Free Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins Page A

involved the
dissolution of Parliament, which resulted in Tom Gladstone’s temporary disappearance from it. At the 1841 general election he contested Peterborough, and although again defeated reversed the
result at an 1842 by-election. But he had overdone his enticements to the electors and was unseated on petition. For the remaining forty-seven years of his long life he was never again in the House
of Commons.
    John Neilson Gladstone had an almost equally chequered electoral experience. When he could no longer get a ship he sought a seat, and in 1841 he won a by-election at Walsall. He was petitioned
against for corrupt practices, but that year’s general election intervened and the petition was overridden by his defeat. In 1842 he won another by-election at Ipswich and sat there until the
next general election of 1847, when he was again beaten. In 1852 he secured at Devizes a seat in a county which was his own (by adoption at least) and survived there until his death eleven years
later, which was a long constituency association by the standards of all members of John Gladstone’s family other than William, and a moderate one even by his.
    William Gladstone’s parliamentary service covered sixty-two and a half years, with a break of twenty months in 1846–7. But this great span was divided between five constituencies as
disparate as Newark, Oxford University, South Lancashire, Greenwich and Midlothian.
    The inescapable conclusion is that John Gladstone and his three parliamentary sons were both peripatetic and opportunisticallycoldhearted in their approach to
constituencies. The father and the two elder sons were unsuccessfully so; William by contrast, despite the problems which might have been caused by his move across the political spectrum, had an
almost complete command over what he wanted. He changed constituencies like an exigent hunting man demanding a new horse whenever he felt the old one was tiring. Admittedly much greater mobility in
this respect was usual in the nineteenth century. Canning, Peel, Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli were all wanderers, although the last two, after early strayings, settled down to thirty years in,
respectively, Tiverton and Buckinghamshire.
    The single constituency throughout a political lifetime and the geographical identity which goes with it came in only with Joseph Chamberlain, whose pattern in this respect if not in most others
was followed in the twentieth century by such diverse figures as Lloyd George, R. A. Butler, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. In the nineteenth century before Chamberlain there
was by contrast no figure of the first rank who stuck to a single constituency. Nevertheless the Gladstones, taken collectively, were unusually fickle. Between them, and including constituencies
considered as well as fought, they spattered the map of England, Scotland and even Ireland with as many red spots as did the British Empire on an old globe. Only Wales was free from their
attentions, which was strange both because it provided much of the hinterland to Liverpool and because William Gladstone lived there, even if barely over the border from Cheshire, for half a
century. However, his brother-in-law, with whom Gladstone cohabited at Hawarden, was a Flintshire member for fifteeen years and thus repaired the Gladstone omission.
    The residence, the brother-in-law and the tenuous Welsh parliamentary connection followed from his marriage into the Glynne family. This, however, did not occur until 1839, shortly before his
thirtieth birthday, and in his seventh year as a member of Parliament. This was despite determined attempts from 1835, involving two failures, to find himself a bride. Those refusals, and his
ultimate success with Miss Glynne, belong to the next chapter.

A C LUMSY S UITOR

    T HE TEN YEARS from his 1833 entry into the House of Commons to 15 May 1843, when he was promoted to Peel’s Cabinet as President of the Board of
Trade,