GLADSTONE, WILLIAM EWART. - English statesman, b. 29 Dec. 1809, d. 19 May 1898 at Hawarden. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian, he had from childhood a most vivid religious feeling, strengthened in him during his years of study at Eton and at Oxford. He entered political life and was elected a Conservative Party member of parliament in 1833, thus beginning a brilliant career.
Secretary of State for the Colonies in Peel's cabinet, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855, he abandoned the Conservatives in 1859 and joined the Liberal Party. President of the Council of Ministers four times (from 1868 to 1874; from 1880 to 1885; in 1886; and from 1892 to 1894), he carried out various reforms. He took a great interest in relations between State and Church (in 1838 he published the work The State in its relation to the Church, in which the latter was subordinated to the public authority) and in the Roman question, and, although he was personally convinced of the need to abolish the pope's temporal power, he was well aware of the moral importance of the papacy, further supporting a policy of open tolerance toward Catholics. Therefore in 1851 he opposed in Parliament the bill "On Ecclesiastical Titles," presented in response to the new organization of diocesan boundaries carried out by Pius IX, because such a bill was in his view contrary to the principle of religious freedom, and he obtained its repeal twenty years later, when he was in power.
In 1865 he set out to Fr. Tosti his ideas on the solution of the Roman question, striving to find a compromise between the demands of Italian national and unitary feeling and the dignity of the visible Head of the Church: "assuring to the latter the fullest and most absolute freedom and independence and at the same time revenues in keeping with the dignity of the See of Rome. Always under those guarantees, the king of Italy would also be, with full and perpetual independence, the vicar, forever and irrevocably, of all those States that were, or are, papal, taking upon himself all secular, financial and municipal affairs; with the condition, however, that no Government, beyond the municipality and the necessary administrative offices, have the faculty of 'locating' itself in Rome without the consent of the pope, that is to say that Florence would remain the civil capital."
G. took a great interest in raising up the economic conditions of Ireland and worked to obtain autonomy for the island (home rule). It was during a stay in Naples that he came to know and denounced to the public the conditions of the political prisoners under Ferdinand II (1851) in order to create in Europe an unfavorable current against the King. His vibrant protests also had wide resonance.
Bibliography4 works
Vegezzi and the great concordat proposed by G. to Fr. Luigi Tosti, ibid., 185 (1916), pp. 322-43; R. Craemer, G. als christlicher Staatsmann, Berlin-Leipzig 1930 (with bibl.); C. Gordon Lang, Mr. G. and the Oxford movement, in The nineteenth century 114 (1933), pp. 374-84; E. Eyck, G., Zurich 1938.
Silvio Furlani