"A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,
and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable
and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself," once
said by Benjamin Disraeli, a former Prime Minister of England and competitor of
William Gladstone for the position. He also stated ,"He has not one single redeeming
defect." William Gladstone was a very successful and caring man. This was shown
through his work and family life. On May 19th, 1898 Gladstone died at Hawarden. He
was then buried in Westminster Abbey.
William Ewart Gladstone was son of John Gladstone a very wealthy man. John
Gladstone's1828 fortune would be worth a modern 25 million pounds. He had gotten
this from his early Liverpool days when he was primarily a corn trader that brought him
to the Mersey the skill which he had developed in Leith, and he also made mostly Baltic
purchases. He then became a partner of the East Indian house, which dealt with mainly
subcontinents, and coming up against the restrictive privilege of the East India Company.
In 1843 he turned himself from a merchant adventurer into a rentier. The West Indies
stake was down and his shareholdings were up. Sugar was the core of his West Indies
activities, but tobacco and cotton were also important. He did not trade in slaves, even
before the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807. However, The plantations he
operated were under slave labour throughout his time as a West Indian magnate. In 1818
John then became a member of Parliament. His career in Parliament never prospered due
to starting at the age of fifty-four. He also had to buy his favors, and failed to make neat
William Ewart Gladstone was born in Liverpool on December 29th, 1809 and was the forth son of Sir John Gladstone and his second wife ...