to write John Gladstone's, biography. Though William encouraged Smiles,
nothing came of the proposal because of a dispute within the Gladstone
family about it. ² This was unfortunate, for John Gladstone was a classic
Smilesian character, mixing duty, probity, and religion with materialism,
initiative, and a strong drive for worldly success.

Of Lowland Scottish Presbyterian stock, John Gladstone made his way
from Leith to Liverpool, from Whig to Tory, and from the Church of Scot-
land to the Church of England, dropping the 's' at the end of his name on
the way. By his second marriage, to Anne Mackenzie Robertson--his first
wife, Jane, died childless in 1798--he linked himself with a minor line of
Highland gentry, William Gladstone recalling his grandmother as 'stoutly
Episcopalian and Jacobite'. ³ He began to translate his money into social
prestige through land, buying the Seaforth estate by Sefton then in the
countryside outside Liverpool, and, in 1830, when his six children's educa-
tion was nearing completion, buying the house and estate of Fasque, in the
Mearns between Aberdeen and Montrose on the east coast of Scotland. In
1846, on the fall of the Peel government, he became Sir John Gladstone,
baronet, of Fasque and Balfour. Sir Thomas Gladstone, the Prime Minis-
ter's elder brother, inherited the title and the estate of Fasque, but took no
significant part in commerce.

John Gladstone also attempted to use his money politically, sitting in the
Commons from 1818 to 1827 for a series of corrupt boroughs: Lancaster
from 1818-20, Woodstock 1820-6 (bought cheaply from the Duke of Marl-
borough), Berwick-on-Tweed 1826-7 (unseated on petition). He was,
therefore, one of those representatives of the new commercial class in the
north of England who paid their way into the unreformed House of
Commons. He was the sort of man who, in the eyes of the Canningites--the
following of George Canning, Foreign Secretary and MP for Liverpool--
demonstrated that the Constitution needed no reform since it was capable
of representing new interests in an old system, or, alternatively, the sort of
man who in the eyes of the ultra-Tories--the extreme defenders of the
Protestant constitution--represented the corruption of the constitution by
money. John Gladstone had thrived in unreformed Britain. His desire for
continuing social stability, his distrust of speculative thought, and his
respect for established religion, made him a natural supporter of the
administrations of Lord Liverpool in the 1820s, and especially of the style
of modest fiscal and administrative reform pursued by Canning, Huskis-
son, and Peel which justified by works the anomalies of the British repre-
sentative system.

Thus, in brief, was forged the family context in which the fifth child, and
fourth son, William Ewart Gladstones, raised. His brothers and sisters
were of very varied character. Anne, the first child, born in 1802, was an
invalid like her mother and died unmarried at the age of 26. Her important

-4-