Gladstone was prime minister four times and left office at 84
William Gladstone began in Parliament as a High Tory opposed to reform and ended as the embodiment of Victorian Liberalism. He led four separate governments between 1868 and 1894, more than any other British prime minister, and resigned for the last time at 84, still the oldest person to hold the job.
Gladstone was born in Liverpool in 1809, one of several sons of John Gladstone, a rich trader from Scotland who owned plantations worked by enslaved people and sat as a Tory. His roots were entirely Scottish. An early memory was being stood on a table to address a crowd, probably at an 1812 election rally for George Canning. At Eton and then Christ Church, Oxford, he took a double first in classics and mathematics and sharpened his oratory as president of the Oxford Union, where in 1831 he spoke against Whig plans for parliamentary reform.
Elected in 1832, he served in both of Robert Peel's governments and followed Peel's breakaway faction, which in 1859 merged into the new Liberal Party. He was chancellor of the exchequer four times in all, pushing lower taxes, free trade and equal opportunity, a creed that became known as Gladstonian liberalism. His first ministry, from 1868, disestablished the Church of Ireland and introduced the secret ballot.
Defeated in 1874, he stepped down as leader, then returned on a wave of moral outrage over Ottoman massacres in Bulgaria. His Midlothian speaking tour of 1879 and 1880 is counted as Britain's first modern election campaign, and working-class admirers called him the People's William. His second government widened the vote with the Third Reform Act but fell after public fury over General Gordon's death at Khartoum.
Ireland defined his final years. His 1886 home rule bill failed in the Commons and split the Liberals, keeping them largely out of power for two decades. A second bill in 1893 passed the Commons but was crushed in the Lords, and he resigned the next year. Admirers knew him as the Grand Old Man, while opponents turned the initials into God's Only Mistake. He sat as an MP for more than 60 years and died in 1898.
Source: William Ewart Gladstone
