Gladstone

Michael Partridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134606375
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de historia

Gladstone is one of the most important political figures in modern British history. He held the office of Prime Minister four times during a turbulent and changing time in Britain's history.

Michael Partridge provides a new survey of Gladstone's life and career, placing him firmly in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, and covering both his intriguing private life and his public career. Surveying a broad range of source material, Partridge begins by looking at Gladstone's early life, education and entry to Parliament, before looking at his marriage and service with Peel. He goes on to look in detail at Gladstone's terms as prime minister concluding with his fourth ministry, when Gladstone, by now in his eighties, returned to power. He tried and failed to resolve the problems of Ireland, which had become his great obsession, for the last time and eventually retired from politics in 1894 and died a few years later.

1
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER, 1809–1834

On 29 December 1809, Mrs Anne Gladstone, of 62 Rodney Street, Liverpool, gave birth to her fourth son. He was christened William Ewart after a business associate of his father, John Gladstone. This was a wealthy household in a town in England that had taken its full share in the commercial expansion of the eighteenth century, in which John Gladstone had also taken an active part.

The port of Liverpool had grown rich on the slave trade. For many years in the eighteenth century Liverpool had been the leading port in this trade in Great Britain, but it was far from being the only one in which Liverpool merchants were engaged. Shoes and other clothing, sealing wax, paper and a wide variety of foodstuffs were sent to or received from colonies. Industry in and around Liverpool also prospered supplying goods to trade, sometimes in exchange for slaves, while contacts with the American colonies (and later with the United States of America) involved numerous goods and artefacts. By the time of the first census in 1801 the population of Liverpool had grown to 77,000, and the city was the fifth largest in the country, one well known for its enlightened policy on urban improvements.

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EARLY LIFE

William Ewart Gladstone’s father had emigrated from the lowlands of Scotland to Liverpool in 1787 and had spent the next ten years busily engaged in a variety of business ventures. John Gladstone had begun following in his father’s footsteps as a corn merchant, in partnership with another Scottish émigré, Edgar Corne, and from that base his interests widened. Other trading interests, in sugar and cotton, were coupled with ventures into shipping and insurance and, not least, into property. In 1803 he took a mortgage on an estate on the West Indian island of Demerara, which was run by slave labour. By 1799 his fortune stood at something approaching £40,000 (about £1.75 million in today’s money) and it continued to grow steadily, standing at around £200,000 (about £8.8 million) in 1815 and reaching a peak of nearly £600,000 (roughly £26.5 million) by the time of his death in December 1851. John Gladstone was therefore an extremely rich man, who could afford to send his sons to university and keep them as unpaid backbench MPs as long as necessary to establish their political careers.

John Gladstone was, by all accounts, a strong character. Young William certainly believed so. His father, he thought, was a very affectionate man, who was very devoted to his family as well as to his work, though even he had to admit that John Gladstone was somewhat shorttempered. John Gladstone’s ambition was not confined to the sphere of business. He entered into the social and the religious life of Liverpool and was responsible, with other emigrants, for establishing a Scottish Kirk in the city in 1799 and in 1815-16 paying for the construction of an Anglican church at Seaforth. This reflected the significant change in his religious opinion. Having been born into a family of Dissenters, it was at least partly due to the influence of both his wives, but especially of his second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1800, that by 1805 Gladstone senior had become a member of the Church of England.

This would have been both a religious and a social decision. As a member of the Church of England, John Gladstone could now enter fully into the social and – perhaps more importantly for him – the political life of the city. For he had one ambition in life even beyond making money: he wanted to be a Member of Parliament. It is not surprising that his political opinions tended to the right. As an almost selfmade man from outside the established elite, he found the doctrines of the Whigs, with their stress on status and birth, deeply unattractive. Equally unattractive, though, were the precepts of die-hard Toryism, the creed of unthinking opposition to change represented by those such as Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, prime minister from 1801 to 1804 and home secretary from 1812 to 1821. He sought, and eventually, found a political figure he could admire in George Canning, who, thanks in part to his backing and encouragement, came to Liverpool and began to sit as one the city’s two MPs from 1812. Canning, later renowned as one of the guiding lights of ‘Liberal Toryism’, foreign secretary and briefly prime minister, was a Tory who was prepared to contemplate necessary changes to keep the ship of state upright. His equally liberal companion as MP from 1822 was William Huskission, another forward-thinking Tory. Ideally, John Gladstone would have liked to be Canning’s partner, sitting with him for Liverpool in the House of Commons, but it was not to be. In 1818 he secured election to the unreformed House of Commons by bribing the electors of the rotten borough of Lancaster. This was one of those seats where the number of electors was so small, or where they were tenants of a particular landowner, that one individual effectively controlled who they voted for. As there was no secret ballot it would not be possible to hide who one voted for. The consequences of voting for the wrong candidate could be serious, including eviction, or they could be profitable since, as John Gladstone discovered, it was also possible to sell one’s vote. This, however, was too expensive for him, so he transferred two years later to the equally rotten seat at Woodstock, a ‘pocket borough’ in the pocket of the Duke of Marlborough: whoever the duke wanted would be returned to Parliament. He sat for this seat from 1820 to 1826, and then, briefly, for Berwick on Tweed from 1826 to 1827, when he was unseated on petition. But he made little impression in the House, consulting Canning on those commercial matters that came up for discussion. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that John Gladstone’s parliamentary career was a great disappointment to him. It is also quite likely that this influenced his views when young William wrote to seek parental guidance for a career. Perhaps Gladstone père could live politically through Gladstone fils.

John Gladstone was the undisputed head of his family. His influence on his children was profound, and not least his influence on young William. But there was another source of authority in the Gladstone household. He had married twice: his first wife, Jane Hall, had died childless in 1798; his second wife, Anne Robertson, lived until 1839. Anne Gladstone was the daughter of Provost Robertson of Dingwall, and she was not always a physically strong individual (this did not prevent her giving birth to six children). But what she lacked in physical strength was made up for in her extraordinary moral presence. Anne Gladstone took refuge from her declining health and the sometimes domineering presence of John Gladstone in religion. She was an evangelical, or low church, member of the Church of England. It was she who lay in large part behind John Gladstone’s decision in 1800 to marry in a Church of England service. But religion was much more important to Anne than a Sunday service at church. From her couch she inspired her offspring with her own strong religious views, and in this respect at least her husband let her have her way. His own religious opinions were shaped in accordance with his wife’s, and the result was that the Gladstone household in Rodney Street was a very religious one indeed.

His mother certainly had an influence on William Ewart, her fifth child. When she lay dying, William noted her last days in detail (as indeed he later did those of his daughter, Jessy, and his father) and summed up his feelings on her life:

She was not during her illness in a state of mental vigour to warrant its being proposed to her to receive the Sacrament. Though she was deprived of this joy, and we of this palpable manifestation of her faith, we cannot feel it a cause for permanent regret while we know that in her daily life she had realised that communion with her Lord, which the ordinance is intended to convey and assure.

Sin was the object of her hatred – and she can now sin no more. Sin is the cause of all the sorrow in the world; she can now no more add to the sin nor the sorrow … She was eminent in the discharge of every duty; she sorrowed for sin; she trusted in the atonement of Christ. But this was not all: these elementary sentiments of religion were matured in her by the power of God, and she was made partaker of the nature and very life of her Redeemer, and her will conformed to his.¹

By the time William was born his older sister Anne was seven years old, and his three brothers – Tom (born 1804), Robertson (born 1805) and John Neilson (born 1807) – were also senior to him. Only his sister Helen (born 1814) was younger than he was.

While his brothers were to have only relatively limited influence on William, his two sisters, in their different ways, were to be far more influential. To the young William it was his older sister, Anne, who had the most important role. Young Anne Gladstone was William’s godmother, a loyal member of the Church of England and well acquainted with some of that church’s teachers. She had a considerable influence on the young Gladstone, counteracting some of the more low church doctrines of his parents, and by dying at only twenty-seven in 1829, continued to exert a powerful influence on him in later years. His younger sister Helen, by becoming an opium addict and, perhaps even worse for Gladstone, a Roman Catholic in later years, was also influential on him, though more as a source of worry than of inspiration. As will be seen, his brothers, too, played their part in his later life, but all three have been somewhat overshadowed by their younger sibling.

Gladstone’s boyhood has been covered by all of his biographers, using his own recollections. From these we discover that he had a lively time as a boy, and that much of what he had to do was no different from that faced by other children over the years. His first public performance occurred in October 1812, election year in Liverpool. A group of dinner guests in the Gladstone house met the future prime minister who, at the age of two years, ‘was taken down to the dining room, dressed if I remember in a red frock. I was set on one of the chairs, standing, and directed to say to the company: “ladies and gentlemen”’.² He went to Edinburgh and Glasgow for an excursion to Sanquhar in Dumfries to visit the family’s roots at some time in the spring of 1814 and, a year later, he went to Cambridge and London for the first time.

In London, young Gladstone stayed with his uncle, Colin Robertson, and was upset because he was not allowed to roam the streets freely as he did when at home in Liverpool. He attended a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, presumably for the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, but neither the service nor the cathedral, which he did not visit again for over fifty years, seems to have made much of an impression on him. It was in this year that the Gladstones moved to a large country house overlooking the River Mersey, between Bootle and Crosby.

Gladstone’s own judgement of his childhood, when he looked back in his old age, was harsh:

I wish that in reviewing my childhood I could regard it as presenting those features of innocence and beauty which I have often seen elsewhere, and indeed, thanks be to God, within the limits of my own home. The best I can say for it is that I do not think it was a vicious childhood. I do not think, trying to look at the past impartially, that I had a strong natural propensity then developed to what are termed the mortal sins. But truth obliges me to record this against myself. I have no recollection of being a loving or a winning child; or an earnest or diligent or knowledge-loving child. God forgive me … The plank between me and all the sins was so very thin.³

And there were other problems: ‘I was not a devotional child. I have no recollection of love for the House of God and for divine service’. When he heard preaching at St. George’s, Liverpool, he confessed to being bored and remembered asking his mother when the speaker would finish. He admitted to liking Pilgrim’s Progress, but so he did Arabian Nights and particularly a book on Scottish chiefs. He prayed ‘earnestly’, at the age of seven or eight, but only ‘to be spared from the loss of a tooth’; to avoid ‘Dr. Perry of … Liverpool … a kind of savage at this work (possibly a very good-natured man too), with no ideas except to smash and crash’. He could not, he claimed, remember anything about his religious upbringing.⁴

To account for this unfortunate lack of religious scruples in his early age, Gladstone offered two possible factors: the first was simply that he had not taken things up very quickly, and the second was that he had drawn little benefit from teaching. None of his three older brothers had any direct influence upon him, nor did his teacher, a Mr Rawson from Cambridge. Rawson’s School ‘afterwards rose into considerable repute’ – but Gladstone attributed this ‘not so much due to its intellectual stamina as to the extreme salubrity of the situation on the pure dry sands of the Mersey’s mouth’. Gladstone remembered that

everything was unobjectionable. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no recollection of being under any moral or personal influence whatever, and I doubt whether the preaching had any adaptation whatever to children. As to intellectual training, I believe that, like the other boys, I shirked my work as much as I could.⁵

Gladstone, then, looked back at his childhood, which he believed ended when he was sent to Eton in 1821, somewhat censoriously, but this can possibly be taken too much at face value. The older Gladstone, it would appear, was being too harsh and expecting too much of his younger self. He seems to have been a fairly ordinary child, displaying no evidence of particular intelligence, strength of character, or religious faith. He thought he should have displayed exceptional piety and ability while a child, and this view seems to have been reflected in the upbringing of his own children. His eldest son, Willy, in particular, seems to have suffered for not displaying the characteristics his father believed should be evident in all children, but especially his own. Gladstone’s own parents, however, were proud of him, even at an early age, and were preparing for the next stage in his career.

ETON AND OXFORD

To confirm their arrival in the very highest circles of British society, something John Gladstone laboured to do through his attempts at parliamentary distinction, the Gladstone parents sent their boys to Eton. The school at this time had not received the attentions of the great public school reformers of the middle nineteenth century, like Thomas Arnold of Rugby. Its organisation and its curriculum both differed widely from those seen later. Here were found self-employed housemasters and private tutors, who taught pretty much what they liked when they wished, and Dames, the formidable women who oversaw the separate houses in which the pupils lived. A boy could hope to learn Latin, some Greek, and some modern language – French, almost certainly – from his teachers. But he would learn as much from his friends and common members of the Eton Society if he could secure election to it.

William Gladstone was not necessarily expecting a good time at Eton. There was no room at the school for ardent evangelicals, and his older brothers – Robertson, and especially Tom – had had a dreadful time there. Robertson had made his escape to Edinburgh to learn business: Tom had to stick it out. This helped William, who on entering the school became his fag. But William had some things that Tom rather lacked – a strong intelligence and a sturdy temperament. This mixture enabled him to survive almost unscathed the rough and tumble of school life and work his way, as intended, into the higher echelons of the school.

Some of the masters appreciated William Gladstone, just as he did them. His French master, Berthomier, for example, encouraged his lifelong interest in Molière. But it was Edward Hawtrey who, noticing William’s abilities, brought him to the attention of the school’s headmaster, Keate, and first gave him a positive desire and enthusiasm to learn. Keate himself, whose formidable reputation as a disciplinarian and a flogger seems fully deserved, appears usually to have appreciated and been appreciated by William, but not invariably. Once, in a church, he and his father had secured a pew in the gallery, and

There was I, looking down with infinite complacency and satisfaction from this honourable vantage ground upon the floor of the church, filled and packed as one of our public meetings is, with people standing and pushing. What was my emotion, my joy, my exultation, when I espied among this humiliated mass, struggling and buffeted – whom but Keate! Keate the master of our existence, the tyrant of our days! Pure, unalloyed unadulterated rapture!⁶

William reached the sixth form – a distinction his brother Tom had never achieved – at the start of 1827, and found here a very different Keate from the one he was used to, but only enjoyed it for some ten months.

William’s character had also developed while at Eton. He had made some firm friends, most notably Arthur Hallam, James Milner Gaskell and Francis Doyle. With these boys William became a member of Pop, the Eton Society, which had been founded in 1811 as a debating society, and he began to read widely on issues, past and present, that were coming up for discussion. It is possible to say exactly what these were since on 16 July 1825 – if not before – William began the diary that he was to keep daily for over sixty years; in it he tells us exactly what books he had been reading and when, and a great deal else. The list is impressive, ranging from the works of Sir Walter Scott to Clarendon’s seventeenthcentury History of the Great Rebellion and William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tom Jones, and even, in 1826, a Roman Catholic prayer book.

William’s public-speaking career began with a discourse on the education of the poor on 29 October 1825, when he made his first speech at the Society, which he found a much less nerve-wracking experience than he thought it would be. There is no doubt where his sympathies lay:

Is it morally just or politically expedient to keep down the industry and genius of the artisan, to blast his rising hopes, to quell his spirit? A thirst for knowledge has arisen in the midst of the poor, let them satisfy it with wholesome nutrient and beware lest driven to despair.⁷

Among his more historically-directed speeches, he has to admit he had changed his mind about Sir Robert Walpole: while there were faults with some of his policies, the fact that he secured the Protestant succession and followed a generally peaceful foreign policy more than made up for them. The sympathies of both of these speeches underlay Gladstone’s later career in some measure.

But William also did other things while at Eton. He was joint editor of a newspaper, The Eton Miscellany, which included articles on various issues, often connected with ‘Pop’. Less intellectually, he both played and watched cricket, went sculling, and joined the Salt Hill Club, a social and dining club, in which Gladstone, known by his fellow members as ‘Mr Tipple’, visited a local inn to ‘bully the waiter, eat toasted cheese and drink egg-wine’. He clearly did not spend all of his time at school labouring over his books.

Gladstone’s education at Eton finished in December 1827. His school work was of a sufficiently high standard for him to have secured a place at Oxford University to study humanities, mathematics and physics. It was not necessary t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Preface
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Early Life and Career, 1809–1834
• 2 The Peelite, 1834–1852
• 3 The Rise to Power, 1853–1868
• 4 The First Ministry, 1868–1874
• 5 Retirement and Midlothian, 1874–1880
• 6 The Second and Third Ministries, 1880–1886
• 7 Opposition, the Fourth Ministry and Retirement, 1886–1898
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography