GLADSTONE, WILLIAM EWART. – English statesman, b. 29 December 1809, d. 19 May 1898 at Hawarden. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian, he possessed from childhood a very keen religious sensibility, which was strengthened in him during his years of study at Eton and Oxford. He entered political life and was elected as a deputy of the Conservative Party in 1833, thus beginning a brilliant career.
Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Peel Cabinet and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855, in 1859 he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal Party. Prime Minister four times (from 1868 to 1874; from 1880 to 1885; in 1886; and from 1892 to 1894), he implemented various reforms. He took a great interest in relations between Church and State (in 1838 he published the work The State in its relation to the Church, in which the Church was subordinated to public authority) and in the Roman question; and, although he was personally convinced of the necessity of abolishing the pope’s temporal power, he was well aware of the papacy’s moral importance, while also advocating a policy of open tolerance toward Catholics. Thus, in 1851, he opposed in Parliament the bill “On Ecclesiastical Titles,” introduced in response to the new arrangement of diocesan districts carried out by Pius IX, because he considered the bill contrary to the principle of religious liberty; and he secured its repeal twenty years later, when he was in power.
In 1865 he expounded to Fr. Tosti his ideas concerning the solution of the Roman question, striving to find a compromise between the demands of Italian national and unitarian sentiment and the dignity of the visible Head of the Church: “by assuring the latter the fullest and most absolute freedom and independence, together with revenues befitting the dignity of the See of Rome. Always under those guarantees, the king of Italy would himself also be, with full and perpetual independence, the vicar, forever and irrevocably, of all those States that were, or are, papal, taking charge of all secular, financial, and municipal affairs; on the condition, however, that no Government, beyond the municipality and the necessary administrative offices, should have the power to ‘locate itself’ in Rome without the pope’s consent, that is to say, that Florence would remain the civil capital.”
G. took a great interest in improving Ireland’s economic conditions and worked to obtain autonomy (home rule) for the island. It was during a stay in Naples that he learned of and denounced publicly the condition of political prisoners under Ferdinand II (1851), in order to create an adverse current against the King in Europe. His vehement protests likewise produced a broad response.