William Ewart Gladstone
The Heart and Soul of a Statesman
By Michael Wheeler
Oxford, 240 pages, $40
William Ewart Gladstone was among the best-known figures of the Victorian age. Four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; the Grand Old Man of late 19th-century politics; perpetual irritant to Queen Victoria (who much preferred Benjamin Disraeli’s wily flattery to Gladstone’s unbending rectitude): Gladstone was a political colossus. He was also a committed and devout Christian, whose faith imbued every aspect of his personal, family, and public life.
Michael Wheeler sees Gladstone’s life and career through the prism of his faith. Referring throughout to William (his subject’s baptismal name), Wheeler portrays Gladstone in part as a priest manque who delivered weekly homilies to his household and whose public utterances frequently blurred the boundary between speech and sermon. All this is true, and speaks to the earnestness of Victorian religious life, but it should not be taken as a sign of regret on Gladstone’s part about the path he chose.
Early in his life, Gladstone made the considered decision that the best way he could serve God was by training as a lawyer and entering public life as a politician. The young Charles Grafton (featured elsewhere in this edition) had precisely the same debate with himself, before reaching a different conclusion. Subsequent events seem to suggest that each man made the right choice.
Gladstone was typically Victorian in keeping extensive diaries, the contents of which were not available to his earliest biographers. Wheeler makes extensive use of these in drawing out the spiritual elements of his subject’s life. An example is the occasion when Gladstone confided that he had undergone half a century of “grace & glory, sin & shame, hopes, fears, joys, pains, emotions, labours, effort.” In this regard, Gladstone surely speaks for longstanding Christians of every age, including ours. In other respects, however, Gladstone was remarkable, if not unique.
Perhaps the most extraordinary—and notorious—of Gladstone’s activities was what Wheeler calls his “rescue work”: late-night visits to prostitutes with the (supposed) aim of saving them from what was universally considered their fallen state. Gladstone’s many biographers have dealt with this thorny topic with varying degrees of naiveté on the one hand and prurience on the other.
Wheeler, appropriately, draws on the diaries to consider the spiritual consequences at some length, including Gladstone’s repeated reproach of himself for the besetting sin of “impurity” (not an unusual term in similar documents of the time). Gladstone’s political career is dealt with more briefly and less directly—for those with an interest in this, the work of Colin Matthew remains the most authoritative, and the biography by Roy Jenkins the most accessible.
What of the content of Gladstone’s faith? He was a committed Anglo-Catholic, heavily influenced by the ideas of the Oxford Movement, and a friend or acquaintance to most of its leading players. Later in life he became more sympathetic to what Wheeler calls “liberal Catholicism,” although that phrase did not mean then what it does now.
Wheeler presents as paradox the fact that Gladstone journeyed from the conservative politics of his early career to the liberalism that came to define him, whilst theologically he remained a high churchman (and thus implicitly conservative) throughout his life. In fact, the two are inextricably linked.
Gladstone was concerned with the religious integrity of the Church of England, which is to say its freedom from state interference. This was a concern of Anglo-Catholics from 1833 onward, and was precisely what led Gladstone to conclude that the old Tory settlement of church and state as different sides of the same coin could no longer stand.
Even where an established church remains, the role of the state is to ensure religious liberty for all, not to privilege (and by extension to control the affairs of) one denomination above another. In this regard, as in many others, Gladstone was ahead of his time, and it was his consistent Anglo-Catholicism that led him there.
In the words of J.P. Ellens, whose Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism is authoritative on this, Gladstone’s Anglo-Catholicism “led him to embrace liberalism,” causing him to embark on a “pilgrimage from an Anglican politics to merely being an Anglican in politics.”
This compact volume is part of the Spiritual Lives series by Oxford University Press, featuring biographies of prominent men and women who are not known primarily for their religiosity. Other entries in the series include Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. If they, like Gladstone, revive interest in the importance of taking lay vocation seriously, then they will join this volume in serving a valuable purpose.
The Rev. Ian McCormack, SSC, is priest associate at Church of the Advent, Boston, and Director of Grafton House.
