William Ewart Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician, starting as Conservative MP for Newark and later becoming the leader of the Liberal Party.
In a career lasting more than 60 years, he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for 12 years, spread over four non-consecutive terms, beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, for more than 12 years. Gladstone was also Leader of the House of Commons. He was a Member of Parliament for 60 years, from 1832 to 1845 and from 1847 to 1895; during that time he represented a total of five constituencies.
Gladstone was born in Liverpool to Scottish parents. He first entered the House of Commons in 1832, beginning his political career as a High Tory, a grouping that became the Conservative Party under Robert Peel in 1834. Gladstone served as a minister in both of Peel's governments, and in 1846 joined the breakaway Peelite faction, which eventually merged into the new Liberal Party in 1859. He was chancellor under Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell. Gladstone's own political doctrine – which emphasised equality of opportunity and opposition to trade protectionism – came to be known as Gladstonian liberalism. His popularity among the working-class earned him the sobriquet "The People's William".
In 1868, Gladstone became prime minister for the first time. Many reforms were passed during his first ministry, including the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and the introduction of secret voting. After electoral defeat in 1874, Gladstone resigned as leader of the Liberal Party. From 1876 he began a comeback based on opposition to the Ottoman Empire's reaction to the Bulgarian April Uprising. His Midlothian Campaign of 1879–1880 was an early example of many modern political campaigning techniques. After the 1880 general election, Gladstone formed his second ministry, which saw the passage of the Third Reform Act as well as crises in Egypt and Ireland, where his government passed repressive measures but also improved the legal rights of Irish tenant farmers.
Back in office in early 1886, Gladstone proposed home rule for Ireland but was defeated in the House of Commons. The resulting split in the Liberal Party helped keep them out of office – with one short break – for 20 years. Gladstone formed his last government in 1892, at the age of 82. The Government of Ireland Bill 1893 passed through the Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords in 1893, after which Irish Home Rule became a lesser part of his party's agenda. Gladstone left office in March 1894, aged 84, as both the oldest person to serve as prime minister and the only prime minister to have served four non-consecutive terms. He left Parliament in 1895 and died three years later.
Gladstone was known affectionately by his supporters as "The People's William" or the "G.O.M.". Historians often rank Gladstone as one of the greatest prime ministers in British history.
Early life
William Ewart Gladstone was on 29 December 1809 at 62 Rodney Street in Liverpool, the fourth son of Sir John Gladstone, a wealthy Scottish merchant, slave owner, planter and Tory politician; and his second wife, Anne MacKenzie Robertson. He was named after a close friend of his father, William Ewart, another Liverpool merchant and the father of William Ewart, later a Liberal politician. In 1835, the family name was changed from Gladstones to Gladstone by royal licence. His father was made a baronet, of Fasque and Balfour, in 1846.Although born and raised in Liverpool, William Gladstone was of purely Scottish ancestry. His grandfather Thomas Gladstones was a prominent merchant from Leith, and his maternal grandfather, Andrew Robertson, was Provost of Dingwall and a Sheriff-Substitute of Ross-shire. His biographer John Morley described him as "a highlander in the custody of a lowlander", and an adversary as "an ardent Italian in the custody of a Scotsman". One of his earliest childhood memories was being made to stand on a table and say "Ladies and gentlemen" to the assembled audience, probably at a gathering to promote the election of George Canning as MP for Liverpool in 1812. In 1814, young "Willy" visited Scotland for the first time, as he and his brother John travelled with their father to Edinburgh, Biggar and Dingwall to visit their relatives. Willy and his brother were both made freemen of the burgh of Dingwall. In 1815, Gladstone also travelled to London and Cambridge for the first time with his parents. While in London, he attended a service of thanksgiving with his family at St Paul's Cathedral following the Battle of Waterloo, where he saw the Prince Regent.
William Gladstone was educated from 1816 to 1821 at a preparatory school at the vicarage of St. Thomas' Church at Seaforth, close to his family's residence, Seaforth House. In 1821, William followed in the footsteps of his elder 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 the latter subject. In December 1831, he achieved the double first-class degree he had long desired. 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 in a famous debate at the Oxford Union in May 1831. On the second day of the three-day debate on the Whig Reform Bill Gladstone moved the motion:
That the Ministry has unwisely introduced, and most unscrupulously forwarded, a measure which threatens not only to change the form of our Government, but ultimately to break up the very foundations of social order, as well as materially to forward the views of those who are pursuing the project throughout the civilised world.
Gladstone's 45-minute speech made a great impression on those present and his Amendment carried 94 votes to 38. Among those impressed was Lord Lincoln, who told his father the Duke of Newcastle about it, and it was through this recommendation that the Duke offered Gladstone the safe seat of Newark which he then controlled.
Following the success of his double first, William travelled with his brother John on a Grand Tour of western Europe.
Although Gladstone entered Lincoln's Inn in 1833, with intentions of becoming a barrister, by 1839 he had requested that his name should be removed from the list because he no longer intended to be called to the Bar.
In September 1842 he lost the forefinger of his left hand in an accident while reloading a gun. Thereafter he wore a glove or finger sheath.
House of Commons
First term
When Gladstone was 22 the Duke of Newcastle, a Conservative party activist, provided him with one of two seats at Newark where he controlled about a fourth of the very small electorate. The Duke spent thousands of pounds entertaining the voters. Gladstone displayed remarkably strong technique as a campaigner and stump speaker. He won his seat at the 1832 United Kingdom general election with 887 votes. After new bills to protect child workers were proposed following the publication of the Sadler report, he voted against the 1833 Factory Acts that would regulate the hours of work and welfare of minors employed in cotton mills.Opposition to the opium trade
Gladstone was an intense opponent of the opium trade. Referring to the opium trade between British India and Qing China, Gladstone described it as "infamous and atrocious". Gladstone emerged as a fierce critic of the Opium Wars, which Britain waged to re-legalise the British opium trade into China, which had been made illegal by the Chinese government. He publicly lambasted the wars as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgements of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840. A famous speech was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War. Gladstone criticised it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace". His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium upon his sister Helen. Before 1841, Gladstone was reluctant to join the Peel government because of the First Opium War, which Palmerston had brought on.Minister under Peel (1841–1846)
Gladstone was re-elected in 1841. In the second ministry of Robert Peel, he served as President of the Board of Trade.Gladstone was responsible for the Railway Regulation Act 1844, regarded by historians as the birth of the regulatory state, of network industry regulation, of rate of return regulation, and telegraph regulation. Examples of its foresight are the clauses empowering the government to take control of railways in times of war, the concept of Parliamentary trains, limited in cost to a penny a mile, of universal service, and of control of the recently invented electric telegraph which ran alongside railway lines. Railways were the largest investment in human history and this bill the most heavily lobbied in parliamentary history. Gladstone succeeded in guiding the Act through Parliament at the height of the railway bubble.
Gladstone became concerned with the situation of "coal whippers". These were the men who worked on London docks, "whipping" in baskets from ships to barges or wharves all incoming coal from the sea. They were called up and relieved through public houses, so a man could not get this job unless he had the favourable opinion of the publican, who looked most favourably upon those who drank. The man's name was written down and the "score" followed. Publicans issued employment solely on the capacity of the man to pay, and men were often drunk when they left the pub to work. They spent their savings on drinks to secure the favourable opinion of publicans and further employment.
Gladstone initiated the Coal Vendors Act 1843, which set up a central office for employment. When that act expired in 1856, a select committee was appointed by the Lords in 1857 to look into the question. Gladstone gave evidence to the committee, stating:
Looking back in 1883, Gladstone wrote that "In principle, perhaps my Coalwhippers Act of 1843 was the most Socialistic measure of the last half century".
He resigned in 1845 over the Maynooth Grant issue, which was a matter of conscience for him. To improve relations with the Catholic Church, Peel's government proposed increasing the annual grant paid to the Maynooth Seminary for training Catholic priests in Ireland. Gladstone, who had previously argued in a book that a Protestant country should not pay money to other churches, nevertheless supported the increase in the Maynooth grant and voted for it in Commons, but resigned rather than face charges that he had compromised his principles to remain in office. After accepting Gladstone's resignation, Peel confessed to a friend, "I really have great difficulty sometimes in exactly comprehending what he means". In December 1845, Gladstone returned to Peel's government as Colonial Secretary. The Dictionary of National Biography notes: "As such, he had to stand for re-election, but the strong protectionism of the Duke of Newcastle, his patron in Newark, meant that he could not stand there and no other seat was available. Throughout the corn law crisis of 1846, therefore, Gladstone was in the highly anomalous and possibly unique position of being a secretary of state without a seat in either house and thus unanswerable to parliament."