Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Gichtel, Johann" to "Glory" / Volume 12, Slice 1

by Various

The first Reformed parliament met on the 29th of January 1833, and the young member for Newark took his seat for the first time in an assembly which he was destined to adorn, delight and astonish for more than half a century. His maiden speech The question of slavery. was delivered on the 3rd of June in reply to what was almost a personal challenge. The colonial secretary, Mr Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, brought forward a series of resolutions in favour of the extinction of slavery in the British colonies. On the first night of the debate Lord Howick, afterwards Lord Grey, who had been under-secretary for the Colonies, and who opposed the resolutions as proceeding too gradually towards abolition, cited certain occurrences on Sir John Gladstone’s plantation in Demerara to illustrate his contention that the system of slave-labour in the West Indies was attended by great mortality among the slaves. Gladstone in his reply—his first speech in the House—avowed that he had a pecuniary interest in the question, “and, if he might say so much without exciting suspicion, a still deeper interest in it as a question of justice, of humanity and of religion.” If there had recently been a high mortality on his father’s plantation, it was due to the age of the slaves rather than to any peculiar hardship in their lot. It was true that the particular system of cultivation practised in Demerara was more trying than some others; but then it might be said that no two trades were equally conducive to health. Steel-grinding was notoriously unhealthy, and manufacturing processes generally were less favourable to life than agricultural. While strongly condemning cruelty, he declared himself an advocate of emancipation, but held that it should be effected gradually, and after due preparation. The slaves must be religiously educated, and stimulated to profitable industry. The owners of emancipated slaves were entitled to receive compensation from parliament, because it was parliament that had established this description of property. “I do not,” said Gladstone, “view property as an abstract thing; it is the creature of civil society. By the legislature it is granted, and by the legislature it is destroyed.” On the following day King William IV. wrote to Lord Althorp: “The king rejoices that a young member has come forward in so promising a manner as Viscount Althorp states Mr W. E. Gladstone to have done.” In the same session Gladstone spoke on the question of bribery and corruption at Liverpool, and on the temporalities of the Irish Church. In the session of 1834 his most important performance was a speech in opposition to Hume’s proposal to throw the universities open to Dissenters.

On the 10th of November 1834 Lord Althorp succeeded to his father’s peerage, and thereby vacated the leadership of the House of Commons. The prime minister, Lord Melbourne, submitted to the king a choice of names for the chancellorship of the exchequer and leadership of the House of Commons; but his majesty announced that, having lost the services of Lord Althorp as leader of the House of Commons, he could feel no confidence in the stability of Lord Melbourne’s government, and that it was his intention to send for the duke of Wellington. The duke took temporary charge of affairs, but Peel was felt to be indispensable. He had gone abroad after the session, and was now in Rome. As soon as he could be brought back he formed an administration, and appointed Gladstone to a junior lordship of the treasury. Parliament was dissolved on the 29th of December. Gladstone was returned unopposed, this time in conjunction with the Liberal lawyer whom he had beaten at the last election. The new parliament met on the 19th of February 1835. The elections had given the Liberals a considerable majority. Immediately after the meeting of parliament Gladstone was promoted to the under-secretaryship for the colonies, where his official chief was Lord Aberdeen. The administration was not long-lived. On the 30th of March Lord John Russell moved a resolution in favour of an inquiry into the temporalities of the Irish Church, with the intention of applying the surplus to general education without distinction of religious creed. This was carried against ministers by a majority of thirty-three. On the 8th of April Sir Robert Peel resigned, and the under-secretary for the colonies of course followed his chief into private life.

Released from the labours of office, Gladstone, living in chambers in the Albany, practically divided his time between his parliamentary duties and study. Then, as always, his constant companions were Homer and Dante, and Literary work. it is recorded that he read the whole of St Augustine, in twenty-two octavo volumes. He used to frequent the services at St James’s, Piccadilly, and Margaret chapel, since better known as All Saints’, Margaret Street. On the 20th of June 1837 King William IV. died, and Parliament, having been prorogued by the young queen in person, was dissolved on the 17th of the following month. Simply on the strength of his parliamentary reputation Gladstone was nominated, without his consent, for Manchester, and was placed at the bottom of the poll; but, having been at the same time nominated at Newark, was again returned. The year 1838 claims special note in a record of Gladstone’s life, because it witnessed the appearance of his famous work on The State in its Relations with the Church. He had left Oxford just before the beginning of that Catholic revival which has transfigured both the inner spirit and the outward aspect of the Church of England. But the revival was now in full strength. The Tracts for the Times were saturating England with new influences. The movement counted no more enthusiastic or more valuable disciple than Gladstone. Its influence had reached him through his friendships, notably with two Fellows of Merton—Mr James Hope, who became Mr Hope-Scott of Abbotsford, and the Rev. H. E. Manning, afterwards cardinal archbishop. The State in its Relations with the Church was his practical contribution to a controversy in which his deepest convictions were involved. He contended that the Church, as established by law, was to be “maintained for its truth,” and that this principle, if good for England, was good also for Ireland.

On the 25th of July 1839 Gladstone was married at Hawarden to Miss Catherine Glynne, sister, and in her issue heir, of Sir Stephen Glynne, ninth and last baronet of that name. In 1840 he published Church Principles considered in their Results.

Parliament was dissolved in June 1841. Gladstone was again returned for Newark. The general election resulted in a Tory majority of eighty. Sir Robert Peel became prime minister, and made the member for Newark Enters the cabinet. vice-president of the Board of Trade. An inevitable change is from this time to be traced in the topics of Gladstone’s parliamentary speaking. Instead of discoursing on the corporate conscience of the state and the endowments of the Church, the importance of Christian education, and the theological unfitness of the Jews to sit in parliament, he is solving business-like problems about foreign tariffs and the exportation of machinery; waxing eloquent over the regulation of railways, and a graduated tax on corn; subtle on the monetary merits of half-farthings, and great in the mysterious lore of quassia and cocculus indicus. In 1842 he had a principal hand in the preparation of the revised tariff, by which duties were abolished or sensibly diminished in the case of 1200 duty-paying articles. In defending the new scheme he spoke incessantly, and amazed the House by his mastery of detail, his intimate acquaintance with the commercial needs of the country, and his inexhaustible power of exposition. In 1843 Gladstone, succeeding Lord Ripon as president of the Board of Trade, became a member of the cabinet at the age of thirty-three. He has recorded the fact that “the very first opinion which he ever was called upon to give in cabinet” was an opinion in favour of withdrawing the bill providing education for children in factories, to which vehement opposition was offered by the Dissenters, on the ground that it was too favourable to the Established Church.

At the opening of the session of 1845 the government, in pursuance of a promise made to Irish members that they would deal with the question of academical education in Ireland, proposed to establish non-sectarian colleges Maynooth grant: resignation. in that country and to make a large addition to the grant to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth. Gladstone resigned office, in order, as he announced in the debate on the address, to form “not only an honest, but likewise an independent and an unsuspected judgment,” on the plan to be submitted by the government with respect to Maynooth. His subsequent defence of the proposed grant, on the ground that it would be improper and unjust to exclude the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland from a “more indiscriminating support” which the state might give to various religious beliefs, was regarded by men of less sensitive conscience as only proving that there had been no adequate cause for his resignation. Before he resigned he completed a second revised tariff, carrying considerably further the principles on which he had acted in the earlier revision of 1842.

In the autumn of 1845 the failure of the potato crop in Ireland threatened a famine, and convinced Sir Robert Peel that all restrictions on the importation of food must be at once suspended. He was supported by only three Free trade. members of the cabinet, and resigned on the 5th of December. Lord John Russell, who had just announced his conversion to total and immediate repeal of the Corn Laws, declined the task of forming an administration, and on the 20th of December Sir Robert Peel resumed office. Lord Stanley refused to re-enter the government, and his place as secretary of state for the colonies was offered to and accepted by Gladstone. He did not offer himself for re-election at Newark, and remained outside the House of Commons during the great struggle of the coming year. It was a curious irony of fate which excluded him from parliament at this crisis, for it seems unquestionable that he was the most advanced Free Trader in Sir Robert Peel’s Cabinet. The Corn Bill passed the House of Lords on the 28th of June 1846, and on the same day the government were beaten in the House of Commons on an Irish Coercion Bill. Lord John Russell became prime minister, and Gladstone retired for a season into private life. Early in 1847 it was announced that one of the two members for the university of Oxford intended to retire at the general election, and Gladstone was proposed for the vacant seat. The representation of the university had been pronounced by Canning to be the most coveted prize of public life, and Gladstone himself confessed that he “desired it with an almost passionate fondness.” Parliament was dissolved on the 23rd of July 1847. The nomination at Oxford took place on the 29th of July, and at the close of the poll Sir Robert Inglis stood at the head, with Gladstone as his colleague.

The three years 1847, 1848, 1849 were for Gladstone a period of mental growth, of transition, of development. A change was silently proceeding, which was not completed for twenty years. “There have been,” he wrote in later Naple prisons. days to Bishop Wilberforce, “two great deaths, or transmigrations of spirit, in my political existence—one, very slow, the breaking of ties with my original party.” This was now in progress. In the winter of 1850-1851 Gladstone spent between three and four months at Naples, where he learned that more than half the chamber of deputies, who had followed the party of Opposition, had been banished or imprisoned; that a large number, probably not less than 20,000, of the citizens had been imprisoned on charges of political disaffection, and that in prison they were subjected to the grossest cruelties. Having made careful investigations, Gladstone, on the 7th of April 1851, addressed an open letter to Lord Aberdeen, bringing an elaborate, detailed and horrible indictment against the rulers of Naples, especially as regards the arrangements of their prisons and the treatment of persons confined in them for political offences. The publication of this letter caused a wide sensation in England and abroad, and profoundly agitated the court of Naples. In reply to a question in the House of Commons, Lord Palmerston accepted and adopted Gladstone’s statement, expressed keen sympathy with the cause which he had espoused, and sent a copy of his letter to the queen’s representative at every court of Europe. A second letter and a third followed, and their effect, though for a while retarded, was unmistakably felt in the subsequent revolution which created a free and united Italy.

In February 1852 the Whig government was defeated on a Militia Bill, and Lord John Russell was succeeded by Lord Derby, formerly Lord Stanley, with Mr Disraeli, who now entered office for the first time, as chancellor of the exchequer Gladstone and Disraeli. and leader of the House of Commons. Mr Disraeli introduced and carried a makeshift budget, and the government tided over the session, and dissolved parliament on the 1st of July 1852. There was some talk of inducing Gladstone to join the Tory government, and on the 29th of November Lord Malmesbury dubiously remarked, “I cannot make out Gladstone, who seems to me a dark horse.” In the following month the chancellor of the exchequer produced his second budget. The government redeemed their pledge to do something for the relief of the agricultural interest by reducing the duty on malt. This created a deficit, which they repaired by doubling the duty on inhabited houses. The voices of criticism were heard simultaneously on every side. The debate waxed fast and furious. In defending his proposals Mr Disraeli gave full scope to his most characteristic gifts; he pelted his opponents right and left with sarcasms, taunts and epigrams. Gladstone delivered an unpremeditated reply, which has ever since been celebrated. Tradition says that he “foamed at the mouth.” The speech of the chancellor of the exchequer, he said, must be answered “on the moment.” It must be “tried by the laws of decency and propriety.” He indignantly rebuked his rival’s language and demeanour. He tore his financial scheme to ribbons. It was the beginning of a duel which lasted till death removed one of the combatants from the political arena. “Those who had thought it impossible that any impression could be made upon the House after the speech of Mr Disraeli had to acknowledge that a yet greater impression was produced by the unprepared reply of Mr Gladstone.” The House divided, and the government were left in a minority of nineteen. Lord Derby resigned.