William Ewart Gladstone

Gladstone Reading

William Ewart Gladstone remains a peculiarly baffling and inaccessible personality. In character and outlook he was tempestuous and volcanic, powerfully intellectual but also a man of strong, barely controlled private emotions.

In his long political career Gladstone achieved a unique personal dominance as the concept ‘Gladstonian Liberalism’ suggests, yet both as Prime Minister and party leader his methods were highly unpredictable.

In the course of a very long political life, Gladstone underwent many transformations, even reversals. The stern ‘unbending Tory’ who opposed the 1832 Reform Act became the apostle of the new creed of liberal emancipation and free trade in the 1850s and 1860s, and the leader of an increasingly radical popular front in his later years. The champion of laissez-faire and public retrenchment significantly expanded the role of government in Britain, and especially in Ireland. The out and out egalitarian became “the people’s William” of Midlothian days and a hero of labour. The classic Anglican defender of church establishment became a champion of the civic equality of Roman Catholics and Nonconformists. The staunch unionist was to advocate national equality for Wales and Scotland, and to stake his future on Home Rule for Ireland. The ‘little Englander’ who attacked imperial expansion was also to preside over major British penetration in southern Africa and the occupation of Egypt. The advocate of cosmic, universal synthesis and ‘the public law’ became widely associated with dissolution, fragmentation and conflict.

Contemporaries found him alternately infuriating and inspiring yet his influence lived on long after his death. The Liberal party rallied around Gladstonian ‘guiding principles’ until the 1930s, while Labour pioneers like Hardie, Henderson and Snowden viewed Gladstone as one of their heroes. In the later twentieth century, Thatcher’s Conservative Party and Blair’s New Labour claim to be the vehicle for Gladstonian values.

Gladstonewas a pragmatic, adaptable political leader . . . with an incessant restless concern with history, literature, the classical world and theological dispute. A creative chancellor, hard-working administrator, popular demagogue and devoted husband, brother and family man, Gladstone emerges as a towering influence who dominated his world as ‘a great Christian statesman’.

Kenneth O. Morgan

Trustee of St Deiniol’s Library 1989 - 1997.
Reprinted from Agatha Ramm: William Ewart Gladstone
(GPC Books University of Wales Press 1989)
Editor’s Foreword Pages vii - ix.