First administration (1868–74) of William Ewart Gladstone

Gladstone’s first Cabinet (1868–74) was perhaps the most capable of the century. Its prime minister tried to supervise the work of each department, devoting his main efforts to Irish and foreign policy. The Irish Protestant church was successfully disestablished in 1869, and a first attempt to grapple with oppressive landlordism in Ireland was made unsuccessfully in 1870; abroad, an attempt to promote disarmament in 1868 failed when Bismarck refused to consider it. The Franco-German War took the government completely by surprise, and the Cabinet would not allow Gladstone to propose to Prussia the neutralization of Alsace and Lorraine. The principal achievements of 1871 and 1872—a London declaration by the great powers that they would not in future abrogate treaties without the consent of all the signatories, and the settlement by arbitration of the “Alabama” claim of the United States—look well in retrospect but were thought pusillanimous at the time. The most useful reforms at home were administrative, except for the Education Act of 1870 and the Ballot Act of 1872. When an Irish University Bill failed to pass the Commons in March 1873, Gladstone resigned but was forced back into office by Disraeli’s refusal to form a government. In August he reshuffled his Cabinet and again took on the chancellorship of the Exchequer himself. He dissolved Parliament in January 1874, but his party was heavily defeated and his government resigned. Gladstone gave up the party leadership (though he remained MP for Greenwich) and retired to Hawarden to write pamphlets attacking papal infallibility and articles on Homer.

Bulgarian atrocities

The indifference of Disraeli’s government to the brutality of Turkish reprisals against risings in the Balkans, in 1875–76, brought Gladstone back to active politics. He published a pamphlet, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East,” which demanded that the Turkish irregulars should remove themselves from the peninsula. London society and the London mob, the Queen, and the Whiggish elements in his own party all opposed him. Only some radicals really supported him; yet he triumphed. He gave up his Greenwich seat and stood for the Scottish county of Midlothian. In two tremendous outbursts of oratory, in November 1879 and March 1880, Gladstone secured his own return to Parliament, overthrew a government, and secured a large Liberal majority. The Conservative government had to resign.

Second administration (1880–85)

Gladstone foolishly combined again for two and a half years the duties of prime minister and chancellor of the Exchequer. His large apparent majority in the Commons was unruly. Not until 1884 could he introduce a third Reform Act that nearly doubled the electorate by giving votes to householders in country districts. On the Eastern question, he and Granville, the foreign secretary, managed by a brusque naval threat to compel Turkey to cede Thessaly to Greece. Still graver troubles arose in Ireland. The Irish Land Act of 1881, largely Gladstone’s own work, in the long run promoted the prosperity of the Irish peasant; but violent crime continued. No alternatives to strong police powers were left, and measures to restrict the freedom of Irish members to obstruct the work of the Commons had to be taken.

In 1882 the Cabinet was compelled to authorize the occupation of Egypt. Gladstone’s settlement of the Egyptian debt question (1885) was honourable to his belief in the concert of Europe but had the unintended effect of tying British foreign policy to that of the Germans. When he allowed Gen. C.G. Gordon to go to Khartoum in Sudan and then failed to rescue him, his death cost Gladstone much popularity. Firm handling of a dispute with Russia over the border of Afghanistan somewhat restored his prestige; but when the government was defeated on the budget in June 1885, he was glad to resign. He refused an offer of an earldom from the Queen.

Irish Home Rule

Gladstone appreciated the full force of Irish nationalism. He had for years favoured Irish Home Rule in the form of a subordinate parliament in Dublin. In 1885 a combination of Irish with Conservative votes had defeated him in June, and he waited silently to see what an Irish–Conservative combination would produce. The general election of November–December 1885 returned a Parliament in which the Liberal members exactly equalled the total of Conservatives plus Irish. At this moment, Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule was revealed, and most Conservatives therefore turned against it. Lord Salisbury’s government was defeated, and Gladstone formed his third Cabinet in February 1886. His Home Rule Bill was rejected in Parliament in June by a large secession of Whigs, and in the country at a general election in July, and Gladstone resigned office.

He had kept his Midlothian seat, unopposed, and carried with him into the new Parliament a personal following 190 strong, supported by the National Liberal Federation, the most powerful political machine in the country. He devoted the next six years to an effort to convince the British electorate that to grant Home Rule to the Irish nation would be an act of justice and wisdom. He spoke at many meetings and cooperated with the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell. But in 1890 he had a dangerous quarrel with Parnell about the political consequences of the O’Shea divorce. (Gladstone had not believed the rumours about Parnell’s liaison, holding that Parnell would never “imperil the future of Ireland for an adulterous intrigue.”) He never sought to correct the stories Parnell spread about him in Ireland. He sanctioned an extensive program of Liberal reforms drawn up at Newcastle in 1891, because it was headed by Home Rule, and on this platform the Liberals won a majority of 40 in the general election of 1892.

Gladstone formed his fourth Cabinet in August 1892. Its members were held together only by awe of him. He piloted another Home Rule Bill through 85 sittings of the Commons in 1893; the Lords rejected it by the largest majority ever recorded there to that time, 419–41. The Cabinet rejected Gladstone’s proposal to dissolve.

He disagreed with his colleagues on a large increase in naval expenditure and finally resigned—ostensibly because sight and hearing were failing—on March 3, 1894. He was much mortified by the coolness of his last official interview with the Queen, who by now so frankly detested him that she could hardly conceal her feelings. He retired to Hawarden and busied himself with an edition of the works of Bishop Joseph Butler (3 vol., 1896). Humanitarian to the end, in his last great speech, at Liverpool in September 1896, he denounced Turkish atrocities in Armenia. After a painful illness, he died of cancer of the palate at Hawarden. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Gladstone was perhaps the greatest British politician of the 19th century. To him above all others goes the credit for creating a political system and state structure that aimed to function beyond the reach of vested interests, particularly those of the upper classes in British society.