Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

The statesman who accomplished the disestablishment of the Irish Church, reformed the Land Laws, and devoted the closing decade of a great career to a fruitless endeavor to secure to Ireland the benefits of self- government, certainly ranks among the century's foremost Englishmen. In length of parliamentary service, in the frequency and duration of his terms as premier, in administrative ability, in moral force, and moving eloquence, it would be difficult to find in the long history of English statesmanship a name which shines with a purer ray than that of William Ewart Gladstone.

The family name was anciently Gledstane, and the ancestry on both sides of the house was purely Scotch. Sir John Gladstone made his own way in life, amassed a fortune as a corn merchant in Liverpool, and became a member of Parliament and a follower of Peel. His gentle and pious wife admirably supplemented his masterful nature, and the sons of the household were brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. At the age of eleven the third son, William Ewart Gladstone, was sent away to Eton, where his two brothers were already at school. Here his piety and studious habits militated against his popularity, but here his intellectual ambition was aroused and his soul was enriched by the closest intimacy with Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson's "In Memoriam" has eulogized. Like Canning he was a precocious orator, and edited the school paper with an ability which led some of his contemporaries to predict a great future for him. "I am confident," said Arthur Hallam, "that he is a bud that will bloom with a richer fragrance than almost any whose early promise I have witnessed." At Christ Church, Oxford, he justified the hopes of his friends- -a quiet, abstemious, reading man, mighty in debate, learned and devout in theology, and a tower of strength in examinations. He graduated with a double first class (classics and mathematics) in 1831, as Robert Peel had done a generation earlier. His choice of a career would have taken him into the clergy of the Church of England, but his father saw in him the making of a parliamentary leader, and to the House of Commons he was accordingly returned in 1833, entering the first Reformed Parliament as a Tory.

Sir Robert Peel was then engaged in rallying the shattered forces of Toryism under the new name of Conservatives, and building up a working opposition. He welcomed the eloquent young Oxonian, and when he became Prime Minister in December, 1834, he gave William Gladstone one of the minor offices in his shortlived government. In the spring of 1835 he was again a private member of the House, free to devote himself to the religious and literary pursuits which appealed so strongly to him. In 1838, when the Tractarian movement was at its height, Gladstone wrote his book on "The State in its Relations with the Church." Reviewing the work Macaulay described the author as "the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories," words often quoted in later years, when his political bedfellows were of quite another sort. The book increased the author's reputation. In 1839 he was married to Miss Catharine Glynne of Hawarden Castle, Flintshire. In 1840 his second important book, a vindication of High Church principles, came from the press. The next year his leader, Peel, came back to power, giving Gladstone, of course, a post in the government (vice-president of the Board of Trade). Gladstone was then a protectionist like his party chief. He bore a hand in the preparation of the tariff legislation of that epoch-making administration, and though temporarily not a member of the House of Commons when the bill for the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried, in 1846, he helped to frame it, and to secure its passage. He had been fully converted to the principles of free trade as preached by Richard Cobden and the Manchester school, and remained true to that principle to the last.

Going out of office, in 1846, with the fall of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone continued to occupy a prominent place in Parliament, acting with the group of Peelites, so called, who kept alive the name and principles of the lost leader. Though still accounted as of the Tory party, Mr. Gladstone's alert and open mind led him to make fresh and independent studies of current political questions and to decide them according to his own enlightened judgment. The result was to weaken by degrees the ties which bound him to the Tories and to knit more closely the bonds which were to unite his fortunes with the Liberals. In 1852, the Peelites having joined the Liberal coalition to overthrow the Derby-Disraeli ministry, Mr. Gladstone's services were rewarded with the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, in which office he delivered the first of the many budget speeches for which he was so celebrated. From 1855 to 1859 he was again out of office, and without party affiliations, "a roving iceberg," to use his own description. The latter year found him again at the head of the Exchequer, this time in the Liberal Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, where he served with distinction, becoming, in 1865, the leader of the House of Commons, when the death of Palmerston raised his colleague, Lord John Russell, to the premiership. With his chief—one of the heroes of the first successful struggle for parliamentary reform—he now drew up the Reform Bill of 1866 which was intended so to modify the qualifications for the franchise as to admit four hundred thousand new voters to the electorate. Though the government was defeated and went out of office on the question, the principle scored a singular victory, for in the following year Disraeli, bidding high for democratic support, carried by Tory votes an even more liberal measure of reform. By this bill, which some one called his "leap in the dark," Disraeli boasted that he had "dished the Whigs." The taunt was thrown at him which he had cast at Peel "that he had caught his opponents bathing and run off with their clothes." Rumor imputed to him the boast that by this move he had got the best of Gladstone and "would hold him down for twenty years," yet, within a twelvemonth, Gladstone had attacked and defeated the government in the Commons, and before the end of the next year was himself Prime Minister, backed by a powerful majority of the Reformed Parliament.

It was an Irish question which caused the overthrow of the Conservatives and swept the Liberals into their seats, and though this Gladstonian administration (1868-74) and its successors (1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) were rich in progressive measures, they are pre- eminent for what they did and attempted to do for Ireland. The three grievances of Ireland since the granting of Catholic emancipation have related to the Established Church, the tenure of land, and self- government. Mr. Gladstone took them up in succession, removing the first, ameliorating the second, and giving his closing years to a tremendous parliamentary struggle to secure the third.

The Church of Ireland, as established by law and maintained by taxation, was an absurdity. Its doctrines were offensive to five-sixths of the Irish people, whose voluntary offerings went to support the Roman Catholic priests, while the absentee Anglican Protestant rectors lived luxuriously in England or the Continent upon the revenues of their Irish parishes. The situation was anomalous. In 1867 Mr. Gladstone, ardent Anglican though he was, espoused the cause of Irish disestablishment, and went to the country on the issue, winning the parliamentary elections by a splendid majority. There was loud outcry from the British Tories, who professed to fear for the existence of the Church of England itself. The majority of the English clergy denounced the proposition, and some even declared its author a madman; but Mr. Gladstone pursued his chosen way with energy and directness. In one of those elevated speeches with which he was accustomed to ennoble debate, he laid the details of his plan open to the Commons. The Irish Church was to be disestablished and disendowed, its bishops were to lose their seats in Parliament, and it was to become a free and independent ecclesiastical body, like the Presbyterian, Wesleyan, or Catholic churches, without further aid from the state. "I trust," said the impassioned advocate, "that when instead of the fictitious and adventitious aid on which we have too long taught the Irish establishment to lean, it shall come to place its trust in its own resources, in its own great mission, in all that it can draw from the energy of its ministers and its members, and the high hopes and promises of the Gospel that it teaches, it will find that it has entered upon a new era of existence—an era bright with hope and potent for good." The Lords did not seriously oppose a measure for which the country had spoken so distinctly, and the bill became a law, July 26, 1869. One standing grievance of Ireland had thus received radical remedy.

In 1870 Mr. Gladstone laid the ax at the root of another tree whose fruit had cursed the Irish peasantry. This was the system of land tenure which prevailed in the southern and western counties. In the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, the tenantry were of another sort, and there were other means of livelihood than agriculture. Out of this condition had sprung the so-called "Ulster tenant-right," the vital principle of which was that a tenant could not be evicted so long as he paid his rent, and "could sell the good will of his farm for what it would fetch in the market." This tenant-right was what Palmerston dismissed with the scornful remark that it was another name for "landlord's wrong." It did not exist elsewhere in Ireland, where a landlord might raise the rent and throw a tenant into the street at will. The Land Act, which Gladstone carried in 1870, gave legal force to the old Ulster custom and applied it to the whole island. Provision was made by which the tenant whose improvements had increased the value of his holding might receive compensation. The Irish landlords and the same class in England made a clamorous protest against such "state interference with freedom of contract," but without avail. Of what the Land Act of 1870 accomplished, Mr. Justin McCarthy is a competent judge. He says: "It was a first and an experimental measure, and no first and experimental measure ever does quite succeed in its object. It has had to be amended and expanded over and over again…..But it introduced a new principle, which no one since has ever attempted to abolish. That new principle was that the Irish tenant was entitled to some share and property in the improvements which he himself had made in his farm. It was, therefore, in the best sense of the word, a revolutionary measure. It created a new principle, and that principle has since been settled. It did not go nearly far enough in the right direction, but it showed the direction in which legislation ought to go, and it was on that account the opening of a new era for Ireland."

The same wave of reforming zeal which brought these blessings to Ireland gave the English nation its first system of free schools (1870), abolished the purchase of commissions in the army (1871), agreed to the principle of arbitrations in international disputes (the Geneva award on the "Alabama Claims" 1872), and introduced the vote by ballot (1872). The effort to establish university education in Ireland upon a basis broad enough to afford equal opportunities for Roman Catholic and Protestant youth was defeated (1873). A few months later, when the national election had pronounced against the liberal policy, Mr. Gladstone yielded his place to his rival, Disraeli.

In the spring of 1874 Mr. Gladstone formally resigned the leadership of his party, then in opposition, and withdrew to a considerable degree from active participation in parliamentary affairs, devoting himself with his accustomed zeal to his studies, which at that time were concerned with ecclesiastical subjects. From his retirement he emerged, in 1876, to write that trenchant series of letters on the "Bulgarian Atrocities," which so stirred the indignation of the English people that Disraeli was unable to carry them into an armed alliance with the red- handed Turk against the Russians. His fierce and persistent onslaughts upon the foreign policy of the government at length carried the nation with him and drove Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield) from power.

No one but Mr. Gladstone could be thought of to head the ministry, and in 1880, he came in for his second term as Prime Minister. The state of Ireland again concerned him deeply. He carried an improved Land Act, but the Lords threw out his bill to relieve the special difficulties which the famine of 1880 had brought upon the Irish tenantry, and the exasperated tenantry resorted to reprisals upon the persons and property of the landlords. The Irish Land League, under the direction of Charles Stewart Parnell, resisted the operation of the new Land Act until its worth should have been tested. Mr. Gladstone and the Irish leaders worked at cross purposes, and thoroughly distrusted one another. The government found it necessary to exert force in order to suppress the agrarian disorders. Mr. Parnell and his associates were thrown into jail, and the Land League was proclaimed as an unlawful association. Parnell, whose word was law with the Leaguers, retaliated by forbidding the tenantry to pay rent. In the spring of 1882, when better feeling was beginning to prevail, some Irish conspirators (Invincibles) assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish and his secretary in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Cavendish was the newly appointed secretary for Ireland, and appears to have been mistaken for W. E. Forster, his predecessor, who was held responsible for the rigorous measures of the past winter. The National League was formed to take the place of the proscribed Land League, and Irish distress and crime continued with little abatement. The "boycott" was applied in its most oppressive form, rents remained unpaid, and evictions were frequent and distressing.