The 87th Roscoe Lecture - Lord Alton of Liverpool

8/8/2019 The 87th Roscoe Lecture - Lord Alton of Liverpool

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The 87th

Roscoe Lecture: St. George’sHall, Liverpool.

Lord Alton of Liverpool 27th October 2009.

Let me begin by saying why this Roscoe Lecture is being held now , why here

and why the university is sponsoring it.



Why now? This year is the bicentenary of Gladstone’s birth in 1809, at 62

Rodney Street, and a series of events have been organised to mark the

occasion. This lecture is among them.

Why Here? St. George’s Hall is a particularly appropriate venue for the

lecture because as a young 32 year-old MP Gladstone would have seen the

foundation stone laid in 1841 and have celebrated its completion and opening

in 18 54. For Gladstone this Hall was the scene of both political triumph and

disaster and it will be here on December 29th, the day of his birth in 1809 that

a wreath will be laid at his statue in the adjacent St. John’s Gardens.



The university’s interest revolves around its connection with William Roscoe,

after whom these lectures and its Foundation for Citizenship are named.

Gladstone’s childhood overlapped with Roscoe’s last years. He was 22 at the

time of Roscoe’s death in 1831 – and his father, John, was initially one of

Roscoe’s supporters.

Both men were quintessential good citizens – par excellence. The recipients of

our Good Citizenship awards follow in their footsteps.



This series of Roscoe Lectures has primarily been looking at the nature of

tyranny.

The trajectory of my remarks tonight will begin with a summary of Gladstone’s connections with Liverpool; then an overview of his achievements,

and, finally, some remarks about his role in opposing injustice and tyranny. In

preparing for tonight I consulted the Liverpool Record Office and the House

of Lords Library and thanks them for their help. I am also grateful to David

Llewellyn, Head of Drama at Liverpool John Moores University, whose

interventions will enliven the lecture.



My own interest in Gladstone began as a teenager. My first newspaper

interview appeared in 1968 under the headline: “If Only Gladstone Was Here.”

Four years later, now a student in Liverpool, I would be elected to represent

the City Council’s Low Hill Ward, where, at Hengler’s Circus in 1896 – two

years before his death - that Gladstone gave his last great speech.

In Parliament, I was privileged to represent part of the city of his birth and

part of the constituency, where for three years he served as Member of Parliament.

So, who was William Ewart Gladstone, this son of Liverpool, and what did

this city mean to him?



Born in the south east quarter of Liverpool, Gladstone came in to the world in

the same year as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Felix Mendelssohn and

Edgar Allen Poe.

In 1809 the Napoleonic Wars continued as Bonaparte defeated the Austrians,seized the Papal States, arrested Pope Pius VII, and took him to Liguria. In

the Peninsular War the British defeated the French at the Battle of La Coruna.



George III, who was descending into madness, was King. Two months before

Gladstone’s birth, he appointed Spencer Perceval as Tory Prime Minister in

place of the Whig Duke of Portland.

In 1812 Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons Hewas replaced by the Earl of Liverpool - serving as Prime Minister until 1827,

when one of Gladstone’s political heroes, and one-time Liverpool MP, George

Canning – whom Gladstone had known since childhood – came to office.



1809, the year of Gladstone’s birth, was two years after William Roscoe had

voted with William Wilberforce in the House of Commons to end the trans-

Atlantic slave trade; and 24 years before the final Abolition Act would be

passed by Parliament.

All of Gladstone’s childhood and early life was shaped by the debates about

the morality of the slave trade. As the battle lines became shaped around

religious arguments the Gladstone family would find themselves torn between

their adherence to evangelical Christianity and to their family’s principal

source of income.



It was wealth from the trade that had enabled Gladstone’s father, John, to

purchase the handsome property in Rodney Street, in the city’s elegant south

east quarter, where William, the fifth of six children was born.

Although he never traded in slaves much of John Gladstone’s wealth wasderived from the West Indian sugar plantations in Demerara, worked by slave

labour.



The trade was the engine that was fuelling Liverpool’s exponential growth. In

the year of Gladstone’s birth the city’s population was 94,000 – up from

60,000 in 1792, and it would continue to grow rapidly.



Although John Wesley described it as ‘One of the neatest, best built towns I haveever seen in England’ the burgeoning city became characterised by an

avaricious provincial barbarism based on the naked accumulation of

wealth. The last letter penned by the dying founder of Methodism was an

exhortation to the young William Wilberforce to make the elimination of the

trade his life’s work.

In his childhood reminiscences Gladstone recalled the picturesque nature of

the white winged vessels waiting to catch the winds out of Liverpool but these

great sailing ships represented something much darker;



and as the young Gladstone grew up he would have encountered the anti-

slavery movement – and its leading figures, Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson

and the lawyer Granville Sharp.



He would have known of the conversion of the Liverpool sea captain – andcomposer of Amazing Grace, John Newton, who died two year before

Gladstone’s’ birth

and he would have heard the stories of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavas Vassa) –

the escaped slave who had died in 1797, having published an autobiographical

account of life as a slave, and who had risked his life by speaking at public

gatherings in cities like Liverpool.



The indefatigable Clarkson had abandoned his Divinity studies at Cambridge

and would devote sixty years of his life combating slavery – organising

meetings and disseminating across Britain pamphlets and Wedgwood

brooches depicting a chained slave and bearing the words “Am I Not a Man

and a Brother?”



Mass petitions were submitted to Parliament and boycotts organised of sugar

from plantations such as those owned by the Gladstone family.

Posters were made to depict life on the slave ships – vessels like the notoriousZong from which 132 slaves were thrown to their deaths in 1783.



In Liverpool Clarkson acquired the implements used to chain and torture

slaves taking them to huge rallies and public meetings where he sought to

rouse the conscience of the nation.



This first human rights campaign would set the tone for the mass movements

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

From 1783 until 1793, 878 round trips were made by Liverpool slaving ships,

carrying over 300,000 slaves from Africa to the West Indies. They were sold

for a profit of £15,186,850.



In the triangle of trade between Europe, Africa and America, vast numbers of

people were uprooted and displaced into bondage: in the 18th century: 6

million people were transported from Africa; by the 1850s, as Gladstone

reached middle age, the figure was put at 12 million

– some historians put the figure as high as 40 million men, women and

children.



John Newton, captain of Liverpool slave ships, wrote in his Journal of a Slave

Trader: “I have no sufficient data to warrant calculation but I suppose not less than

100,000 slaves are annually exported from all parts of Africa and that more than

one half of these are exported in English ships.”

William Roscoe in a 35 page poem published in 1787, The Wrongs of Africa,

wrote



“Blush ye not to boast your equal laws, your just restraints, your rights defined,

your liberties secured, Whilst with an iron hand ye crush to earth the helpless African; and bid him

drink That cup of sorrow, which yourselves have dashed, Indignant, from oppression’s

fainting grasp.”



At the time of the vote on February 23rd, 1807, Hansard records that:

“I have, said the hon. gentleman, Mr. Roscoe, long resided in the town of

Liverpool; for 30 years I have never ceased to condemn this inhuman traffic; and I

consider it the greatest happiness of my existence to lift up my voice on this

occasion against it, with the friends of justice and humanity.”

Roscoe returned to Liverpool on May 2nd 1807, the day after the abolition of

the trade became law. His public entry was disastrous. A combination of

enraged slave traders and religious zealots – who reviled Roscoe because he

had championed Catholic relief – assailed Roscoe as he stepped from hiscoach and horses in the city’s Castle Street.

Although he would never be returned to Parliament again, Lord Holland, not

only spoke for his Cabinet colleagues, but for many sympathisers of the Whig

cause, when he wrote to Roscoe to say that his “rejection at Liverpool is



considered by us all as one of the greatest disgraces to the country, as well as

misfortunes to the party, that could have happened.”

John Gladstone, a principal opponent of Roscoe, certainly did not see it that

way. John was himself one of seventeen children, born in 1764, and of Scottish

Presbyterian descent. He migrated to Liverpool in 1787. A childless widower,

in 1800 he married another Scot, Anne Robertson, at St. Peter’s Church,

Liverpool.

As his family grew, he built a formidable trading empire and embraced his

wife’s evangelical Anglicanism – which created a tension with Wilberforce’s

anti-slavery movement. He built three churches – “the Scotch Church” in

Oldham Street, St. Andrew’s in Rodney Street,



and a third church, St. Thomas’, at Seaforth, where, in 1815, on the border of

Crosby and Bootle, the family took up residence in the palatial Seaforth

House. By 1820 John was worth a staggering three quarters of a million

pounds.

But it was at Rodney Street that the young Gladstone had his first political

encounters.



In 1812, John Gladstone was one of the merchant princes who invited George

Canning to accept the Tory nomination for the Liverpool constituency. There

were four candidates for two seats but, in reality, it became a duel between Canning and the Whig candidate, Henry Brougham.

They were the two greatest orators of their age and were two of the brightest

stars in the political galaxy. John Gladstone, now alienated by Roscoe’s

intellectualism and opposition to the slave trade, deserted the Whigs to

support Canning.



One year before the election William Roscoe wrote and published a 32 page

letter to his friend Brougham. It encouraged Brougham to support full

blooded parliamentary reform and it became the basis of the arguments that

raged in the election of the following year.

Roscoe insisted that Parliamentary reform was “essential to the safety and

preservation of the country.” He said: “The connection between a corrupt Parliament and bad measures is as certain as

cause and effect in any other instance; feel the truth of that unalterable maxim that

an evil tree cannot produce good fruit.”



He insisted that: “…Men of good and independent character should be returned and these men

should not have before them a continual temptation to desert their duty…they must

be free from partiality and corruption” To the House of Commons he wanted to see – in words that have a

contemporary resonance - “restored that degree of independence and integritywhich is indispensably necessary to enable it to perform its functions and to

maintain its proper dignity and influence in the State.” Each day in the 1812 election the candidates poured forth their verbal assaults

on each other at the Liverpool hustings and either pressed for

uncompromising reform or warned of the dangers to the constitution should

reform be sanctioned.



Every evening the crowds gathered to hear them declaim from the windows of

their houses – Brougham staying in Clayton Square and Canning staying with

the Gladstones in Rodney Street. William Gladstone’s earliest memory was as

a three year old being dressed up in a red frock and asked to utter the words

“ladies and gentleman” as the diverting and beguiling warm-up prior to theappearance of the great orator Canning. Canning went on to win the 1812

election and was duly elected and served as a Liverpool MP until 1823.

Gladstone was finishing his school days at Eton when in 1827 Canning died in

post as Prime Minister. He purchased a bust and portrait of Canning,

composed a memorial verse, and before returning to Seaforth visited the

Statesman’s grave at Westminster Abbey.

After the meteoric rise which followed Eton, at Christ Church, Oxford, where

he walked away with the finest academic prizes, Gladstone increasingly

emulated Canning and, after some glittering performances at the OxfordUnion, was elected as its President.



One of his detractors later remarked that he was “Oxford on top, and

Liverpool below” – which might, when properly considered, well account for

Gladstone’s phenomenal political success.

Always something of an outsider, one potential spouse reputedly told her

mother: “I cannot marry a man who carries a bag like that” while Emily Eden

complained: there is “something in the tone of his voice and his way of coming

into a room that is not aristocratic.

However, Gladstone’s workmanlike approach to his public life did win some

admirers from those same circles. His trenchant opposition to the 1832

Reform Bill brought him to the attention of the Duke of Newcastle – who

offered him his patronage and the rotten borough seat of Newark.



At the age of 23, Gladstone, with 887 votes, entered the House of Commons.

His maiden speech was in the 1833 debate on the Bill abolishing slavery in

British dominions, and it was a defence of plantation owners in the West

Indies. Among those accused of cruelty in his treatment of his slave workers

was the young MP’s father, John Gladstone.

Lord Howick described the manager of the Gladstone plantations as “a

murderer of slaves.”



A few days after the Abolition Bill was passed, Gladstone’s friend, HenryWilberforce, took him to the deathbed of his father.

William. Gladstone prayed with William Wilberforce and ten days later he

attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey. Gladstone said: “It brought me

solemn thoughts, particularly about the slaves. This is a burdensome question.”Just as he later embraced the cause of wider electoral representation,

Gladstone renounced his support of slavery and admitted that Wilberforce

had profoundly affected him: “I can see plainly enough the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject.” Many changes were now occurring in Gladstone’s life – personally and

politically.



In 1839, the young Gladstone married Catherine Glynne, of Hawarden

Castle. Between 1839 and 1854 Catherine had nine pregnancies, including

one miscarriage.

Politically, his support for Sir Robert Peel during the battles over the Corn

Laws led the Duke of Newcastle – an ardent protectionist – to withdraw hispatronage and Gladstone lost his Newark seat –



now becoming MP for the university seat of Oxford. As Gladstone became preoccupied with great theological questions England

was also undergoing radical change.

Since his childhood Liverpool and the surrounding region had altered beyondrecognition. In particular, the consequences of the potato blight of 1848 had

been catastrophic. During “the great starvation” of the Irish Famine the population of Ireland

had halved. One million people had died and three million emigrated – many

getting little further than Liverpool “the gateway to America.”



In 1847, the Irish Nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell had begged the House

of Commons to save the starving and he described a country that had become

a land of corpses and walking skeletons. In February 1847, in his last speech to the Commons, a tottering O’Connell,

told Parliament:

“Ireland is in your hands….She is in your power….If you do not save her she

cannot save herself. And I solemnly call on you to recollect that I predict with

the sincerest conviction that one quarter of her population will perish unless you

come to her relief.”



Parliament did not come to her relief and in the year of that prophetic speech,

the year of O’Connell’s death, 17,280 mainly Irish people were recorded as

dying in the town of Gladstone’s birth. There were also 20,000 street children.

Dr. Duncan, the city’s outstanding public health officer estimated that 100,000

people were living in abject conditions. 3,000 had been tightly packed into the

Workhouse – which stood on the site of today’s Metropolitan Cathedral, and

there was room for no more. As typhus raged, fever sheds were erected to

isolate the afflicted and two ships were moored in the River Mersey as

lazarettos.

In 1846, two days before Christmas, in 1846, Sarah Burns, an Irishwoman

and mother of seven, died after complaining of pains in her head and chest. At

the inquest it was revealed that in three days she had eaten only a scrap of

bread. The Coroner said of her Liverpool home:



“The floor was composed of mud; in that hovel there were seventeen human

beings crowded together without even so much as a bit of straw to lie down on.” In April 1847, during one week, in the St. Mary’s parish, just up the hill from

this Hall, and close to this university’s Learning Resource Centre, there were

166 burials; 105 were children. Typhus was compounded by hunger.

In May 1847, 8-year-old Luke Brothers died. His post mortem revealed that

there “was not the least particle of food in his stomach.” The typhus was

followed by cholera.

It would not be until November 24th 1998 that the first memorial to the

thousands of Liverpool victims of the Irish famine was unveiled in Liverpool –

in the grounds of St. Luke’s Church in Bold Street. The memorial was

unveiled by President Mary McAleese, who later the same day gave the eighth

Roscoe Lecture here in St. George’s Hall.



Although, even by standards of Victorian squalor, the situation in Liverpool

was appalling, all over Britain the scars of industrialisation and poverty were

to be seen in the lives of vast numbers of people. In their novels, Charles

Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell shone a light into the twilight worlds of the

Victorian poor.

Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was published in 1848.

Mary Barton with its cast of working-class characters and its interest in

Chartism, the emerging trades union movement and social issues, including

the consequences of industrialisation and poverty, shocked Victorian society

and provoked political debate. Mrs. Gaskell had men like Gladstone in her

sights when she wrote, in Mary Barton,

“What thoughtful heart can look into this gulf

That darkly yawns 'twixt rich and poor,And not find food for saddest meditation!”



The situation did produce thought both for meditation and for action.

In Liverpool, Dr. Duncan, Major Lester and Canon James Nugent – two of

whom are commemorated here in St. John’s Gardens – became the heroes of

the hour – and the relief of poverty, public laundries, district nurses and social

provision all became manifest. The Victorian virtues are often caricatured as hypocrisy to cover Victorian

vices - but taken as a species the Victorian age produced some extraordinary

generosity of spirit –

philanthropists like Rowntree, Peabody and Cadbury.



Gladstone once said that “No man ever became great or good except through

many and great mistakes” and he along with other eminent Victorians had all

the same human failings as our own generation. We criticise Victorians for

trying to hide their vices from public view – and Gladstone pre-eminently

represented this approach to life – but this was driven by a belief in the

principles of private and public morality – a belief held by the unskilled

classes as much as it was held by the middle classes. Family and home were

repositories of personal and civic virtues. Gladstone became the most

eminent representative of these beliefs which is why he achieved such anextraordinary empathy with the masses, but he was no cheap populist and he

passionately believed it when he proclaimed: “Nothing that is morally wrong

can be politically right.”

When Gladstone extolled the Arthur of the Victorian Poet Laureate, Alfred

(Lord) Tennyson, who, in Idylls of the King, described his Arthur as “a selfless



man and stainless gentleman…the great pillar of the moral order”, he had in

mind the proto-type for the perfect Victorian. He dispensed the advice that we

should “Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you

won't have to hunt for happiness. Gladstone’s parliamentary constituencies of Newark and Oxford University

had, for different reasons, constrained him and restricted his ability to take

his values to the masses. That was about to change. In 1865 he lost his Oxford constituency as a result of the opposition of clerical

graduates following his attack on the continued establishment of the Church

of Ireland. One month later he was then returned for the seat of South Lancashire – a

vast constituency which included the hundreds of West Derby and Salford.

He launched his Lancashire campaign at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall with

the words: “At last, my friends, I am come among you ‘unmuzzled.’” The industrialised urban electorate would now become the power base, for“the People’s William.”



His ability to reach the masses, and to give voice to their aspirations, changed

the nature of political campaigning, created a more representative form of

government, and arguably averted revolution by facilitating reform. Gladstone was now on his way to forming his first Government – but it wasn’t

plain sailing. Two years after winning South Lancashire, in a boundary re-organisation, the

vast seat was divided into two.

When the 1868 General Election was called Gladstone opted for the new

South West Lancashire seat which included the Liverpool suburbs

of Wavertree, West Derby, Old Swan and the towns of St. Helens, Bootle,

Leigh and Widnes – a total electorate of 350,000



Here, on the Plateau of Liverpool’s St. Georges’ Hall, the first recognisably

modern election campaign got underway. Crowds gathered on what The Times described on November 23rd as “a raw

and cold morning with some rain” to see the candidates nominated. The report

continued: “By the time Mr. Gladstone had to speak the crowd had reached

10,000 to 12,000 extending in a compact mass right across Lime Street…a

number of fellows on the Conservative side, some of whom if dress is any guide,

should have had a little more decency, conceived it to be their duty to put down

the speakers on the other side by sheer noise. Blowing horns, singing songs etc

were resorted to. No personal violence of any kind was attempted, and placards

and lampoons were rare, but witty.” Gladstone addressed the crowds here at St George’s Hall, at length, detailing

his record in government, setting forth his beliefs, and making a rousing pleafor support:

“And gentlemen, when with all possible respect to my opponents, I ask you to

vote for me, I am not asking you merely to give your approval to my

personal claims, which are nothing, or to give authority to my opinions, whichare of no account – I am asking you to confirm by your suffrages the recoded

verdict of the nation.



“….Some persons have said that you need not return me for South Lancashire

because I may sit somewhere else. They say that I had better go away from the

place where I was born, from the place where I was bred, from the place where

my family have been for 90 years, and where they still pursue the honourable

commerce of this country. You may just as well say, “I will turn a man out of his

proper house because someone else will have the charity to take him in as a

beggar or a vagrant.” I don’t, gentlemen, desire to be a parliamentary vagrant “…grant the request that I may have not merely a seat in Parliament, but that I

may be permitted and enabled to speak the words of truth and justice in theHouse of Commons, in the name and with the authority of the men of South-

West Lancashire (Loud cheering).” Gladstone never lacked in rhetoric – nor, in South West Lancashire, was he

without powerful allies. He had the active support of John Pemberton

Hayward, the Liverpool banker, Thomas Weld Blundell, and William

Rathbone (VI) –



who in 1882 would help to found University College Liverpool, the progenitor

of Liverpool University. Notwithstanding his formidable coalition of supporters Gladstone had to

contend with a well organised and ferocious campaign against him. Fuelled by

sectarianism – and deep antagonism to his support for Irish Catholics –

Gladstone had to contend with a formidable campaign organised by the

Orange Lodges.

On November 27th 1868 The Times reported that “Political rivalry had been

attended in his case with far more than usual personal animosity, and the

Lancashire Tories have fought rather against an enemy than an

opponent….Ever since the day Mr.Gladstone made the Irish Church an

imminent political question it has been known that his seat was far from safe.”



The Liverpool Daily Post announced that when the High Sheriff declared the

result, votes cast were: Mr. Cross, 7,729; Mr. Turner, 7,676; Mr. Gladstone,

7,415; and Mr. Grenfell, 6,939. In thanking his supporters the newspaper

reported that the vanquished Mr.Gladstone said “It is to me a matter of lively

satisfaction, which I can never lose, that I received a large majority of votes

within the district of Liverpool.”

Despite a massive swing throughout the country which had swept his Party to

power Gladstone had suffered defeat. Fortunately, in those times, a candidate

could stand in two parliamentary divisions simultaneously – and, without

seeking Gladstone’s approval, the Greenwich constituency association had

listed him as their second candidate in their two member seat. Defeated in Lancashire his success in Greenwich enabled him to become

Prime Minister and to form his first Administration. He remained in the office

until 1874.



He would frequently visit Liverpool and the region in the years which

followed but never again as a local MP. But, as I will remark at the end of this

lecture, it was to Liverpool that he would return to make the last great speech

of his life.

So much for Gladstone’s connections with Liverpool and how events in the

city of his birth shaped his life. Let me briefly try to summarise his central

achievements. At the conclusion of the 1868 election Gladstone retreated from Liverpool toHawarden Castle before returning to London. He received a telegram from

Queen Victoria saying that her secretary would shortly arrive with a

commission to form a government. He read the telegram and he continued to

fell trees. It was recorded that a few minutes later he “looked up and said with

great earnestness in his voice and great intensity in his face, exclaiming: “My

mission is to pacify Ireland.” He then resumed his task, and never said another

word until the tree was down.” On his return to the capital, he formed the first of four administrations in

which he served as Prime Minister – becoming Prime Minister at 58 years of age.



His life long legacy includes a remarkable record as Chancellor of the

Exchequer- presenting eleven budgets to Parliament; consistent support for

free trade and the shaping of structured fiscal policies; the “mission to pacify

Ireland” – which one hundred years later found its ultimate fulfilment in

Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement; the promotion of Home Rule

and devolution; his confrontation with the unelected House of Lords;

meritocratic reform – including public exams throughout almost all of the

civil service; the abolition of university religious tests; an appreciation of self

reliance and the role of faith in a secular society; the creation of a

recognisably modern and democratic political movement; his willingness to

confront and split his political party on an issue of principle; his heroic

legislation – on everything from free elementary education to the secret

ballot; and his ability to rouse the conscience of the nation, embracing causes

that challenged tyranny or injustice and promoting national crusades, such as

the Midlothian Campaign.



Many volumes have been written about Gladstone’s life. In 1995 the late Roy

Jenkins wrote his highly readable biography of Gladstone. He approached his

subject in much the same way as John Morley, who published “The Life of William Gladstone” in 1903. Most recently, in 2007, Richard Shannon added his brilliant “Gladstone, God

and Politics”- which re-examines Gladstone’s life from a different vantage

point and explains the Statesman’s political life against the backdrop of his

religious faith. Morely and Jenkins rightly argue that Gladstone was a greatleader of his party but Shannon argues that “Gladstone’s Liberalism was a

great problem for the Liberal Party” and says that without understanding

Gladstone as a religious leader, viewed simply from a purely partisan or

secular point of view, the story becomes distorted and makes no real sense - a

proposition with which I agree.



Gladstonianism diverged from the interventionist direction in which his party

had been moving: He was highly critical of the new Liberal“pet idea - what

they call construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the state the

business of the individual man". He wrote that Tory Democracy and this new

Liberalism had done "much to estrange me, and has done for many, manyyears."

In 1876 Gladstone recalled the proverb “Vox populi, vox Dei” – The people’s

voice, God’s voice. Religion, for Gladstone, was central to his personal life and

to that of the nation: “As to its politics, this country has much less, I think, to

fear than to hope; unless through a corruption of its religion – against which, asConservative or Liberal, I can perhaps say I have striven all my life long.”

These views won him the respect and support of the pioneering Christian

leaders of the Labour movement, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson and George

Lansbury along with Nonconformists, High Anglicans, and Irish Catholics.



In 1998 – the centenary year of Gladstone’s death, I invited Lord Jenkins togive the seventh Roscoe Lecture, entitled “Gladstone: A Consummate Victorian

Citizen”.

I asked him where he placed Gladstone in the pecking order of great Prime

Ministers: “When I began writing about him I thought he was a terrible prig. By the time I finished, I thought he was the greatest of our prime Ministers.” After publishing his masterly 2001 biography of Churchill, Lord Jenkins told

me that he had revised his opinion adding that Gladstone, unlike Churchill,had not been tested in war. Notwithstanding this caveat – and, in fact, as Chancellor Gladstone had

considerable experience of the Crimean War - Roy Jenkins added that

“Gladstone was, without question, the most remarkable specimen of humanity ever

to be in No10 Downing Street.”



Gladstone had plenty of faults – and his wife of sixty years, Catherine Glynne,

shrewdly remarked: “Oh, William dear, if you were not such a very great man,

what a bore you would be!” What made him great rather than a bore, were his

legendry energy, his formidable intellect, and passionate oratory. At 76 he climbed the highest peak in the Cairngorms;

at 86 he personally wheeled 30,000 of his books up the hill from Hawarden

Castle to his new library at St. Deiniol’s Library, and in his eighties he still

pursued his hobby of felling great oaks with one of the axes which visitors

frequently presented to him. His intellectual energy made him a voracious bibliophile, personally

annotating the books he read, and, sitting with his wife, as he translated the

Odes of Horace or the works of Homer, or reading his Bible – in the Greek –

as he did each day.



His oratory brought thousands to hear him – and shouters would pass the

words back through the crowds.

Queen Victoria hated his oratory, famously complaining that when he spoke

to her: “He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.” She remarked to

her daughter: “What an incomprehensible old man he is! Old Lord Palmerston

was not wrong when he said to me, “he is a very dangerous man.”

Punch contrasted Gladstone’s earnestness with Disraeli’s ability to flatter and

charm. In a speech in Liverpool (Hengler’s Circus) Gladstone asserted that “All the

world over, I will back the masses against the classes”. Little wonder Lord

Palmerston regarded him as a dangerous rabble rouser, stirring sedition with

his calls for the enlargement of the franchise and electoral reform. Disraeli

loathed him – and while the public nicknamed Gladstone “the People’s

William” and the G.O.M : the“Grand Old Man” Disraeli preferred to renderthis acronym as “God’s Only Mistake”



In a letter to Lord Derby, Disraeli venomously referred to Gladstone as“…that unprincipled maniac Gladstone – extraordinary mixture of envy,vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition.” He once accused Gladstone of

conduct that was worse than those who had committed the Bulgarian

atrocities.

Gladstone was little more admiring of his leading political adversary: “theTory Party had principles by which it would and did stand for, bad and for good.All this Dizzy destroyed.”



When Disraeli died, Gladstone proposed a State Funeral, but Disraeli's will

asked for burial alongside his wife, to which Gladstone replied, "As Disraelilived, so he died — all display, without reality or genuineness." Gladstone and Disraeli were the towering figures of Victorian politics. They

were political opponents whose dissonant outlook and attitudes, social and

cultural backgrounds, led to bitter rivalry and disagreement.

Gladstone’s decision to leave the Conservative Party and to become a Liberal

no doubt contributed to this animosity – although as late as 1870 in Dod’s

Parliamentary Companion Gladstone described himself as “liberal

conservative” – a label later used by Churchill and even David Cameron. Leaders from all sides of the political divide, including Margaret Thatcher

and Tony Blair, have laid claim to Gladstone’s mantle.



I have talked about his Liverpool upbringing and his central achievements.The last part of my remarks, today, turns to his abhorrence of tyranny and

his belief in the liberties of free peoples to determine their own destiny.

After his defeat in 1874 - having sought to raise revenue from Spirits and

Death Duties - and “borne down in a torrent of gin and beer” , as he put it – and

as head of a Government which Disraeli famously described as “a range of

exhausted volcanoes”, Gladstone resigned as Leader of the Liberal Party.

Disraeli formed a new Government.

A short period of quiet followed but Gladstone soon began publishing mildly

inflammatory pamphlets and embarking on a scathing critique of Disraeli’s

imperialism, warning of the dangers of a bloated empire.



Most memorably, in 1876 he published his “Bulgarian Horrors and theQuestion of the East” In a tirade against the tyranny of the Ottoman Turks in

the Balkans Gladstone used all his powers of rhetoric. Let me give you a

sample:

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely,

by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashisand Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage,

shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.

This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we

can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron

and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and

shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah to the moral sense of

mankind at large. ….



That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely

possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!” By 1879 he had decided to turn his moral indignation into a nationwide

clarion call.

He would contest the next election at Midlothian and from this began what

would become known as the Midlothian Campaigns (of 1879, 1880 and 1884).



In 1879 he gave 30 substantial speeches heard by an estimated 87,000 people;another 18 speeches followed in 1880 – and each was reported extensively in

the national newspapers. They were speeches for and from his constituency.

Throughout the Campaigns he argued that nations should reconcile their

differences through the Concert system, not secret alliances, that Britain

should assert a doctrine of “equal rights of all nations” and, in particular, he

condemned the brutality of the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subject

nations.

In the 1880 General Election Gladstone’s victory saw him back in office forfour years Now he had to deal with the “bloated empire” –

not least in the debacle in Sudan with Charles Gordon’s death at Khartoum

when the acronym G.O.M. (Grand Old Man) was turned on him by the

Conservatives who now called him M.O.G. (Murderer of Gordon).

The following year, 1886, Gladstone returned to office for a third time.



Now allied to the Irish Nationalists he sought to promote Irish Home Rule.

This policy split the Liberal Party and led to the Unionist breakaway. Within

months his Home Rule Bill had been defeated. Once again he was out of

Downing Street. He knew that the failure to provide an equitable settlement

for Ireland would have disastrous consequences: “We are bound to lose Ireland

in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would

rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.”

In 1892, at the next election, Gladstone returned for the fourth and final time.

Now aged 82 he became the oldest man to occupy the Prime Minister’s office.

He held the post for two years until resigning in 1894.



His resignation followed the defeat of his second Irish Home Rule Bill. It hadpassed all its stages in the Commons achieving a Second Reading majority of

43 but the House of Lords defeated it 419 votes to 41 – and ended both

Gladstone’s parliamentary career and any prospects of a peaceful settlement

of the Irish Question.

His mission to pacify Ireland would be put on hold for the best part of onehundred years and a civil war; partition; Stormont’s abuses and

discrimination; civil rights marches; British troops; Bloody Sunday; direct

rule; internment; hunger strikes; and decades of bombings and paramilitary

terror would be the consequence.

His last speech to the Commons came on March 1 st 1894 when he urged the

House to overturn the veto of the Lords. That day he also chaired the last of

his 556 cabinets. Because of the tears of his colleagues it became known as the

“blubbering cabinet”. Gladstone remained still and composed.

The following year, in 1895, he left the House.



But let me end where I began - in his home town of Liverpool.

On December 3rd, 1892, Gladstone returned to this St. George’s Hall and he

was given the freedom of the city. The presentation of a casket was made on

behalf of the Corporation by Robert Durning Holt, the Lord Mayor.

And, in a perfect act of symmetry, four years later, on September 24 th, 1896,

now aged 86, at Hengler’s Circus, in Low Hill, Gladstone gave his last public

speech.

In another two years he died of cancer.

The Hengler’s Circus speech came after a minor uprising in 1894, in Sasun, in

Turkish Armenia. Throughout 1895 a series of pogroms were carried out

throughout Turkey’s Armenian provinces – and even in the capital, Istanbul.



Gladstone took first hand accounts of the killings from Armenians whotravelled to Hawarden Castle, his home in North Wales. “the powers of

language hardly suffice to describe what has been and is being done, and

exaggeration, if we were ever so much disposed to it, is in such a case reallybeyond our power”

Gladstone reflected that only the enormity of the “sickening horrors”perpetrated against the Armenians, and “a strong sense of duty” could have

induced “a man of my age” to abandon what he called “the repose and quietude”

of his retirement to embark on what would be his last great mission.

“We are not dealing with a common and ordinary question of abuses of

government. We are dealing with something that goes far deeper…..four awful

words – plunder, murder, rape, and torture.”



By the time he came to speak in Liverpool, a year later – and where an

immense crowd of 6,000 people gathered to hear him – Gladstone knew that it

was his duty to rouse the conscience of the nation. The Times reported that

many more people thronged outside while The Liverpool Daily Post recordedthat the entire city turned out for him and had greeted him with “a tornado of

applause.” Such passion for great political questions is so often absent today.

In describing the “horribly accumulated outrages” he demanded a non-sectarian and non-partisan approach; and he also emphasised that “this is nocrusade against Mohammedanism”; that, whatever faith had been held by the

Armenians, “it would have been incumbent upon us with the same force and the

same sacredness” to speak out on their behalf.

With precision, Gladstone identifies and names the Ottoman Turkish Sultan,

Sultan Abdul Hamid II – “the assassin” - as responsible for the order to

massacre the Armenians; and he roundly condemns the European powers for

giving the Sultan “the assurance of impunity.” While believing that ideally

Europe should act together he bitterly criticised their failure to do so:

“Collectively, the powers have under-gone miserable disgrace…



"Translate the acts of the Sultan into words and they become these, 'I have tried your patience in distant places; I will try it under your own eyes. I have desolated my provinces; I will now desolate my capital. I have found that your sensitiveness

has not been effectually provoked by all that I have heretofore done; I will come

nearer to you and see whether ... I shall or shall not wake the wrath which hasslept so long.'"

When Europe failed to act, Gladstone said Britain had the right to act alone

and not “make herself a slave to be dragged at the chariot wheel of other powers

of Europe.”

Many of these same arguments have relevance and application in our own

times but so does the challenge which comes at the culmination of his

Hengler’s Circus address: he demands no ambiguity, no neutrality but

condemnation of crimes against humanity “which have already come to such a

magnitude and to such a depth of atrocity that they constitute the most terrible,



most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal

and deplorable history of human crime.” Gladstone was right to prophesy that indifference would lead to catastrophic

consequences. Seventeen years after his death, the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 would

become the first genocide of the twentieth century. Over one million men,

women and children were killed as the Ottoman Turks sought to entirely

erase the Armenian identity from eastern Turkey.

The belief that no-one really cares is what always encourages the tyrant.

Hitler believed he could invade Poland and do so with impunity: “who after

all,” he asked, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The same

rationale – a culture of impunity – led to the industrialised murders of the

concentration camps.

The folly of forgetting – collective amnesia about what has gone before – led to

Hitler’s ideology of a purified Master-Race. It was directly inspired by the

biological vision of a purified pan-Turkism, based on racial origins and racial

superiority; even his corruption of medicine and science drew inspirationfrom the deliberate infecting of Armenians with typhus in a sequence of

medical experiments.



If, in 1896 or 1915, the world had saved the Armenians – or after World WarOne held those responsible to account - would Hitler have believed that he

could act against the Jews with impunity? And might a holocaust have been

averted?

Perhaps, as we ponder the contemporary failure to end the continuing

massacre of people the world over – from Congo, to Burma, to Darfur – we

should lament the absence of statesman like Gladstone today.



After his death, on Ascension Day, 19

th

May, 1898, he was given a state funeraland was buried in the statesman’s corner of Westminster Abbey. Two years

later Catherine was laid to rest at his side.

Gladstone was mourned throughout Britain and hardly a town or city is

without a road or street named in his honour.

In this bicentenary year of his birth, as we revisit the life of this scourge of tyrants and great son of this city, it may be pointless to say “If only Gladstone

Was Here” – as I did when I was 17 - but it is far from pointless to hope that

through the study of his life and times we can inculcate a new generation with

his sense of political purpose, his high calling, and his passionate belief that we

must confront tyranny in all its forms.



Gladstone knew that the best we can sometimes do is to put down markers for

the future, memorably asserting that “We look forward to the time when the

power to love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the

blessings of peace.” Perhaps we can share his optimistic belief in the final

outcome recalling his words that whatever the short-term defeats “you cannot

fight against the future. Time is on our side.”

The 87th Roscoe Lecture - Lord Alton of Liverpool

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