of West Indian slave-owners, among whom his father was notorious. 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 personal religion in which he believed until the end of his life with the pure faith of a child.

Religious position

In 1838 Gladstone nearly wrecked that career through trying to force a religious mission upon the Conservative Party which had given him minor office. 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 most profoundly shocked. 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.

Finance

Gladstone took readily to finance and achieved his greatest success in that field. 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 as Macaulay had popularized history, and he convinced himself as he did so that self-discipline in freedom is the essential condition of human strength and happiness.

That experience caused Gladstone to alter for the second time 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.

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 the almost idolatrous love of the masses.

Gladstone was no demagogue; he had convinced himself, ingenuously, 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 on earth of Christian ethics. 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 that huge class by appealing not to its self-interest but to its self-respect, and he thereby completed in the political field the work of spiritual emancipation which John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had begun during the previous century. Despite his subsequent disillusionment with the masses Gladstone continued, as he grew older, to pour an increasing volume of scorn upon what he termed the blindness and selfishness of the West End of London, the upper ten thousand, and the House of Lords.

It has to be admitted that the masses understood Gladstone no better than he understood them. They, too, became disillusioned because they had imagined that he would be an effective champion of their material aspirations, to which he never gave a thought. He was horrified by the bare suggestion that the State might intervene to relieve human suffering and want, because any action of that kind would have run counter to his darling creed of laissez faire. He preferred to rely on private charity, and he gave away during his lifetime the greater part of his private fortune and begged others, vainly, 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; and the strong Christian temper of British popular democracy was the fruit of their marriage of convenience.

When he became prime minister in 1868 for the first time, Gladstone resented any suggestion that his main duty was to reconcile conflicting interests. He considered, on the contrary, that his principal task was to discover a series of high moral missions, and the most resounding were his missions to rescue the Balkans from Turkish, 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.

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 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). In the latter government his modest parliamentary reform bill was defeated in 1866, but his speeches did much to mold Disraeli's Reform Bill of 1867.

Prime Minister 1868-1874

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.

In 1868 Gladstone appointed Robert Lowe (1811-92) chancellor, despite Lowe's nasty attacks on Gladstone's own chancellorships, because he thought Lowe could hold down public spending. Public spending rose, and Gladstone pronounced Lowe "wretchedly deficient," a view that posterity has not challenged. Lowe was, however, a better Gladstonian than Gladstone himself. Lowe also stood out for his systematic underestimation of the revenue, enabling him to resist the clamor for tax cuts and to reduce the national debt instead, and for his insistence that the tax system be fair to all classes, which was more intense and protracted than that of any other chancellor of the age. By his own criterion of fairness - that the balance between direct and indirect taxation remain unchanged - he succeeded. This balance had never been a good measure of class incidence and was by that time thoroughly archaic.

Defeat 1874 and Return 1876

Defeated by the Conservatives at the general election of 1874, Gladstone retired in disgust from public life. He planned to devote the whole of his time, instead of his leisure as theretofore, to the task of defending Christian dogma from scientific onslaught; but he emerged from retirement late in 1876 when he thought that he heard a call from God to aid the Serbians and Bulgarians who had risen in revolt against the Turks. He then greatly embarrassed the leadership of the Liberal Party by stumping the country like some ancient Hebrew prophet and by calling attention to the transcendental issues involved in all cases of tyranny and oppression. The crowning moment of that second phase of Gladstone's career was his Midlothian campaign in November and December 1879. In that astonishing fortnight of mass appeals to vast audiences against Disraeli's pro-Turkish foreign policy, Gladstone made himself a moral force in Europe, and was carried back to power against his innermost wish, as he was often almost half-inclined to believe, by the spirit of a nation which had never before been summoned from its depths by a call so heartfelt and so clear.

Later terms 1880-1885, 1886, 1892-1894

With the Liberals defeat in the elections of 1874, 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. Gladstone was in office again for part of 1886 and his fourth ministry was from 1892 to 1894. The whole of the latter part of his parliamentary career was devoted to an abortive attempt to secure home rule for Ireland.

Laissez-faire policy

During his second term as prime minister Gladstone was confronted with a worsening agricultural and trade depression, to which his policy of laissez faire provided no answer. Cheap foodstuffs imported from America were ruining British farmers; tariff barriers rising throughout the world were restricting British exports and causing unemployment and unrest; and a formidable growth of European armaments was menacing British security. That challenge stimulated two mass movements of British opinion, and demands arose for a policy of social reform at home and for a vigorous imperialist policy overseas. Gladstone averted his head in disgust from both demands. 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 Disraeli, the Conservative leader, was his belief that his rival was deliberately corrupting the minds of the masses upon whose disinterestedness Gladstone had relied. Gladstone incurred bitter unpopularity after his failure to rescue General Gordon, whose forces were overwhelmed by Sudanese rebels against Egyptian suzerainty and who was killed by them at Khartoum. As the masses ceased even to appear disinterested, Gladstone was visited by moods of black depression. At such times he spoke with an engaging but unguarded simplicity about his personal wish to retire and his public duty to remain at his post in order to execute the will of God; he was regarded in consequence by most of his enemies, and even by some of his friends, as a humbug. The most outstanding example of his lack of sophistication was his sudden espousal of the cause of Ireland.

The Irish question

As early as 1854 Gladstone told his wife that Ireland alone held him chained to politics; but for almost a quarter of a century after 1845 he hardly allowed his mind to dwell again upon Ireland for a moment. He plumed himself openly upon his instinct for "right-timing" and waited accordingly until 1868, when the fortunes of the Liberal Party were at a low ebb and a drastic means of restoring them was badly needed, before pulling Ireland suddenly out of the hat like a conjurer. Thereafter, for a quarter of a century, the Irish problem transformed the pattern of politics in Great Britain. Gladstone's enemies naturally equated his gift for right-timing with opportunism and greed for office; but his closest friends were nearest to the truth when they said that no one of such great simplicity had been seen before in so exalted a position.

Once he had taken up the Irish cause Gladstone announced that he was prepared if necessary to incur martyrdom on its behalf for his party as well as for himself; but his followers were not the stuff of which martyrs are made. 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. In that cause he conducted a campaign which was the product of the irrestrainable energy of one daemonic individual and which made Gladstone the greatest spokesman of 19th-century liberalism.

In directing his campaign, Gladstone made insufficient allowance for the sentiments of Protestant Ulster in the north of Ireland and for the unwillingness of the British ruling class, at the zenith of its wealth and pride, to make far-reaching concessions to murder and agrarian crime. The right wing of his party was outraged at being ordered by its leader to start to dismember the heart of the British Empire; and the left wing was equally outraged at seeing all its aspirations for social reform ruthlessly sacrificed because Gladstone, who strongly disapproved anyway, declined absolutely to concentrate upon more than one subject at a time. This last phase of Gladstone's career generated such heat that the country was plunged into an enervating ferment of excitement. But the Liberal Party was so completely dominated by his personality that his leadership remained unshaken after the right wing, calling themselves Liberal Unionists, peeled off in order to join the Conservatives in opposing Home Rule, and after the radicals resigned from the government in protest against Gladstone's refusal to countenance a modest measure of social reform. Nevertheless, the Liberal Party's future was prejudiced by its leader's intransigence. Many people felt that an ability to compromise and to act as the prudent chairman of a board would have been a more valuable quality in a prime minister than any species of transcendental mission.

Retirement and personality

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 died at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire 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.

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 marvellously 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.

In the office of prime minister, which he held four times and for more than 13 years, Gladstone's achievement was splendid, but lesser individuals have been better fitted temperamentally for that office. He was too intent upon ideas to pay sufficient attention to persons, and upon great ends to take sufficient care of irksome means. He forgot, for example, the woman in the self-willed and partial queen whom he served so loyally and well, and he never bothered to conciliate the small fry among his followers in the House of Commons.

In the last analysis, however, what Gladstone was is of vastly greater significance than what he did. If by ignoring human weaknesses he allowed the best cause to become the enemy of the good, he did more by his example than any political leader in modern times to give effect, in his private and public life, to the spirit of the Gospel message. In its service he started as the foe, became the agent, and ended as the prophet of the liberal experiment.

Gladstone and Disraeli

Biographers have often exaggerated the political and especially the personal antagonism between the two men. In the 1830's they were both Tory members of Parliament with similar views, and they did not clash directly over fiscal policy until 1852. Gladstone mistrusted Disraeli and questioned his motives but greatly admired his oratory and literary skill. Disraeli appreciated Gladstone's talents and in the 1850's tried to persuade him to rejoin the Conservatives. As rival party leaders in the 1860's and early 1870's, they frequently clashed in the Commons, but they also praised each other and had cordial contacts outside Parliament. Their political relations deteriorated in the later 1870's, which led to some mutual ill-feeling, but it was only briefly expressed in public. They continued to be fascinated by each other until they died. Gladstone was shocked by Disraeli's death and denied that there had been any personal hatred between them. The two men misunderstood but genuinely admired each other.

Bibliography

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