Gladstone

Routledge Historical Biographies

by Michael S. Partridge

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.

312 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2003

About the author

A specialist in 19th century British history, Michael Stephen Partridge was a Reader in History at St Mary's University, Twickenham in London, where he taught from 1985 until his death.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Ewart Gladstone first won election to the House of Commons at the age of 22, and retired from it for the final time when he was 85. Starting with his appointment as President of the Board of Trade in Sir Robert Peel’s second ministry, he would spend over a quarter of a century in high office, including twelve years as Chancellor of the Exchequer and another twelve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. During that time, he oversaw numerous bills that were some of the greatest legislative achievements of the Victorian era, including the Third Reform Act, the Irish Land Act, and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. And while the Irish home rule bill that was to be the capstone of his career did not pass, the fight over it transformed British politics for a generation afterward.

Summarizing such a long and eventful life is a challenge for any biographer, and even more so for one who seeks to do so in a relatively concise number of pages. Fortunately, Michael Partridge is more than up to this task. Drawing upon the enormous body of published and unpublished works that Gladstone wrote, as well as a judicious selection of secondary works, he has produced a fine survey that distills his subject’s career down to its essentials. In doing so, he draws out interesting observations that are too often loss in the mass of detail about Gladstone’s life, ones which undermine many of the assumptions about the easily caricaturable figure and spotlight the underlying complexities of both his politics and his legacy.

One of the most surprising of these is the strain of illiberalism in the career of this legendary Liberal leader. Much of this illiberalism reflected his upbringing. His father, John Gladstone, was a Tory and a merchant who was a slave owner by virtue of being an absentee landlord of sugar plantations in Jamaica. John’s wealth and Tory connections paved the way for his son’s entry into politics, as after an education at Eton and Oxford young William won a seat in the House of Commons thanks to the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle, a leading Tory grandee of the era. At first, Gladstone echoed the Tory views of his patron, and voted against the secret ballot, the income tax, the admission of Jews to Parliament, and the abolition of flogging in the army, among others. His political evolution towards liberalism started with his growing association with Peel, the moderate Tory who reached out to the promising parliamentarian and offered him a seat in his cabinet in 1842.

Though Gladstone was a devoted follower of Peel and continued to follow him both politically and ideologically after the Conservative Party’s split in 1846 over the Corn Law repeal, Partridge sees the latter man’s death in 1850 as an emancipatory moment. Such was Gladstone’s reputation at this point that Peel’s successor as Conservative leader, the Earl of Derby, courted him on several occasions to rejoin the party. What deterred Gladstone from doing so, in Partridge’s view, was Gladstone’s loathing for Benjamin Disraeli, the party’s leader in the House of Commons. Instead, Gladstone drifted into an association with Lord Palmerston, the elderly maverick whose instinct for the popular will made him the master of British politics during the 1850s and early 1860s. Though Partridge makes Gladstone’s dislike for “Pam” clear, his detestation of Disraeli – in many ways, Gladstone’s polar opposite in personality – made Palmerston the more palatable alternative.

By the late 1860s, Gladstone was the obvious man to lead the newly-emergent Liberal Party. Their electoral triumph in 1868 made Gladstone prime minister for the first time, in what would be arguably the most productive of his four ministries. Partridge’s coverage of Gladstone’s governments takes up roughly half of the book, as he details their achievements and challenges while also paying due attention to his subject’s intellectual pursuits and family life. After losing office in 1874 it seemed as though his career was coming to an end, only for Gladstone to reassert his dominance over the party with his successful speechmaking tour of the Midlothian constituency in the late 1870s attacking Disraeli’s foreign policies. Yet Gladstone’s subsequent governments experienced diminishing results, especially once his controversial embrace of Home Rule exposed the growing divide between the old aristocratic Whig base and the more radical middle-class supporters whom he increasingly courted.

Partridge does not make much of the irony of Gladstone adoption of the Palmerston-esque persona of an elderly populist in his final years, nor does he delve into the “Grand Old Man” identity that defined his public image during that time and posthumously. Yet it is entirely understandable that not every aspect of a life and career of the scope of Gladstone’s can be covered in such a relatively limited amount of space. This makes the scope of his achievement all the more impressive. Though his focus is on Gladstone’s career, he interweaves within it both a useful coverage of his family life and an interesting exploration of his faith and his fascinating psychology. The result is far from definitive, nor does Partridge make any pretense of providing such a portrait. But for anyone seeking an accessible introduction to this iconic figure of Victorian politics, there are few starting points better than this one.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this to get a better sense of English history in the 1800's. I didn't realize how many small wars Great Britain was engaged in over the 1800's. Most of them were not good for either Great Britain nor for the native people in the countries they were fought in. An object lesion for the American empire in the 2000's. Gladstone evolved from a conservative to a liberal over his life, and his path mirror progress in England. It is hard to believe how long it took to bring the vote to all men, raise the minimum working age to 11 years old, limit working day for women to 12 hours, provide free elementary education for all people. That is where England got to in 1890.