Church, State, and Free Trade: the Public Crisis of the 1840s

Abstract Thus Gladstone wrote in his diary (or journal, as he always called it) on his birthday, 29 December 1844, as he prepared to resign from Peel’s cabinet on the Maynooth question. And indeed strong cords were being both woven around him and released, cords which, partly by his own tying and partly by the developments of the day, came to bind him to political and intellectual positions which in the 1830s he would have regarded as inconceivable, even satanic. The predominant features of Gladstone’s life in the 1840s are those of sharp change and sometimes painful consolidation: change in domestic, political, and intellectual affairs; consolidation in the gradual establishment of life-long attitudes and commitments. Domestically, Gladstone’s marriage in 1839 marked the start of wide-ranging responsibilities and changes.