The centenary of the death of W. E. Gladstone in 1998 was marked in several ways. On 18 May 1998, the eve of the precise anniversary, the University of Oxford, which he represented in parliament from 1847 to 1865, held a service of commemoration at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. Lord Runcie, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a sermon that soon appeared under the title ‘God’s Politician’.¹ On the following day a sequence of events took place at Westminster. An exhibition was opened in Westminster Hall by Lord Jenkins, recently Gladstone’s biographer; evensong, incorporating Gladstone’s own...

In April and May 1838, the 28-year-old William Ewart Gladstone attended a series of lectures on the establishment and extension of national churches delivered in London by the celebrated Scottish Presbyterian divine, Thomas Chalmers. The rooms at Hanover Square were ‘crowded to suffocation’ with fashionable audiences, including Anglican bishops and leading politicians. Chalmers’s aim in the lectures was to inspire co-ordinated political action for the defence and extension of the established churches in both England and Scotland. Gladstone attended the lectures both as a politician who shared Chalmers’s commitment to the idea of a national church, and as a friend...

These two contemporary quotations form an appropriate backdrop to an investigation of William Gladstone’s relationship with Sir Robert Peel. The first is the opening sentence of the Whig historian T. B. Macaulay’s famousEdinburgh Reviewpolemic of April 1839 which attacked Gladstone’s long and tendentious defence of the political importance of High Anglicanism,The State in its Relations with the Church. The first part of Macaulay’s sentence is as well known as it is misquoted; the second presents an implicit judgement about Gladstone’s political relationship with Peel. Macaulay’s assessment might be dismissed as mere political mischief-making. He was better known...

Gladstone’s Homeric studies have not fared well with commentators, either past or present. Contemporaries were particularly dismissive of the statesman’s apparent obsession with Homer’s account of the divinities of Olympus. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Gladstone’s successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1855 and a considerable classical scholar, told a correspondent that Gladstone’s estimate of Homer as an exponent of religion was ‘fundamentally wrong’.¹ Lord Tennyson thought Gladstone’s opinions on the subject ‘hobby-horsical’.² Lord Acton reported to his wife from Hawarden that he had spent ‘a dreadful hour’ listening to Gladstone’s theories about Homer.³ Even the loyal John Morley was...

Gladstone’s connection with parliamentary reform is best remembered with regard to his role in the genesis of the 1867 Reform Act and the passage of the 1884 Reform Act. Yet Gladstone’s involvement with parliamentary reform extended over a much wider field and time span than the second and third Reform Acts. As an Oxford undergraduate, he was a vociferous opponent of the 1832 Reform Act and as a middle-aged cabinet minister, he supported reform bills in the 1850s and early 1860s. As a Liberal Prime Minister he was responsible for the 1872 Ballot Act and the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal...

The extent and diversity of the activity of the first Gladstone government were its most distinguishing characteristics, and present as great a challenge to the historian as to the weary MPs who had to respond to it. Why was the legislation so varied and controversial? What was the particular role of Gladstone, a new Liberal leader? How far did he alter the direction of the party? The Liberals were traditionally a vibrant but undisciplined coalition, held together very loosely under Palmerston. The 1867 Reform Act galvanised them further, unleashing many expectations and fears. This chapter suggests a way of classifying...

In his dotage, Gladstone writing to James Bryce described himself as ‘a dead man, one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man’.¹ In doing so he was not simply lamenting the passing of the mid-century order of free trade, peace and stability but paying tribute to two very different statesmen who had exerted a decisive influence on the shaping of his political outlook and his major legislative achievements, especially with regard to finance and free trade. Sir Robert Peel’s influence was undoubtedly the more immediate and personal, and he remained late into Gladstone’s life a favourite topic of conversation. Peel was, for...

Sidney Checkland’s invaluable collective biography,The Gladstones, prompted comparisons between the Gladstones and the Kennedys.² In each case a patriarch, more domineering than dominating, single-mindedly accumulated the property, influence, connections and children from which a dynasty could grow. The public and business lives of each patriarch, Sir John for the Gladstones and Joseph for the Kennedys, were as questionable as the public and business lives of any successful newcomers were bound to be in cities like Liverpool or Boston. What neither could determine was the myth engendered by the political empires which each had launched. For the Kennedys it was...

J.C. Beckett’s estimate of Gladstone inThe Making of Modern Irelandprobably offers the most succinct and compelling testament by a modern Irish historian of the G. O. M.’s impact on John Bull’s Other Island. Beckett, who can scarcely be labelled a wild-eyed nationalist but rather reflects the values of northern Liberal Unionism, captures the essence of Gladstone’s majestic appeal to the Irish national audience – the nobility of Gladstone’s vision rather than his concrete accomplishments. This chapter has two aims. It describes and assesses what Gladstone actually achieved for Ireland, that is principally for Irish Catholics. The material for this...

Any discussion of Gladstone and Irish Unionists takes place against the background of Irish history and politics since 1886. This is because the first home rule bid is measured against the cataclysmic years of 1912–22 when the conflict of nationality in Ireland resulted in the partition of the island into two states, a predominantly nationalist Irish Free State and a predominantly Unionist Northern Ireland; and the ‘troubles’ of the past 25 years only enhance this perspective, raising yet again reflections on what might have been had Gladstone achieved his home rule settlement. These considerations invite further ruminations on that...

‘What … is the real relationship betweenethics and politics? Have they nothing at all to do with one another …? Or is the opposite true, namely that political action is subject to “the same” ethic as every other form of activity?’¹ This question, raised by Max Weber in hisPolitik als Beruf, summarises one of the inescapable dilemmas of practical politics. On the one hand there is the ‘ethic of principled conviction’, which is not concerned with consequences; on the other, there is the ‘ethic of responsibility’. As Weber put it,

It is not that the ethic of conviction...

‘It is a situation which would have suited the game of Palmerston or of Dizzy – whether it can be handled by sublimer spirits remains to be seen.’¹ This was the view of Sir William Harcourt, effectively Gladstone’s second-in-command in the House of Commons, and for much of his life a candid friend to other leading Liberals. It was expressed in a letter to John Morley on 10 July 1892, just as the – for the Liberals – less than satisfactory results of the general election were starting to become apparent. In modern parlance, a hung parliament was in the offing. Harcourt here...

Writing in hisNapoleon: For and Against, Pieter Geyl commented, ‘And all the time the historical presentation turns out to be closely connected with French political and cultural life as a whole.’¹ Something of the kind can be said of the invocation of Gladstone’s name in Liberal politics during the 30 years after his death.

For a period after 1898 Gladstone was revered with little equivocation by Liberals as the great Christian statesman who towered morally over his contemporaries.² After the Liberal Unionist split of 1886, the Liberal party had had a greater cohesion around the person of Gladstone and...