For some years he had alluded to his impending retirement from public life, saying that he was “strong against going on in politics to the end.” He was now sixty-four, and his life had been a continuous experience of exhausting Temporary retirement. labour. On the 12th of March 1874 he informed Lord Granville that he could give only occasional attendance in the House of Commons during the current session, and that he must “reserve his entire freedom to divest himself of all the responsibilities of leadership at no distant date.” His most important intervention in the debates of 1874 was when he opposed Archbishop Tait’s Public Worship Bill. This was read a second time without a division, but in committee Gladstone enjoyed some signal triumphs over his late solicitor-general, Sir William Harcourt, who had warmly espoused the cause of the government and the bill. At the beginning of 1875 Gladstone carried into effect the resolution which he had announced a year before, and formally resigned the leadership of the Liberal party. He was succeeded by Lord Hartington, afterwards duke of Devonshire. The learned leisure which Gladstone had promised himself when released from official responsibility was not of long duration. In the autumn of 1875 an insurrection broke out in Bulgaria, and the suppression of it by the Turks was marked by massacres and outrages. Public indignation was aroused by what were known as the “Bulgarian atrocities,” and Gladstone flung himself into the agitation against Turkey with characteristic zeal. At public meetings, in the press, and in parliament he denounced the Turkish government and its champion, Disraeli, who had now become Lord Beaconsfield. Lord Hartington soon found himself pushed aside from his position of titular leadership. For four years, from 1876 to 1880, Gladstone maintained the strife with a courage, a persistence and a versatility which raised the enthusiasm of his followers to the highest pitch. The county of Edinburgh, or Midlothian, Midlothian campaign. which he contested against the dominant influence of the duke of Buccleuch, was the scene of the most astonishing exertions. As the general election approached the only question submitted to the electors was—Do you approve or condemn Lord Beaconsfield’s foreign policy? The answer was given at Easter 1880, when the Liberals were returned by an overwhelming majority over Tories and Home Rulers combined. Gladstone was now member for Midlothian, having retired from Greenwich at the dissolution.
When Lord Beaconsfield resigned, the queen sent for Lord Hartington, the titular leader of the Liberals, but he and Lord Granville assured her that no other chief than Gladstone would satisfy the party. Accordingly, on the 23rd of April he became prime minister for the second time. His second administration, of which the main achievement was the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural labourers, was harassed by two controversies, relating to Ireland and Egypt, which proved disastrous to the Liberal party. Gladstone alienated considerable masses of English opinion by his efforts to reform the tenure of Irish land, and provoked the Irish people by his attempts to establish social order and to repress crime. A bill to provide compensation for tenants who had been evicted by Irish landlords passed the Commons, but was shipwrecked in the Lords, and a ghastly record of outrage and murder stained the following winter. A Coercion Bill and a Land Bill passed in 1881 proved unsuccessful. On the 6th of May 1882 the newly appointed chief secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his under-secretary, Mr Burke, were stabbed to death in the Phoenix Park at Dublin. A new Crimes Act, courageously administered by Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan, abolished exceptional crime in Ireland, but completed the breach between the British government and the Irish party in parliament.
The bombardment of the forts at Alexandria and the occupation of Egypt in 1882 were viewed with great disfavour by the bulk of the Liberal party, and were but little congenial to Gladstone himself. The circumstances of General Gordon’s untimely death awoke an outburst of indignation against those who were, or seemed to be, responsible for it. Frequent votes of censure were proposed by the Opposition, and on the 8th of June 1885 the government were beaten on the budget. Gladstone resigned. The queen offered him the dignity of an earldom, which he declined. He was succeeded by Lord Salisbury.
The general election took place in the following November. When it was over the Liberal party was just short of the numerical strength which was requisite to defeat the combination of Tories and Parnellites. A startling surprise was at hand. Gladstone First Home Rule Bill. had for some time been convinced of the expediency of conceding Home Rule to Ireland in the event of the Irish constituencies giving unequivocal proof that they desired it. His intentions were made known only to a privileged few, and these, curiously, were not his colleagues. The general election of 1885 showed that Ireland, outside Ulster, was practically unanimous for Home Rule. On the 17th of December an anonymous paragraph was published, stating that if Mr Gladstone returned to office he was prepared to “deal in a liberal spirit with the demand for Home Rule.” It was clear that if Gladstone meant what he appeared to mean, the Parnellites would support him, and the Tories must leave office. The government seemed to accept the situation. When parliament met they executed, for form’s sake, some confused manœuvres, and then they were beaten on an amendment to the address in favour of Municipal Allotments. On the 1st of February 1886 Gladstone became, for the third time, prime minister. Several of his former colleagues declined to join him, on the ground of their absolute hostility to the policy of Home Rule; others joined on the express understanding that they were only pledged to consider the policy, and did not fetter their further liberty of action. On the 8th of April Gladstone brought in his bill for establishing Home Rule, and eight days later the bill for buying out the Irish landlords. Meanwhile two members of his cabinet, feeling themselves unable to support these measures, resigned. Hostility to the bills grew apace. Gladstone was implored to withdraw them, or substitute a resolution in favour of Irish autonomy; but he resolved to press at least the Home Rule Bill to a second reading. In the early morning of the 8th of June the bill was thrown out by thirty. Gladstone immediately advised the queen to dissolve parliament. Her Majesty strongly demurred to a second general election within seven months; but Gladstone persisted, and she yielded. Parliament was dissolved on the 26th of June. In spite of Gladstone’s skilful appeal to the constituencies to sanction the principle of Home Rule, as distinct from the practical provisions of his late bill, the general election resulted in a majority of considerably over 100 against his policy, and Lord Salisbury resumed office. Throughout the existence of the new parliament Gladstone never relaxed his extraordinary efforts, though now nearer eighty than seventy, on behalf of the cause of self-government for Ireland. The fertility of argumentative resource, the copiousness of rhetoric, and the physical energy which he threw into the enterprise, would have been remarkable at any stage of his public life; continued into his eighty-fifth year they were little less than miraculous. Two incidents of domestic interest, one happy and the other sad, belong to that period of political storm and stress. On the 25th of July 1889 Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage, and on the 4th of July 1891 his eldest son, William Henry, a man of fine character and accomplishments, died, after a lingering illness, in his fifty-second year.
The crowning struggle of Gladstone’s political career was now approaching its climax. Parliament was dissolved on the 28th of June 1892. The general election resulted in a majority of forty for Home Rule, heterogeneously Second Home Rule Bill. composed of Liberals, Labour members and Irish. As soon as the new parliament met a vote of want of confidence in Lord Salisbury’s government was moved and carried. Lord Salisbury resigned, and on the 15th of August 1892 Gladstone kissed hands as first lord of the treasury. He was the first English statesman that had been four times prime minister. Parliament reassembled in January 1893. Gladstone brought in his new Home Rule Bill on the 13th of February. It passed the House of Commons, but was thrown out by the House of Lords on the second reading on the 8th of September 1893. Gladstone’s political work was now, in his own judgment, ended. He made his last speech in the House of Commons on the 1st of March 1894, acquiescing in some amendments introduced by the Lords into the Parish Councils Bill; and on the 3rd of March he placed his resignation in the queen’s hands. He never set foot again in the House of Commons, though he remained a member of it till the dissolution of 1895. He paid occasional visits to friends in London, Scotland and the south of France; but the remainder of his life was spent for the most part at Hawarden. He occupied his leisure by writing a rhymed translation of the Odes of Horace, and preparing an elaborately annotated edition of Butler’s Analogy and Sermons. He had also contemplated some addition to the Homeric studies which he had always loved, but this design was never carried into effect, for he was summoned once again from his quiet life of study and devotion to the field of public controversy. The Armenian massacres in 1894 and 1895 revived all his ancient hostility to “the governing Turk.” He denounced the massacres and their perpetrators at public meetings held at Chester on the 6th of August 1895, and at Liverpool on the 24th of September 1896. In March 1897 he recapitulated the hideous history in an open letter to the duke of Westminster.
But the end, though not yet apprehended, was at hand. Since his retirement from office Gladstone’s physical vigour, up to that time unequalled, had shown signs of impairment. Towards the end of the summer of 1897 he began to suffer from an acute pain, which was attributed to facial neuralgia, and in November he went to Cannes. In February 1898 he returned to England and went to Bournemouth. There he was informed that the pain had its origin in a disease which must soon prove fatal. He received the information with simple thankfulness, and only asked that he might die at home. On the 22nd of Death. March he returned to Hawarden, and there he died on the 19th of May 1898. During the night of the 25th of May his body was conveyed from Hawarden to London and the coffin was placed on a bier in Westminster Hall. Throughout the 26th and 27th a vast train of people, officially estimated at 250,000, and drawn from every rank and class, moved in unbroken procession past the bier. On the 28th of May the coffin, preceded by the two Houses of Parliament and escorted by the chief magnates of the realm, was carried from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey. The heir-apparent and his son, the prime minister and the leader of the House of Commons, were among those who bore the pall. The body was buried in the north transept of the abbey, where, on the 19th of June 1900, Mrs Gladstone’s body was laid beside it.
Mr and Mrs Gladstone had four sons and four daughters, of whom one died in infancy. The eldest son, W. H. Gladstone (1840-1891), was a member of parliament for many years, and married the daughter of Lord Blantyre, his Family. son William (b. 1885) inheriting the family estates. The fourth son, Herbert John (b. 1854), sat in parliament for Leeds from 1880 to 1910, and filled various offices, being home secretary 1905-1910; in 1910 he was created Viscount Gladstone, on being appointed governor-general of united South Africa. The eldest daughter, Agnes, married the Rev. E. C. Wickham, headmaster of Wellington, 1873-1893, and later Dean of Lincoln. Another daughter married the Rev. Harry Drew, rector of Hawarden. The youngest, Helen, was for some years vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.
After a careful survey of Mr Gladstone’s life, enlightened by personal observation, it is inevitable to attempt some analysis of his character. First among his moral attributes must be placed his religiousness. From those early Character. days when a fond mother wrote of him as having been “truly converted to God,” down to the verge of ninety years, he lived in the habitual contemplation of the unseen world, and regulated his private and public action by reference to a code higher than that of mere prudence or worldly wisdom. A second characteristic, scarcely less prominent than the first, was his love of power. His ambition had nothing in common with the vulgar eagerness for place and pay and social standing. Rather it was a resolute determination to possess that control over the machine of state which should enable him to fulfil without let or hindrance the political mission with which he believed that Providence had charged him. The love of power was supported by a splendid fearlessness. No dangers were too threatening for him to face, no obstacles too formidable, no tasks too laborious, no heights too steep. The love of power and the supporting courage were allied with a marked imperiousness. Of this quality there was no trace in his manner, which was courteous, conciliatory and even deferential; nor in his speech, which breathed an almost exaggerated humility. But the imperiousness showed itself in the more effectual form of action; in his sudden resolves, his invincible insistence, his recklessness of consequences to himself and his friends, his habitual assumption that the civilized world and all its units must agree with him, his indignant astonishment at the bare thought of dissent or resistance, his incapacity to believe that an overruling Providence would permit him to be frustrated or defeated. He had by nature what he himself called a “vulnerable temper and impetuous moods.” But so absolute was his lifelong self-mastery that he was hardly ever betrayed into saying that which, on cooler reflection, needed to be recalled. It was easy enough to see the “vulnerable temper” as it worked within, but it was never suffered to find audible expression. It may seem paradoxical, but it is true, to say that Mr Gladstone was by nature conservative. His natural bias was to respect things as they were. In his eyes, institutions, customs, systems, so long as they had not become actively mischievous, were good because they were old. It is true that he was sometimes forced by conviction or fate or political necessity to be a revolutionist on a large scale; to destroy an established Church; to add two millions of voters to the electorate; to attack the parliamentary union of the kingdoms. But these changes were, in their inception, distasteful to their author. His whole life was spent in unlearning the prejudices in which he was educated. His love of freedom steadily developed, and he applied its principles more and more courageously to the problems of government. But it makes some difference to the future of a democratic state whether its leading men are eagerly on the look-out for something to revolutionize, or approach a constitutional change by the gradual processes of conviction and conversion.
Great as were his eloquence, his knowledge and his financial skill, Gladstone was accustomed to say of himself that the only quality in which, so far as he knew, he was distinguished from his fellow-men was his faculty of concentration. Whatever were the matter in hand, he so concentrated himself on it, and absorbed himself in it, that nothing else seemed to exist for him.
A word must be said about physical characteristics. In his prime Gladstone was just six feet high, but his inches diminished as his years increased, and in old age the unusual size of his head and breadth of his shoulders gave him a slightly top-heavy appearance. His features were strongly marked; the nose trenchant and hawk-like, and the mouth severely lined. His flashing eyes were deep-set, and in colour resembled the onyx with its double band of brown and grey. His complexion was of an extreme pallor, and, combined with his jet-black hair, gave in earlier life something of an Italian aspect to his face. His dark eyebrows were singularly flexible, and they perpetually expanded and contracted in harmony with what he was saying. He held himself remarkably upright, and even from his school-days at Eton had been remarked for the rapid pace at which he habitually walked. His voice was a baritone, singularly clear and far-reaching. In the Waverley Market at Edinburgh, which is said to hold 20,000 people, he could be heard without difficulty; and as late as 1895 he said to the present writer: “What difference does it make to me whether I speak to 400 or 4000 people?” His physical vigour in old age earned him the popular nickname of the Grand Old Man.