GLADSTONE illustrates Bacon’s axiom: “The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath”.
William Ewart Gladstone – born in Liverpool 200 years ago – asserted: “All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes”.
Gladstone’s religious beliefs were central to his life and work. Christianity, in his mature view, “must be filled full with human and genial warmth, in close sympathy with every true instinct and need of man . . . ”
From an evangelical and Conservative youth, he became the highest moral authority among British prime ministers. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that he was born on December 29th, 1809, the feastday of St Thomas Becket.
The Liberal statesman inspired widespread affection, including a grateful Irish diaspora after he declared for Home Rule. For instance, the Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) was given “Gladstone” as a middle name.
Queen Victoria may have reviled him, but Elizabeth Mathew, a grandniece of the apostle of temperance and later the wife of John Dillon, wrote in her diary on December 30th, 1887: “Mr Gladstone has gone to Naples for five weeks. He left on Wednesday, the day after his birthday – 78th . . . Long may he be with us”.
Gladstone possessed prodigious energy, both mental and physical. He lived for nearly 89 years; he read about 20,000 books during an active adult life – an average of 280 a year; he chopped down innumerable trees on his estate in Hawarden, north Wales; he could walk vast distances in Snowdonia or the Scottish Highlands. He read the Bible in Greek every day. He read all the major Victorian novels as they came out.
His diary, which he kept from the age of 16, was largely an account book with God for his expenditure of “the most precious gift of time”.
Although Gladstone remained an Anglican, John Henry Newman’s influence tempered his evangelical views. On the other hand, Newman used Gladstone’s attack on ultramontanism to strike a blow indirectly against the extreme Catholic position, concluding his riposte with the famous declaration: “I shall drink . . . to conscience first and to the pope afterwards”.
Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule transformed the basis of the Anglo-Irish relationship. On being elected prime minister for the first time in 1868, he announced: “My mission is to pacify Ireland”. He believed Fenianism “had its root in bad laws”.
His 1881 Land Act laid the foundation for all subsequent land purchase legislation by constituting the Irish Land Commission as a statutory body and a court empowered to fix fair rents on a judicial basis.
Sometime in 1885 he became convinced of the justice of Irish self-government. The Parnellites had won 85 seats out of 103 in Ireland (and one in Liverpool). This overwhelming expression of Irish opinion made a profound impression upon Gladstone. He saw that Irish violence and the English reaction to it was corrupting the whole polity and, moreover, that granting Home Rule quickly offered the only prospect of keeping Ireland within the British connection.
But Lord Randolph Churchill played the Orange card for the Tories. Accordingly, the first Home Rule Bill was defeated by 30 votes in June 1886. It split the Liberal party and initiated 20 years of Conservative political dominance. Those who seceded from the Liberals included Whigs such as Lord Hartington and new-money millionaires like George Goschen and Joseph Chamberlain.
In 1892 Gladstone returned to power briefly and made a final attempt at Home Rule.
This time he got the bill through the House of Commons but it was crushed in the Lords.
Having endowed St Deiniol’s library beside Hawarden church, he spent several days at the age of 86 pushing barrows full of the contents of his own library along the half-mile connecting route. The Grand Old Man believed divine learning ought to be associated with the various branches of human knowledge. At the heart of this library of more than 250,000 books is Gladstone’s own collection of some 32,000 volumes, many of which contain his annotations.
He died on May 19th, 1898 — Ascension Day.
His body was laid out in the “Temple of Peace”, his library at Hawarden Castle.
The family accepted parliament's offer of a public funeral. At the burial in Westminster Abbey, Newman's hymn Praise to the holiest in the heightwas sung.
Victoria confided to the Tory prime minister that she “regrets all the fuss made” for Gladstone. From Melbourne, however, one John Joseph Murphy penned a tribute: “. . . right not might was the object of his noble cultured mind”.
St Deiniol’s residential library retains an Anglo-Catholic ambience.
Named after a Celtic saint, its impressive chaplain during the visit of this diarist was an Australian woman priest.
Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury has said: “Gladstone’s spirit commits this library to an epic vision of a humanity which is not all about the exchanges of power but about the discoveries of the interweaving of human imaginations, human failures, human visions, human faith”.
In an invitation to dialogue to mark the bicentenary of its founder, the library plans to open an Islamic reading room.