Happy Birthday, Mr. Gladstone

December 29, 2009 marks the bicentennial of the birth of one of Britain’s greatest statesmen and indeed, of one of the most colorful figures in parliamentary history anywhere—William Ewert Gladstone.

No individual in history had a longer or more distinguished career in the British gov­ernment: 62 years in the House of Com­mons; in charge of the nation’s finances as Chancellor of the Exchequer for 14 budgets in four administrations; leader of a major political party (the Liberals) for almost 40 years; four times prime minister, for a total of 12 years.

Gladstone was 84 years old when he retired as P.M. in 1894, the oldest prime minister in British history. He was hailed as the “Grand Old Man” for his lead­ership and stature and as “England’s Great Commoner” because he was not of royal blood and refused to accept any titles of nobility. When he died, a quarter million cit­izens attended his funeral, one of the largest the country ever saw.

What made Gladstone both great and memorable was what he accomplished while he served in government. One of his many biographers says that Gladstone “achieved unparal­leled success in his policy of setting the indi­vidual free from a multitude of obsolete restrictions.”

Today, when a citizen gets elected to make government smaller but ends up doing the opposite, the conventional wisdom credits him with having “grown in office.” Glad­stone’s philosophy evolved, but in precisely the opposite direction—from a hodgepodge of statist notions to principled liberty. He entered Parliament at age 22 in 1832 as a protectionist, a defender of the tax-subsidized Church of England, and an oppo­nent of reform. By the time he retired from public life, he was a champion of limited government. For a fuller story of Gladstone’s contributions, see here.