128 Facts About William Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician.

William Gladstone served as Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, serving over 12 years.

William Gladstone first entered the House of Commons in 1832, beginning his political career as a High Tory, a grouping which became the Conservative Party under Robert Peel in 1834.

William Gladstone was chancellor under Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell.

Back in office in early 1886, William Gladstone proposed home rule for Ireland but was defeated in the House of Commons.

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William Gladstone formed his last government in 1892, at the age of 82.

William Gladstone left office in March 1894, aged 84, as both the oldest person to serve as Prime Minister and the only prime minister to have served four non-consecutive terms.

William Gladstone left Parliament in 1895 and died three years later.

William Gladstone was named after a close friend of his father, William Ewart, another Liverpool merchant and the father of William Ewart, later a Liberal politician.

William Gladstone's father was made a baronet, of Fasque and Balfour, in 1846.

William Gladstone's grandfather Thomas Gladstones was a prominent merchant from Leith, and his maternal grandfather, Andrew Robertson, was Provost of Dingwall and a Sheriff-Substitute of Ross-shire.

In 1815, William Gladstone travelled to London and Cambridge for the first time with his parents.

William Gladstone was educated from 1816 to 1821 at a preparatory school at the vicarage of St Thomas' Church at Seaforth, close to his family's residence, Seaforth House.

In 1821, William Gladstone followed in the footsteps of his elder brothers and attended Eton College before matriculating in 1828 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Classics and Mathematics, although he had no great interest in the latter subject.

William Gladstone served as President of the Oxford Union, where he developed a reputation as an orator, which followed him into the House of Commons.

At university, William Gladstone was a Tory and denounced Whig proposals for parliamentary reform.

When William Gladstone was 22 the Duke of Newcastle, a Conservative party activist, provided him with one of two seats at Newark where he controlled about a fourth of the very small electorate.

William Gladstone displayed remarkably strong technique as a campaigner and stump speaker.

William Gladstone won his seat at the 1832 United Kingdom general election with 887 votes.

William Gladstone wanted gradual rather than immediate emancipation, and proposed that slaves should serve a period of apprenticeship after being freed.

William Gladstone opposed this and said in 1832 that emancipation should come after moral emancipation through the adoption of an education and the inculcation of "honest and industrious habits" among the slaves.

William Gladstone helped his father obtain £106,769 in official reimbursement by the government for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations in the Caribbean.

In 1844 William Gladstone broke with his father when, as President of the Board of Trade, he advanced proposals to halve duties on foreign sugar not produced by slave labour, in order to "secure the effectual exclusion of slave-grown sugar" and to encourage Brazil and Spain to end slavery.

Sir John William Gladstone, who opposed any reduction in duties on foreign sugar, wrote a letter to The Times criticizing the measure.

William Gladstone emerged as a fierce critic of the Opium Wars, which Britain waged to re-legalise the British opium trade into China, which had been made illegal by the Chinese government.

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William Gladstone publicly lambasted the wars as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgements of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840.

William Gladstone criticised it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace".

William Gladstone was responsible for the Railways Act 1844, regarded by historians as the birth of the regulatory state, of network industry regulation, of rate of return regulation, and telegraph regulation.

William Gladstone succeeded in guiding the Act through Parliament at the height of the railway bubble.

William Gladstone initiated the Coal Vendors Act 1843, which set up a central office for employment.

William Gladstone resigned in 1845 over the Maynooth Grant issue, which was a matter of conscience for him.

In December 1845, William Gladstone returned to Peel's government as Colonial Secretary.

In 1847 William Gladstone helped to establish Glenalmond College, then The Holy and Undivided Trinity College at Glenalmond.

William Gladstone aided the House of Mercy at Clewer near Windsor and spent much time arranging employment for ex-prostitutes.

William Gladstone became concerned at the political situation in Naples and the arrest and imprisonment of Neapolitan liberals.

In February 1851 William Gladstone visited the prisons where thousands of them were held and was extremely outraged.

The income tax had legally expired but William Gladstone proposed to extend it for seven years to fund tariff reductions:.

William Gladstone wanted to maintain a balance between direct and indirect taxation and to abolish income tax.

William Gladstone knew that its abolition depended on a considerable retrenchment in government expenditure.

William Gladstone therefore increased the number of people eligible to pay it by lowering the threshold from £150 to £100.

The more people that paid income tax, William Gladstone believed, the more the public would pressure the government into abolishing it.

Matthew has written that William Gladstone "made finance and figures exciting, and succeeded in constructing budget speeches epic in form and performance, often with lyrical interludes to vary the tension in the Commons as the careful exposition of figures and argument was brought to a climax".

William Gladstone had to increase expenditure on the military and a vote of credit of £1,250,000 was taken to send a force of 25,000 to the front.

William Gladstone served until 1855, a few weeks into Lord Palmerston's first premiership, and resigned along with the rest of the Peelites after a motion was passed to appoint a committee of inquiry into the conduct of the war.

In 1858, William Gladstone took up the hobby of tree felling, mostly of oak trees, an exercise he continued with enthusiasm until he was 81 in 1891.

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In 1859, Lord Palmerston formed a new mixed government with Radicals included, and William Gladstone again joined the government as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to become part of the new Liberal Party.

William Gladstone inherited a deficit of nearly £5,000,000, with income tax now set at 5d.

William Gladstone argued that "In time of peace nothing but dire necessity should induce us to borrow".

Usually not more than two-thirds of a tax imposed could be collected in a financial year so William Gladstone therefore imposed the extra four pence at a rate of 8d.

William Gladstone's dividing line set up in 1853 had been abolished in 1858 but William Gladstone revived it, with lower incomes to pay 6½d.

The next year, William Gladstone included the abolition of paper duty in a consolidated Finance Bill to force the Lords to accept it, and accept it they did.

William Gladstone steadily reduced Income tax over the course of his tenure as Chancellor.

William Gladstone believed that government was extravagant and wasteful with taxpayers' money and so sought to let money "fructify in the pockets of the people" by keeping taxation levels down through "peace and retrenchment".

William Gladstone's popularity rested on his taxation policies which meant to his supporters balance, social equity and political justice.

When Mr William Gladstone visited the North, you well remember when word passed from the newspaper to the workman that it circulated through mines and mills, factories and workshops, and they came out to greet the only British minister who ever gave the English people a right because it was just they should have it.

When Mr William Gladstone appeared on the Tyne he heard cheer no other English minister ever heard.

When William Gladstone first joined Palmerston's government in 1859, he had opposed further electoral reform, but he changed his position during Palmerston's last premiership, and by 1865 he was firmly in favour of enfranchising the working classes in towns.

William Gladstone was forced to clarify in the press that his comments in Newcastle had not been intended to signal a change in Government policy, but to express his belief that the North's efforts to defeat the South would fail, due to the strength of Southern resistance.

In May 1864 William Gladstone said that he saw no reason in principle why all mentally able men could not be enfranchised, but admitted that this would only come about once the working classes themselves showed more interest in the subject.

Russell and William Gladstone attempted to pass a reform bill, which was defeated in the Commons because the "Adullamite" Whigs, led by Robert Lowe, refused to support it.

The Conservatives then formed a ministry, in which after long Parliamentary debate Disraeli passed the Second Reform Act of 1867; William Gladstone's proposed bill had been totally outmanoeuvred; he stormed into the Chamber, but too late to see his arch-enemy pass the bill.

William Gladstone was furious; his animus commenced a long rivalry that would only end on Disraeli's death and William Gladstone's encomium in the Commons in 1881.

William Gladstone stood for South West Lancashire and for Greenwich, it being quite common then for candidates to stand in two constituencies simultaneously.

William Gladstone became Prime Minister for the first time and remained in the office until 1874.

William Gladstone broke off briefly to declare My mission is to pacify Ireland before resuming his exertions.

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William Gladstone was associated with the Charity Organization Society's first annual report in 1870.

William Gladstone instituted abolition of the sale of commissions in the army: he instituted the Cardwell Reforms in 1869 that made peacetime flogging illegal.

William Gladstone secured passage of the Ballot Act for secret ballots, and the Licensing Act 1872.

William Gladstone's leadership led to the passage of the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 restructuring the courts to create the modern High Court and Court of Appeal.

William Gladstone unexpectedly dissolved Parliament in January 1874 and called a general election.

William Gladstone's proposals went some way to meet working-class demands, such as the realisation of the free breakfast table through repealing duties on tea and sugar, and reform of local taxation which was increasing for the poorer ratepayers.

William Gladstone was attracted by its international success in majestic traditions.

William Gladstone claimed that this decree had placed British Catholics in a dilemma over conflicts of loyalty to the Crown.

William Gladstone urged them to reject papal infallibility as they had opposed the Spanish Armada of 1588.

William Gladstone described the Catholic Church as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience".

William Gladstone further claimed that the Pope wanted to destroy the rule of law and replace it with arbitrary tyranny, and then to hide these "crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense".

William Gladstone was opposed to socialism after 1842, when he heard a socialist lecturer.

Pamphlet William Gladstone published on 6 September 1876, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, attacked the Disraeli government for its indifference to the Ottoman Empire's violent repression of the Bulgarian April uprising.

William Gladstone made clear his hostility focused on the Turkish people, rather than on the Muslim religion.

Historian Geoffrey Alderman has described William Gladstone as "unleashing the full fury of his oratorical powers against Jews and Jewish influence" during the Bulgarian Crisis, telling a journalist in 1876 that: "I deeply deplore the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East".

William Gladstone similarly refused to speak out against the persecution of Romanian Jews in the 1870s and Russian Jews in the early 1880s.

William Gladstone saw the war as "great dishonour" and criticised British conduct in the Zulu War.

William Gladstone condemned what he saw as the Conservative government's profligate spending:.

William Gladstone is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called saving candle-ends and cheese-parings.

William Gladstone is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend.

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William Gladstone won his constituency election in Midlothian and in Leeds, where he had been adopted as a candidate.

William Gladstone originally intended to retire at the end of 1882, the 50th anniversary of his entry into politics, but did not do so.

William Gladstone's term saw the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the First Boer War, and the war against the Mahdi in Sudan.

On 11 July 1882, William Gladstone ordered the bombardment of Alexandria, starting the short, Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882.

William Gladstone's decision came against strained relations with France, and maneuvering by "men on the spot" in Egypt.

William Gladstone passed the Second Land Act which gave Irish tenants the "3Fs"—fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale.

William Gladstone extended the vote to agricultural labourers and others in the 1884 Reform Act, which gave the counties the same franchise as the boroughs—adult male householders and £10 lodgers—and added six million to the total number of people who could vote in parliamentary elections.

William Gladstone was increasingly uneasy about the direction in which British politics was moving.

William Gladstone found contemporary Liberalism better, "but far from being good".

William Gladstone claimed that this Liberalism's "pet idea is what they call construction, —that is to say, taking into the hands of the state the business of the individual man".

Critics said William Gladstone had neglected military affairs and had not acted promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon.

William Gladstone resigned as Prime Minister in June 1885 and declined Queen Victoria's offer of an earldom.

In 1886 William Gladstone's party allied with Irish Nationalists to defeat Lord Salisbury's government.

William Gladstone regained his position as Prime Minister and combined the office with that of Lord Privy Seal.

William Gladstone, says his biographer, "totally rejected the widespread English view that the Irish had no taste for justice, common sense, moderation or national prosperity and looked only to perpetual strife and dissension".

The problem for William Gladstone was that his rural English supporters would not support home rule for Ireland.

William Gladstone supported the London dockers in their strike of 1889.

William Gladstone was impressed with workers unconnected with the dockers' dispute who "intended to make common cause" in the interests of justice.

William Gladstone believed that the right to combination used by British workers was in jeopardy when it could be denied to Irish workers.

The passage William Gladstone alluded to was one where Spencer had spoken of "the behaviour of the so-called Liberal party".

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William Gladstone opposed increasing public expenditure on the naval estimates, in the tradition of free trade liberalism of his earlier political career as Chancellor.

In January 1894, William Gladstone wrote that he would not "break to pieces the continuous action of my political life, nor trample on the tradition received from every colleague who has ever been my teacher" by supporting naval rearmament.

William Gladstone had his last audience with Queen Victoria on 28 February 1894 and chaired his last Cabinet on 1 March—the last of 556 he had chaired.

William Gladstone retained his seat in the House of Commons until 1895.

William Gladstone was not offered a peerage, having earlier declined an earldom.

William Gladstone is both the oldest person to form a government—aged 82 at his appointment—and the oldest person to occupy the Premiership—being 84 at his resignation.

On 2 January 1897, William Gladstone wrote to Francis Hirst on being unable to draft a preface to a book on liberalism: "I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism".

William Gladstone met Queen Victoria, and she shook hands with him for the first time in the 50 years he had known her.

William Gladstone riposted "It was enough to make Peel and Cobden turn in their graves".

William Gladstone was obliged to be in bed, and he was ordered to remain there, but the time had come for the confession of sin and the receiving of absolution.

William Gladstone died on 19 May 1898 at Hawarden Castle, Hawarden, aged 88.

William Gladstone had been cared for by his daughter Helen who had resigned her job to care for her father and mother.

The day after, both Houses of Parliament approved the Address and Herbert William Gladstone accepted a public funeral on behalf of the William Gladstone family.

William Gladstone's coffin was transported on the London Underground before his state funeral at Westminster Abbey, at which the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York acted as pallbearers.

William Gladstone's intensely religious mother was an evangelical of Scottish Episcopal origins, and his father joined the Church of England, having been a Presbyterian when he first settled in Liverpool.

William Gladstone rejected a call to enter the ministry, and on this his conscience always tormented him.

In 1838 William Gladstone nearly ruined his career when he tried to force a religious mission upon the Conservative Party.

William Gladstone announced that since that church possessed a monopoly of religious truth, nonconformists and Roman Catholics ought to be excluded from all government positions.

Sir Robert Peel, William Gladstone's chief, was outraged because this would upset the delicate political issue of Catholic Emancipation and anger the Nonconformists.

William Gladstone altered his approach to religious problems, which always held first place in his mind.

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William Gladstone hated Nonconformists and Welsh Nonconformists in particular and he had no real sympathy with the working classes.

William Ewart Gladstone was the greatest political figure of the nineteenth century.

Since 1937, William Gladstone has been portrayed some 37 times in film and television.