William Ewart Gladstone

Born in Liverpool in 1809 to a Scottish merchant and slaveholder, Gladstone came up through Eton and Oxford and entered the Commons in 1832 as a High Tory. He broke with his party in 1846 after Robert Peel's fall, drifted through the Peelite faction, and merged into the new Liberal Party in 1859, serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer under three prime ministers. His first ministry in 1868 disestablished the Church of Ireland and introduced the secret ballot; after losing in 1874 he resigned as leader, only to mount a comeback in the late 1870s on moral fury over Ottoman massacres in Bulgaria. His Midlothian speaking campaign of 1879-1880 invented the modern stump tour, and his second ministry saw the Third Reform Act, brutal measures in Ireland paired with new rights for tenant farmers, and a debacle in Egypt where General Gordon's death at Khartoum forced his resignation. His 1886 push for Irish home rule split the Liberals and cost them two decades in the wilderness; a final attempt in 1893 passed the Commons but died in the Lords. He resigned in March 1894 at 84, the oldest prime minister on record, and left Parliament the next year - dead by 1898, remembere