Premiership of William Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone was Prime Minister of Great Britain on four separate occasions between 1868 and 1894. He was noted for his moralistic leadership and his emphasis on world peace, economical budgets, political reform and efforts to resolve the Irish Question. Gladstone saw himself as a national leader driven by a political and almost religious mission, which he tried to validate through elections and dramatic appeals to the public conscience. His approach sometimes divided the Liberal Party, which he dominated for three decades. Finally Gladstone split his party on the issue of Irish Home Rule, which he saw as mandated by the true public interest regardless of the political cost.

During the Christmas of 1867 The Earl Russell announced that he would not lead the Liberal Party at the next general election and so Gladstone succeeded him as Liberal Party leader. The resulting general election of 1868 (the first under the extended franchise enacted in the Reform Act 1867) returned a Liberal majority of 112 seats in the House of Commons.

As prime minister 1868 to 1874 Gladstone headed a Liberal Party that was a coalition of Peelites like himself, Whigs and radicals; Gladstone was now a spokesman for "peace, economy and reform."

Between 1870 and 1874 religious disputes played a major part in destroying the broad Liberal Party coalition. Disputes over education, Irish disestablishment, and the Irish universities showed the divergence between, on the one hand, Whigs, who wanted state control of education and the propagation of a nondenominational, morally uplifting Christianity, and on the other hand Gladstone and his supporters, who sought to guard religion's independence from a modernising civil power. This division struck a lasting blow to prospects of agreement on future policy over education and Ireland.

The first major reform Gladstone undertook was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland as embodied in the Irish Church Act 1869. This was followed by the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1870 which attempted to protect Irish tenants from unfair treatment from landlords by lending public money to tenants to enable them to buy their holdings. The Act limited landlords' powers to arbitrarily evict their tenants and established compensation for eviction, which varied according to the size of holdings and was not eligible for those evicted for failing to pay rents.

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