William Gladstone

New Studies and Perspectives

Roland Quinault, Roger Swift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409420460
• eBook ISBN: 9781134766949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) was the outstanding statesman of the Victorian age. He was an MP for over sixty years, a long serving and exceptional Chancellor of the Exchequer and four times Prime Minister. As the leader of the Liberal party over three decades, he personified the values and policies of later Victorian Liberalism. Gladstone, however, was always more than just a politician. He was also a considerable scholar, a dedicated Churchman and had a range of interests and connections that made him, in many respects, the quintessential Victorian. Yet important aspects of Gladstone's life have received relatively little recent attention from historians. This study reappraises Gladstone by focusing on five themes: his reputation; his representation in visual and material culture; his personal life; his role as an official; and the ethical and political basis of his international policies. This collection of original, often multidisciplinary studies, provides new perspectives on Gladstone's public and private life. As such, it illustrates the many-sided nature of his career and the complexities of his personality.

PART I
REPUTATIONS

Chapter 1
Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical

Frank M. Turner

The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of three major nineteenth-century transatlantic figures: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and William Gladstone. Enormous celebrations, numerous conferences, special courses and lectures, new books and articles, as well as various museum exhibitions commemorated the first two. Lincoln and Darwin remain widely recognised names, and their ideas and lives are still debated in the media and among the broadly educated public, and still touch public policy. Both figures adorn the currency of their respective nations. By contrast, William Gladstone does not command such current attention. Whether in Britain, Ireland, the United States or parts of the former British Empire, only a few people, mostly professional historians, recall the name Gladstone. His home, which drew thousands to political rallies in his lifetime or to the sight of him felling trees, remains owned by his family and closed to the public. His vast body of publications can be found only through channels for acquiring rare books and pamphlets. Why does Gladstone command relatively little attention today?

First, Gladstone’s personality, his values and some of his causes barely resonate, or resonate badly, with many people today. As S.G. Checkland noted in 1971:

To much of the modern mind Mr. Gladstone’s upbringing is unreal and his outlook unsympathetic. There is a strong temptation to patronize him, with his appalling burden of guilt, his sense of personal inadequacy, his masochism, his indulgence in tortuous religious controversy, his awful moral clarity and his dedication that seemed to critics to be mere self-righteousness. Yet few men have shown the same power to break with earlier conditioning, making new terms with reality.1

So much about Gladstone, personally and politically, is difficult to engage with or to do so with any empathy. Those aspects include a family fortune built largely on slavery and an invasion of Egypt which boosted the value of his large investment in Egyptian bonds. Even when he did make ‘new terms with reality’, Gladstone’s efforts in that direction always seemed pained, possibly hypocritical, unpredictable, opportunistic and often hesitant. This was the case even with respect to his support for Irish Home Rule and reform of the House of Lords. Moreover, his political, religious and classical thinking retained (even indulged in) so many of its own internal points of orientation, that it is difficult to follow and explicate in a satisfactory fashion.

Second, Gladstone’s intellectual world, with its emphasis on the ancient classics as modes of understanding the present, also belongs to a world of the past. The ancient world no longer stands as a model for intellectual engagement on political issues and, until the recent penetrating scholarship of David Bebbington, Gladstone’s mind and ideas appeared to most scholars as simply too difficult and idiosyncratic to try to penetrate or master.2

Third, the rapidly changing Victorian religious marketplace, in which Gladstone played so important and fascinating a role, has also vanished. It is a fine point of debate and judgment whether the Church of England remains a genuinely national institution, while British Nonconformity is certainly no longer a great political or religious force. In contemporary Ireland, many Catholics are now alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, and Irish bishops and priests stand accused of misbehaviour far more grievous than that perpetrated by Parnell and Katherine O’Shea. At the same time, Gladstone’s fervent anti-Catholicism seems anachronistic, as does much, though not everything, that he contributed to the Victorian conflict over science and religion, while the secularism he feared has largely triumphed in the British Isles.

Fourth, the Victorian Liberal Party represents very largely a political world we have lost. The tasks and goals the Liberal Party addressed under Gladstone’s leadership have either been accomplished or co-opted by others. In particular, the Irish problem as Gladstone understood, experienced and eventually redefined became radically and irreversibly transformed by the Easter Rising in l9l6 and its aftermath. Likewise, the Europe of his time was altered and largely destroyed by the rapaciously destructive ideologies of the twentieth century.

Lastly, the shifts in historiography of the past half century have made Gladstone much less central to the concerns of Victorian historians. The emphasis on social history over political history and on popular political movements rather than political leaders has shifted the focus of the modern British historical enquiry.

Eschewing Cultural Apostasy

One of the key reasons why Gladstone now seems so elusive, irrelevant or difficult to approach is that, unlike so many other Victorians, he was not a Victorian cultural apostate. He became a political radical, but he was not a cultural radical. Gladstone stood profoundly at one with his age, even as he sought throughout much of his life to reform his world, often in the face of bitter partisan opposition. He wanted to reform, not to transform in any Utopian manner. He understood his was an age of transition, but thought it should not be one of upheaval. Again and again he attempted to channel the exploding forces of the day, often through reliance on religion, still more often through institutional accommodation and, finally, by a careful, if increasingly enthusiastic, embrace of freedom. Modern sympathies, by contrast, have come to reside with those Victorians who challenged the values and ideals and social expectations of their day. For this reason Gladstone has tended to elude us.

Historians of the Victorian era have thus tended to emphasise those figures who were at odds with the prevailing thought and institutions of their day and who were impatient with moderate reform in the areas of their respective endeavours. Those whom I have previously denoted by the term ‘cultural apostates’,3 rebelled intellectually, morally or religiously against the predominant Anglican culture from within. The cultural apostates rejected those presuppositions about English culture in terms of Protestantism, natural religion and neoclassicism that had marked the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. It was exactly these cultural presuppositions that Gladstone never abandoned nor seriously questioned.

Gladstone, from at least his first troubled vote for the Maynooth Grant in l845, entered upon a career of political rather than cultural reform. The trajectory of his political development over the next half century led him into increasingly radical and disruptive political positions that generated enormous controversy, distrust and conservative enmity. But throughout his political crusades, he at no time challenged the cultural presuppositions of British life. He remained a supporter of the Bible and natural theology. He remained a firm supporter of the Church of England. He eschewed virtually any changes in personal or sexual morality including contraception. He remained firmly hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, if not to individual Roman Catholics. But he did steadily, if quite gradually, embrace the tenets of liberal democracy. He stood prepared to rethink Ireland’s relationship to the United Kingdom and to imagine a radical restructuring of the House of Lords. Like many great Victorian liberals, he could engage in radical political reform because he believed the existing cultural foundations of society would provide the bulwarks of stability in the face of political restructuring. He believed in an expanding realm of political liberty because he thought that the surrounding culture would preserve essential social and moral order.

By contrast, figures such as Charles Darwin, John Ruskin and John Henry Newman overturned the cultural presuppositions of early Victorian Anglican religious and intellectual life from within. Darwin achieved his evolutionary thinking less by assaulting the opponents of transmutation than by working through those presuppositions of Paleyan natural theology that had so permeated his thought aboard the Beagle and which had persisted until at least the l860s. Ruskin worked towards a new, daring and expansive aesthetic that would eventually pave the way towards the ‘modern’ through a profound rethinking of aesthetic neoclassicism. John Henry Newman embodied a profound cultural apostasy by overturning in his own mind and spirit the three pillars on which the theology of the various parties in the Church of England rested. In his sermons and theological publications of the l830s, he critically dissected – more deeply than any other writer of his age – evangelical faith in the adequacy of the Bible alone as providing the basis for faith, the role of emotions in validating evangelical religious experience and the evangelical understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith. In his ‘Tract 90’ of l841, as James Anthony Froude commented, Newman broke ‘the back of the [Thirty-nine] Articles’ as a device for defining the Church of England as something distinctly other than the Roman Catholic faith.4 In his Tamworth Reading Room letters of the same year, he produced a devastating critique of natural theology as a foundation for the Anglican faith and Protestantism more generally, and of both as sustaining contemporary British society. Finally, in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine of l845 he assaulted the High Church confidence in the authority of Antiquity. His ever-polemical theological writings thus swept away the intellectual foundations from all versions of Anglican Protestantism and the cultural self-identity they fostered. What is important to note is that Newman forged those sceptical conclusions from reasoning within the Anglican culture and the theological world that he had long inhabited and came implicitly to reject, hence his cultural apostasy.

Gladstone had initially shown sympathy for Newman and the Tractarians, though never any kind of absolute identification with them. However, from the late l830s onwards, he steadily (and with no little political opportunism) separated himself from them. So long as he understood Newman and the Tractarians to be reviving ancient church principles in order to give new vitality to Anglican religious life, he lent them sympathy. But when he came to understand that they had undertaken a genuinely radical experiment in their own self-styled Catholic religion, he both abandoned and denounced them. For all his capacity to evolve in his own religious faith and commitment over the course of his life, Gladstone was no religious radical. He was not a religious Utopian any more than he was a political Utopian.5

The cultural apostates are understandable and sympathetic figures to us because we can interpret them i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by David Bebbington
• Introduction
• PART I REPUTATIONS
• PART II IMAGES
• PART III PERSONAL QUESTIONS
• PART IV GLADSTONE AS AN OFFICIAL
• PART V ETHICS AND INTERNATIONALISM
• PART VI EPILOGUE
• A Selected Bibliography
• Index