Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics

by Ian St John

Overview

This book provides a thorough analysis of the political career of William Gladstone, one of the most intriguing figures in modern British history.  ‘Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics’ captures the incredible richness of Gladstone’s political journey, tracing his evolution from Tory defender of a theocratic Anglican state to great reforming Liberal Prime Minister, always prepared to champion the ‘masses against the classes’.  Each stage in Gladstone’s development is assessed in the light of recent historiographical debates and his own fascinating explanations of his conduct.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843318729
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Series:	Anthem Perspectives in History
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ian St John has taught history at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in Hertfordshire since 2000. His chief research interests are in Victorian history.

Read an Excerpt

Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics

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By Ian St John

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Ian St John
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-394-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE YOUNG TORY

Although born in Liverpool, Gladstone hardly exaggerated when he declared that there is 'not a drop of blood runs in my veins except what is derived from a Scottish ancestry'. Gladstone's grandfather was a corn dealer in Edinburgh. His son John Gladstone (William's father) left Scotland for Liverpool in 1787 and extended the corn trade to North America and the Baltic. He also purchased slave plantations in the West Indies, on which sugar was produced. As his wealth grew, he moved to a succession of larger houses, and it was at 62 Rodney Street, Liverpool, that William was born on 29 December 1809. John Gladstone's wealth – which in 1851 stood at £750,000 (equivalent to around £60m today) – meant he could afford to enter the House of Commons by purchasing the right to represent a series of Rotten Boroughs. Although making little impact in Parliament, he did come into contact with leading politicians of the day. Originally a Whig, he became a Pittite Tory and in 1812 helped to arrange for the Tory George Canning to become MP for Liverpool. It was during that year that young William, still less than three, was exhibited to the future Prime Minister upon a visit to his home – and Canning, and the brand of Liberal Toryism he represented (defined by Gladstone while at Eton as 'the friend of Improvement, and the enemy of Innovation'), retained a powerful resonance into middle age.

Gladstone was born into a household governed by an earnest Evangelical faith – a form of religion emphasising the individual's personal relationship with Jesus Christ and dwelling upon the reality of sin, guilt, and judgement as the devotee continually questioned whether they were worthy of salvation. Considerable importance was attached to regular family prayers, the reading of the Bible and close attention to church sermons. This spiritual background stayed with Gladstone throughout his life: concepts such as judgement, providence, conscience and atonement structured his understanding of the world and his place within it. The leading figure in the family's religious devotion was his pious but rather sickly mother Anne, whose roots lay in the Scottish Episcopalian Church. John Gladstone, though converting from Scottish Presbyterianism to the Church of England, was rather less concerned with the doctrinal rigours of faith, and William was perturbed when on his death bed he requested not Holy Communion but a bowl of porridge.

This was the business-like and rather earnest atmosphere into which William, the fourth son in a family of six, was born. In his early years, he was left much to himself, and what formal education he received was from an Evangelical vicar, the Reverend Rawson, who was brought by John Gladstone from Cambridge to preach the 'pure Gospel of Jesus' at the Church he had built by his Seaforth estate. Gladstone's education really began when he went to Eton in 1821. Arrival at the school confirmed Gladstone's entry into the upper echelons of English society – which was, of course, why John Gladstone sent three of his sons there. It was now that he began the habit of methodical hard work. The dominant study at Eton was Latin and Greek, and Gladstone acquired a mastery of both, as well as French. In 1825 he was elected to the Eton debating society. Besides his formal studies, Gladstone was a voracious reader of books and pamphlets on politics, history, theology, fiction and science, each work he read being recorded in his diary. Where his businessman father accounted for every penny spent, Gladstone recorded every precious minute his Maker vouchsafed him.

From Eton Gladstone proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, which was then by far the dominant college, politically and socially. The College had a proprietary hold upon one of the two Oxford seats in Parliament, and the atmosphere was strongly Tory with Liverpool, Canning and Peel having all studied there. Gladstone applied himself diligently and emerged in 1831 with a Double First in Classical Literature and Mathematics. He read intensively, for up to 10 hours a day, his favourite author being Aristotle.

Yet two other aspects of Oxford life were as important as formal study. One was religion. During this period Gladstone began, tentatively, to depart from the simple Evangelicalism of his childhood towards a more High Church perspective. Where he had previously viewed religion in terms of individual faith in God, he came to attach greater importance to the mediating role of the Church of England, whose teaching and liturgy were necessary for a full appreciation of the Christian truth. This was a slow process. The first step was acceptance of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration – the view that through baptism an individual's sins could be cleansed and their soul saved, an idea that clashed with the Evangelical emphasis upon personal conversion. Even so, Gladstone's essential Evangelicalism meant that he had little sympathy with the theology of such figures as Keble and Newman, who were shortly afterwards to lead the Oxford Movement. It was only in 1832, after he had left Oxford, that during a visit to St Peter's in Rome he was affected by an awareness of the 'unity in the Church': 'From this time on I began to feel my way by degrees into or towards a true notion of the Church'. By this he meant two things. First, the High Church conviction that the Church of England, though separated from Rome, remained a part of the universal Catholic Church in that it administered the major sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, followed the same creed and possessed bishops and priests who could trace their line via the Roman Catholic Church to the apostles. Second, that the Church occupied a more exalted position in the Christian life than was admitted by Evangelicalism, since its creed, rituals and teachings served as the medium through which individuals could approach the truths of Christianity. The Church of England was, in other words, the essential educator of the English people in matters of faith, and it was vital that its ability to discharge this responsibility be upheld. Gladstone never looked for a union of the Anglican Church with Rome. He always believed the Anglican Church was best suited to promoting Christianity among the English and followed his early mentor, William Palmer, in upholding the importance of the post-Reformation alliance between Church and State. As such, he resisted the Tractarian pull towards Rome that powerfully affected many of those he knew at Oxford, including Newman and Manning, who came to see the Church of England as existing in an essentially schismatic relationship to Roman Catholicism.

Politics was another preoccupation of Gladstone's student career. He was an active member of the Oxford Union debating society, becoming its President in 1830. What really provoked his ire were the Whig proposals for electoral reform. The more he contemplated them, the more he panicked, and he became, says Bebbington, 'the fiercest foe of parliamentary reform in his generation at Oxford'. Britain's system of government, in which the dominant place was occupied by the monarchy and aristocracy, had served the country well and there was no reason to imperil this achievement and push the nation towards unrest through the adoption of 'new, pestilent, impracticable theories'. Gladstone campaigned actively against the Reform Bill during the 1831 election in Oxford, and in May 1831 he denounced the Bill in a famous three-quarters-of-an-hour long speech at the Oxford Union. It was, he said, a 'monstrous' measure which threatened 'not only to change the form of our government, but ultimately to break up the very foundations of the social order'. Government rested upon the divine will, and human opinion was of no account in the matter. To those who heard the speech, like Wordsworth's nephew, it was the 'most splendid ... that was ever heard in our Society'. Looking back in 1878 at the opening of a Liberal Club in Oxford, a more critical Gladstone reflected: 'Perhaps it was my own fault, but I must admit that I did not learn when I was at Oxford that which I have learned since – namely, to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principle of human liberty.'

Entry into Politics

The Oxford Union speech brought Gladstone, via the recommendation of his friend Lord Lincoln, to the notice of his father, the Duke of Newcastle. Newcastle, who controlled several seats and was an implacable opponent of Reform (being the originator of that notorious defence of the privileges of property: 'Have I not a right to do what I like with my own?'), invited the 22-year-old Gladstone to contest his Nottinghamshire seat of Newark in the Tory interest. This caused Gladstone something of a dilemma, since he had been meditating a career in the Church and had composed a 4,000 word letter to his father upon the subject. Yet John Gladstone's ambitions for his son did not encompass the career of a clergyman, and he discouraged any such idea. Gladstone did not return to the issue and reconciled the tension by concluding that entry into public life was the best way to defend the Church of England against the attacks of the Whigs and Utilitarians that were sure to follow the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. Among Anglicans he was far from alone in these gloomy forebodings: in Oxford the reactions of Keble, Newman and Pusey to the Liberal ascendancy were equally alarmist and ushered in the counter-movement of Tractarianism.

The election in December 1832 was the first under the reformed franchise. Newark's electorate was 1,600, and the cost of drinks, food and other bribes ran to £2,000. But Gladstone made a strong impression upon the constituency and did not shy away from outlining an early version of his theories on the relations of Church and State. In his electoral address, he wrote that to restore social stability in the wake of the Reform Bill crisis, the nation must revert to 'sounder general principles', and in particular, 'that principle on which alone the incorporation of Religion with the State in our constitution can be defended; that the duties of governors are strictly and peculiarly religious; and that legislatures, like individuals, are bound to carry throughout their acts the spirit of the high truths they have acknowledged'. Whatever the electorate made of Gladstone's vision of a Christian polity, he topped the poll and took his seat in January 1833 at the age of 23.

Gladstone entered the Commons as one of only around 174 Tory MPs to survive the Whig-Radical landslide of 1832. Believing that the world was on the verge of a 'grand struggle between the principles of good and evil', Gladstone quickly established a reputation for being an orthodox Tory. In his maiden speech in June, he opposed a Bill for the immediate abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire and defended his own father against allegations of cruelty with regard to the slaves on his West Indian plantations. The defence of the West Indian plantation interest was to be a prominent feature of Gladstone's parliamentary career during the 1830s, and though invariably on the losing side, his speeches impressed by their command of factual detail and robust argument. In addition, Gladstone spoke or voted against the admission of Jews to Parliament, the admission of Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge, the use of the ballot in Parliamentary elections (ascribing the fall of the Roman Republic to the secret suffrage), the use of superfluous funds of the Irish Church for secular purposes and against the repeal of the Corn Laws.

In December 1834 Gladstone experienced a taste of office when, following William IV's dismissal of the Whigs, the new Prime Minister, Robert Peel, made him a Junior Lord of the Treasury and then, following a General Election, Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Since the Colonial Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, sat in the House of Lords, Gladstone was responsible for speaking on Colonial matters in the Commons. In the process, he formed a close working relationship with Aberdeen, the future Peelite leader, of whom he later said that he was 'the man in public life of all others whom I have loved'. Gladstone's tenure of office was short-lived, however, as the minority Tory Government fell in April 1835 – which for the apocalyptic Gladstone meant the loss of 'the last ordinary, available, natural resource against the onset of revolution'.

But whilst Gladstone's political career progressed, his main interest remained with questions of religion, and in particular, the relationship between religion and politics. It was in these years that Gladstone, in conjunction with his friends Henry Manning and James Hope, moved to a committed High Churchmanship. This had considerable implications for his politics, since by attaching ever greater importance to the role of the Church of England, Gladstone was led to the conclusion that the best way he could serve God was to assert the Church's claim to occupy a privileged position within the state. This did not merely involve a defence of the existing prerogatives of the Church; it meant a belief that the Government should be much more explicitly guided by the Church's teaching than it had been over recent decades. To vindicate this proposition, Gladstone leant heavily upon a concept of religious nationality. Under the influence of Coleridge, Gladstone believed that nation states were living, organic entities with their own religious personalities and moral responsibilities. A state, like an individual, had a duty to distinguish between right and wrong. Now, England's religious and moral personality was uniquely expressed by the Church of England. The Church of England was the right conscience of the English state – which was why it was established and why that establishment must be defended against the attacks of Non-conformists, Radicals, Catholics and others who would want to break it.

Gladstone elaborated these views in his 1838 book, The State in its Relations with the Church. The manuscript was hastily written over the summer – an act 'foolish' and 'potentially dangerous,' says Jenkins, 'for a young and at least half-ambitious politician', especially given that it was 'a delicate subject on which he held extreme views'. Even in the 1830s Gladstone's ideas seemed anachronistic. The liberal historian Macaulay wrote a famous slashing review, while Peel, when shown a copy, threw it in the fire, declaring: 'That young man will ruin a fine career if he persists in writing trash like this!' Within a few years Gladstone was indeed to find the book an embarrassment.

So, by the late 1830s, Gladstone had established himself as one of the most gifted and interesting of younger Conservatives. He had already served effectively in Government and had consolidated his reputation as an impressive parliamentary speaker. In the words of Magnus:

He was a singularly graceful speaker, and his wealth of language appeared to be as inexhaustible as the memory upon which it drew. He was always saturated with his subject ... The most attractive feature of his oratory was the melodious voice, which was much the finest organ of its kind in Parliament ... He combined in an unusual degree the arts of exposition and debate. He had an unerring instinct for the weak points in an opponent's argument, and he would swoop upon them, like a hawk.

Yet Gladstone's political career had still to come into focus. His political movements continued to be deflected by the powerful gravitational pull of religion. As he explained in 1839 to his soon-to-be wife Catherine Glynne, he would have preferred to have become a clergyman and was instead embarked upon an attempt to make political life more Christian. To hold to such an ambition in 1832 spoke of a youthful naivety; to retain such a goal in 1839, after the frosty reception accorded to Church and State and his general exposure to the worldly atmosphere of Westminster, might well betoken an idealism bordering upon the delusional. It was Peel's great service to extricate Gladstone from his theocratic cul-de-sac by the expedient of sending him to the Board of Trade.

Gladstone's Conservatism

Although Gladstone consistently resisted Whiggish causes, his Toryism was never of the merely negative die-hard variety. He believed, says Bebbington, that:

the political battles being fought around him were fundamentally ideological ... The tendencies of the age that he abhorred were the result of principles that had to be combated. A revitalized Tory Party would have to stand for a set of convictions or else be swept away by the tide of history.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics by Ian St John. Copyright © 2010 Ian St John. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction; The Young Tory; From High Tory to Reforming Peelite 1841-51; The Struggle for Peelite Finance 1851-1855; Years of Decision 1855-59; Gladstonian Finance 1859-1866; The Ascent to Leadership 1865-1868; 'I Ascend a Steepening Path': Prime Minister 1868-74; Gladstone’s Foreign Policy 1868-1880; Gladstonian Liberalism; Gladstone's Second Government 1880-1885: Foreign and Domestic Policy; Gladstone and Ireland 1880-1885; Gladstone and Irish Home Rule; Gladstone, 1886-1898: Raging against the Dying of the Light; Gladstone: A Study in Victorian Dialectic; Notes; Bibliography; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'In this lucid, clearly-organised and engaging study, Ian St John explores the intellectual convictions, religious beliefs and powerful impulses which shaped the complex temperament and extraordinary career of William Gladstone, the dominating political presence of 19th century Britain. Drawing on the latest research, St John presents a convincing and compelling portrait of the Victorian statesman who defined the aspirations and anxieties of his age, thereby providing a valuable and timely guide for all students of the period.' —Dr Angus Hawkins, Director, Public & International Programmes, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, England

'Ian St John’s earlier work on Disraeli gave ample evidence that here was an historian capable of reconciling the demands of scholarship and accessibility, and ‘Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics’ more than repeats the feat. Integrating an analysis of high political manoeuvre with the life of both Gladstone’s mind and spirit, St John has produced a substantial volume which will reward the ambitious sixth former and undergraduate alike.' —David Cooper, Tutor to the Academic Scholars, Tonbridge School, England

Editorial Reviews

‘A lucid and clearly presented analysis of the ways in which scholars have approached and interpreted the great Victorian.’ —Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘Victorian Studies’

‘…St John provide[s] a detailed examination of the multiple turns and twists in Gladstone’s 60 plus years in public life. In the course of doing so he provides a thorough evaluation of the recent outpouring of Gladstonian literature. St John does this with assurance and welcome clarity...’ —Russ Foster, ‘History Review’

‘The author provides frequent summaries and analyses throughout the text. One can read the work straight through, but readers can also go to specific sections and find them clearly laid out and summarized. In this regard, it would well serve any academic community. Recommended.’ —P. T. Smith, Saint Joseph’s University, ‘Choice’

From the Publisher