Benjamin Disraeli is back in fashion. The dapper Earl of Beaconsfield, twice prime minister under Queen Victoria, makes a comeback whenever conservatives of a certain bent—toward “national greatness” rather than “limited government”—go hunting for a genealogy. Writing in the Weekly Standard, David Gelernter hailed him as “the inventor of modern conservatism” and “a 19th-century neocon.” Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Book Review editor with a hobbyist’s interest in the Right, has urged conservatives to rediscover Disraeli’s tradition, which he believes best represented in recent years by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Disraeli may be every liberal’s favorite conservative, but his great rival, William Ewart Gladstone, is an orphan: too much the classical liberal for today’s Left, too anti-imperialist for the contemporary Right. Only briefly, 30 years ago, did he come back into vogue when Margaret Thatcher and her free-marketeer allies cited him as an inspiration. They were right to do so, but Gladstone deserves attention for more than just his economics.

Early on, he seemed a near reactionary, but he embarked on the rarest of political odysseys, moving from right to left as he aged. The Tory became leader of a new Liberal Party that coalesced around him; he went from being a self-described “out-and-out inequalitarian” to a backer of “the masses against the classes.” His policies over four terms as prime minister and four as chancellor of the Exchequer—roughly analogous to secretary of the Treasury—were called liberal in his time, but appear conservative in ours: he was largely successful in limiting government, imposing fiscal discipline, keeping taxes low, devolving power, and expanding political and religious liberties. Friends and opponents alike admired his integrity, yet he was also loathed for his forthright Christian piety. After meeting him, Henry James noted, “Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—and his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of, without a flaw.”

Gladstone was born in Liverpool to evangelicals of Scottish origin. His mother descended from minor gentry. His father, John, was middle class and had made a fortune as a businessman in the Americas. To raise the status of his family beyond mere wealth, John Gladstone purchased land and a seat in the notoriously corrupt Parliament. He also modeled three of his sons’ education on the example of George Canning, a broadly liberal, pro-commerce Tory of modest background who maintained close ties with the family. “[U]nder the shadow of the great name of Canning,” Gladstone recalled, as a youth he had “rejoiced in the removal of religious disabilities” and in “the establishment of free commercial interchanges between nations; with Canning, and under the shadow of the yet more venerable name of Burke, my youthful mind and imagination were impressed.”

Gladstone followed Canning to Eton and Oxford. When a seat in the newly reformed House of Commons opened, he stood for office and was elected as a Tory at age 22. At first, he retained the skepticism he had expressed in the Oxford Union toward the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. He saw this legislation, which made representation more equal between the cities and countryside, as a “revolution.” This stance would embarrass him later, but his impressive performances in the House of Commons propelled him to the rank of junior minister in Sir Robert Peel’s short-lived first administration.

Outside of government, Gladstone spent the 1830s developing his religious and political beliefs. He discussed their intersection in his first book, The State in its Relations with the Church, in which he made his case for an established church, understood as an active, guiding connection between the nation’s spiritual and civil powers. Invoking Burke, Coleridge, and many Greek and Roman writers, Gladstone argued for an organic conception of society. Yet contrary to the claims of Macaulay—who infamously proclaimed Gladstone “the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories”—he stopped short of endorsing theocracy. Instead, Gladstone surveyed the range of options between a completely secular state and one ruled on religious principles. He accepted situations that would disqualify establishment, but argued that they did not exist anywhere in the United Kingdom.

When Peel returned to power in 1841, he promoted Gladstone to vice president and then president of the Board of Trade, placing him in the Cabinet at the tender age of 33. Gladstone was now at the heart of economic policy, which centered upon the controversy over tariffs, specifically the notorious Corn Laws. He soon became a convinced free trader, vigorously supporting Peel’s economic reforms against the protectionist majority within his own party, including Disraeli.

Peel succeeded in abolishing the Corn Laws in 1846, at the cost of splitting the Conservative Party and losing office. He and his supporters, including Gladstone, subsequently drifted between the Conservatives, the classically liberal Whigs, and the democratic Radicals, courted by all sides. In this setting, Gladstone served three times as chancellor in coalitions of Peelites, Whigs, and Radicals. He transformed Britain’s economy, relentlessly advancing free trade, reduction of overall taxation, and regulatory reform. All these measures were aimed at creating a framework for free-market prosperity, supported by a minimal state. His decision to serve a second time as the Whig-Radical coalition’s chancellor burnt his last bridge to the Conservatives. He was now the biggest beast on the progressive side of politics.

Away from his public role, Gladstone was happily married to Catherine Glynne, who was every bit as devout a Christian as he, and with whom he had eight children. Notoriously, with the knowledge and indeed cooperation of his wife, Gladstone began in the 1850s to undertake “rescue work”—saving prostitutes from their lives of sin and exploitation. It was unusual behavior for a member of Parliament. And although no hint of sexual impropriety attached to Gladstone, tongues did wag, in particular over his connection to a former courtesan and Christian convert named Laura Thistlethwayte.

His relationship with her was one of the few topics that he did not confide to his wife. But like his overall association with working women, its existence was well known among the political elite. One contemporary wrote, “Gladstone seems to be going out of his mind. … Gladstone’s last passion is Mrs. Thistlethwayte. He goes to dinner with her and she in return in her preachments to her congregation exhorts them to put up their prayers on behalf of Mr. G’s reform bill.” Another observer noted that Mrs. Thistlethwayte had “since her marriage taken to religion, and preaches or lectures. This, with her beauty, is the attraction to G and it is characteristic of him to be indifferent to scandal.” Whatever the nature of their bond, she provided Gladstone with an emotional outlet. He confessed to her how “from morning to night, all my life is pressure, pressure to get on, to dispatch the thing I have in hand, that I may go to the next, urgently waiting for me. Not for years past have I written except in haste a letter to my wife. As for my children, they rarely get any.”

The pressure drove Gladstone to the pinnacle of politics. In 1868, he made his debut as prime minister, heading Britain’s first Liberal government. It was also the first government elected after the Conservatives had passed the Second Reform Act, which extended voting rights further than Gladstone had thought appropriate. Disraeli had hoped to win the working classes for the Tories, but it was Gladstone’s new party that ascended.

As prime minister, Gladstone shored up his reform agenda. Economic policy remained important, but his legislative program went further and included disestablishing the Irish Church (despite his earlier thoughts on church and state), reforming Irish land rights and universities, restructuring education in England and Scotland, and introducing examinations that opened the civil service and the armed forces to merit. Gladstone also tried to make abolition of the income tax the central issue of the 1874 general election. Disraeli foiled this plan by adopting the same policy. This canny strategy paid off for the Conservatives: the Liberals won more votes, but Disraeli’s party took more seats in Parliament and formed the next government.

If Gladstone’s political career had ended at this point, as he intended, his name would have been made. His financial policies had lifted all boats in a rising tide, keeping class conflict at bay and encouraging self-government for those who proved themselves capable of it. Gladstone’s platform connected the issues of wealth creation, social opportunity, the balance between indirect and direct taxation, the question of extending voting rights, and even foreign policy, since free trade was as much intended to create wealth as to generate peace and international cooperation. As prime minister, he ensured that his Treasury policies were kept in place, giving them time to bear fruit. In this respect, Gladstone was responsible for creating a consensus on political economy that would last until World War I.

The defeat of the Liberals in 1874 meant Gladstone’s resignation and semi-retirement as party leader. Yet he continued to exert tremendous influence on politics by steering public opinion, frequently addressing crowds of tens of thousands, sometimes for hours at a time. He famously protested Turkish crimes in Bulgaria and the inadequate British response to them, greatly contributing to his reputation as a liberal interventionist. Disraeli quipped that of all the Bulgarian horrors, Gladstone’s pamphlet on the issue was “perhaps the greatest.”

Eventually he returned to politics proper to lead three more governments—at one point serving simultaneously as chancellor and prime minister. But none of these ministries was as successful as his first. They were dominated by frustrated attempts to pacify Ireland and renewed protectionism abroad. Foreign policy, too, was troubled. Minus Disraeli’s romantic rhetoric of empire, Gladstone’s approach did not differ fundamentally from that of the Conservatives—they had established an imperial consensus much as Gladstone had established a financial one.

His political life came to a close soon after a second bill to grant Home Rule to Ireland failed. Increasingly frustrated by health problems (including declining eyesight) and fruitlessly fighting his Cabinet colleagues in a characteristic attempt to reduce naval expenditures, Gladstone resigned as prime minister for the last time in March 1894. His final Cabinet meeting proved a tearful spectacle—much to the scorn of the great man himself, who remained stoic throughout and afterward referred to the episode as “the blubbering Cabinet.” His resignation still a secret except to the Cabinet and his immediate family, that afternoon he conducted Question Time in the Commons as if nothing had happened. He then left the chamber, never to set foot in Parliament again.

Gladstone seemed to have changed his curious mind about many things in the course of his career. Nonetheless, his apparent transformation from a priggish young reactionary to enlightened old progressive masked a fundamental consistency. His politics were always informed by an intense and idiosyncratic meditation on the relationship between Christianity and the classics—especially the use of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer to shed light on the Christian faith. His political and religious views were interdependent, and his scholarly publications on Homer and Bishop Butler (who adapted Aristotle’s analysis of virtue to Christianity) should not been seen in isolation. Whatever the changes in his politics, they all occurred within this framework. Indeed, as he said in 1891: “I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence. I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it.”

Yet liberty for him never meant freedom from hierarchy and authority sustained by Christian virtue, and he never abandoned an organic conception of society. Throughout his life he praised Dante, Augustine, Aristotle, and Butler as the “four Doctors” who guided him, appending Burke to the list as well, while rejecting Bentham and both Mills. His friend and official biographer, John Morley, relates that during a friendly chat in his eighties, Gladstone claimed to be “of the same mind, and perhaps for the same sort of reason, as Joseph de Maistre, that contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge.” Much like another friend, Lord Acton, Gladstone believed in natural and divine law, duties and obligations, and historically-grown liberties—all while being dubious about abstract rights.

In practice, this vision amounted to a politics of prudence. His skepticism of the romantic strain of Toryism long popular in the Conservative Party contributed to his progressive turn. He introduced reform measures in terms of restoration, and he attempted to placate Ireland by showing its people that they could work through existing institutions. Similarly, Gladstone’s reluctance to extend voting rights and his dislike of the income tax were based on their potentially disruptive effects on the existing social order. Political prudence, in Gladstone’s eyes, meant recognizing our inherent limitations as fallen creatures. Accordingly, he saw the aristocracy and the monarchy as legitimate forces in society and in government, but only as long as they lived up to their duties. A traditional liberal education, centered upon the classics and Christianity, was his preferred test of virtue, intended to produce Homeric Christian gentlemen.

Although he was the founder of a great political party, Gladstone cautioned in his first book that one must avoid “sinking into a party man … instead of man in politics.” The Liberal Party emerged around him precisely because he was an outsider: he did not fully belong to any of the contending progressive factions, and the Peelites had dissolved as a separate group. Arguably, Gladstone remained a “Canningite” throughout his career—a liberal Tory, paradoxically cautious of reform, yet at home with Peel.

Contemporary conservatives tend to read much into his association with the Liberal Party. In today’s politics, Gladstone’s fierce opposition to anything resembling a welfare state, which he maintained to the very end, would make him a poor fit for the social-democratic Left. As long as he remained in politics, Gladstone fought to keep socialism at bay. Once he was gone, the Liberal Party became a different animal. Clearly his particular variant of the politics of prudence—call it liberal inequalitarianism—would be unfeasible in our democratic age, as he would have been the first to recognize. Even so, Tocqueville successfully translated his own aristocratic liberalism into a democratic context, with the help of America’s example. We might hope the same can be done for Gladstone’s. 
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Melvin L. Schut received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He teaches law and legal philosophy at Leiden University Law School, the Netherlands.

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