It may surprise some that a figure so imbued with the
English establishment ethos and with High Anglicanism should be claimed as a
Scot, but in fact the great Mr Gladstone was a pure-bred Scot. His father Sir
John Gladstone was born and raised in Leith, the port of Edinburgh, while his
mother Anne McKenzie Robertson was the daughter of a solicitor and erstwhile
Provost of Dingwall in Ross-shire. Mr Gladstone’s Scots ancestry may partly
account for his principled mind-set and strong work ethic, but perhaps also for
his religiosity and his suppressed sexual obsessions. Although his father lived
most of his life from 1787 and prospered as a Liverpool merchant, John Gladstone
retained a family seat, Fasque House in Kincardineshire, bought in 1829 and dying
there in 1851.
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| Fasque House in Kincardineshire |
William Ewart
Gladstone, (1809-1898) the most eminent of Victorian Prime Ministers, was
born in Liverpool, the 4th and youngest son of his parents, who had
also 2 daughters. His father, later Sir John Gladstone, 1st baronet,
had made a fortune in the corn, cotton and sugar trades and was a Canningite
Tory MP. W.E. was sent to Eton like his brothers and then he went up to Christ
Church, Oxford, where he won a double first in Classics and Mathematics. His
views were uncompromisingly Tory and he spoke against the Reform Bill. Entering
Parliament in 1832, he opposed the abolition of slavery and was famously
described by Macaulay as “The rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories”.
Gladstone was gradually to move from Right to Left, far across the political
spectrum.
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| W.E. Gladstone in the 1830s |
Gladstone also originally held extreme religious opinions
arguing in his 1838 The State and its
relations with the Church, that the State had a duty actively to support
the Church of England to the exclusion of Catholics and Non-Conformists. This divisive view was not taken
seriously by Peel or other Tories though it led to Gladstone’s brief
resignation from Peel’s 1841-46 ministry over the Maynooth grant to a Catholic
seminary in Ireland. Gladstone held cabinet office and was a loyal Peelite,
indeed a strong admirer of Peel, supporting the repeal of the Corn Laws, which
split the Tories in 1846. Gladstone became an apostle of free trade and
follower of the cheap food programme of Richard Cobden and John Bright together
with their championing of the aspirations of the working classes.
The Peelite Tories drifted over to the Whig party under
Russell and Palmerston with Gladstone becoming 3 times Chancellor of the
Exchequer. “Gladstonian” finance was one of the pillars of his fame, consisting
of a balanced budget, the reduction in indirect taxes, economy in government
and a determination to cover expenditure by adjusting the rate of income tax.
In 1860, he famously abolished paper duties (“taxes on knowledge”) and he
became a hero of the working class, credited with keeping down the cost of
food. By 1859 the Peelites, Whigs and Radicals merged into the Liberal Party
with Gladstone the heir apparent.
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| Gladstone in his 1861 prime |
After Disraeli stole the Liberals’ clothes by passing the
Second Reform Bill of 1867, Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first time
in 1868-74, leading one of the great modernising ministries. The Civil Service
and the Universities were opened to merit, the purchase of Army commissions was
abolished, a seminal Education Act was passed, election ballots became secret and
the local authority management of the Poor law was overhauled. Public
drunkenness was limited by new Licensing laws, upsetting the powerful brewing
interest and when the Liberals lost the 1874 election Gladstone complained that
he had been “borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”. Yet the achievements of
his first ministry had been immense.
At the beginning of this ministry, cutting wood as was his
hobby and pleasure at his wife’s family estate at Hawarden in Flintshire, North
Wales, he had made the oracular pronouncement “My mission is to pacify
Ireland”. This became a central prop (and blind alley) of his political life
from 1874 and one which he drove on with eloquent persistence. He disestablished
the episcopal Church of Ireland, initiated important land reforms and in time
embraced the fraught policy of Home Rule – fraught because it was likely to
split his party. His watchword remained “Retrenchment”, strict economy, small
government and no overseas adventures as the age of Imperialism dawned. Queen
Victoria was no admirer of Gladstone (“a half-mad firebrand”, she opined) and
was much gratified when his adversary Disraeli, had her proclaimed Empress of
India in 1877.
Gladstone soon showed his mettle by storming back to office
in 1880 after his “Whistle-stop” Midlothian Campaign of 1879 on the American
electoral model, exciting his audiences with his domestic programme but also by
his denunciations of the “Bulgarian Horrors”, the brutal Ottoman suppression of
Balkan insurrection. His Second Ministry was less successful: Ireland loomed
large with rural terrorism and the Phoenix Park murder of Lord Frederick
Cavendish, chief Secretary for Ireland in 1882.
Entanglement with the governing of bankrupt Egypt contradicted Liberal
principles and Gladstone’s government was blamed when odd-ball General Gordon
succumbed to the fanatical warriors of the Mahdi in Khartoum in 1885. The
suffrage was further extended to many rural inhabitants in the 1884 3rd
Reform Bill.
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| The Formidable Grand Old Man |
In a brief Third Ministry in 1886, Gladstone introduced his
first Irish Home Rule Bill. Gladstone pleaded for support in a 3-hour oration
but he failed by 30 votes to carry his Bill in the Commons. His Liberal Party
was split as feared with the Liberal Unionists led by Lord Hartington and by
Radical Joseph Chamberlain voting with the Tories. In his final undaunted
attempt and 4th ministry in 1892, aged 82, the Home Rule Bill passed
the Commons but was decisively blocked by the Lords, leaving one of history’s
great “What ifs?” Gladstone could have, but did not, put the conflict between
Commons and Lords to an electoral test in 1894.
The mere outline of Gladstone’s political life does him scant
justice. He had a mesmeric hold on the House of Commons and on many of his
colleagues. He believed he was God’s instrument to reform his nation and
improve the world. He was happily married for 59 years to almost aristocratic
Catherine Glynne but in a wildly indiscreet fashion he wandered the streets of
London from 1848 onwards seeking out and trying to help prostitutes (“fallen
women” in the jargon of the time) to change their lives. This may have been the
evangelical pull of doing good works but there may have been a prurient element
of getting close to the purveyors of forbidden pleasures. He could be a
sanctimonious brother too, chasing after his neglected sister Helen, an opium
addict, but much worse, a Catholic convert. He was not a bigot, being an
admirer of the poetry of Cardinal Newman.
Gladstone, by modern standards, was not well travelled but
he went on a European Grand Tour in his youth and later was appalled by the
poverty he saw on a visit to Naples. His profound classical scholarship was rewarded
by his becoming for 3 months in 1858-9 the Extraordinary British High
Commissioner to the Ionian Islands over which Britain had a Protectorate and he
seriously applied himself to the problems of Corfu. Happily by 1862 the Ionian
Islands were united to the Kingdom of Greece. He was a tremendous bibliophile,
supposedly having read 20,000 books in his time; he read Homer for pleasure –
“serve him right”, quipped unclassical Winston Churchill.
His ministries were epoch-defining as may also be said of those
of Attlee and of Thatcher. His emphasis on government economy, on self-help, laissez-faire and on small government
were echoed most recently by Margaret Thatcher, who is one of his residual
legatees. Gladstone was many-sided, complex and a thunderbolt-wielding Thor
dominating two generations of British political history: his Scottish
antecedents add lustre to his great name.
SMD
8.07.2014
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014.
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