The Gladstone Monument - by Jonathan Hopson
Hawarden has a monument to the troubled history of Anglo-Irish relations, paying tribute to Gladstone and his heroic, thwarted mission to pacify Ireland, which ended in failure when Parliament rejected his Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893.
After Gladstone’s death in 1898, a National Memorial Committee was swiftly established, which proposed monuments funded by public subscription for the three capitals of the United Kingdom - London, Edinburgh and Dublin (Wales had no official capital until 1955). The Dublin monument was finally approved in 1910, by which time subscribers had raised £7,212.7s.2d. The commission (for a fee of £6,000) was given to the Irish sculptor John Hughes (1865-1941), Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Hibernian Academy and best known for the memorial to Queen Victoria unveiled in Dublin in 1908, which would be the last royal sculpture erected in Ireland.
Hughes’s letters describe his endeavour to ‘represent Gladstone, at the fateful moment, when full of fiery energy, he fought his great battle for Ireland’. As an art student in London, Hughes had seen Gladstone at close quarters and had ‘never been as impressed by any human physiognomy and more especially by the splendid, fearless eyes! He looked like the great man he was’.
The sculpture was carved in Paris (where Hughes resided) in a studio specially hired to be large enough for the work. The monument reaches a height of 28 feet, 8 inches and weighs 60 tons. It comprises the statue of Gladstone supported by four allegorical figures - Erin, Finance, Classical Learning and Eloquence. These are placed on a stepped pedestal of Portland stone made by Kirkpatrick Bros of Trafford Park, Manchester. This features four flanking Tuscan columns, with the north and south faces decorated by acanthus leaves in the renaissance style. 
Hughes placed the figure of Erin (the female personification of Ireland, pictured) centre stage ‘in a pose of hopeful expectancy [of] the victorious battle which [Gladstone] began. Then shall the music of her long-silent harp be heard once more in the glens and valleys of Ireland’. His figures were ready for casting in bronze by July 1914, but this work was delayed by the outbreak of war which led to a shortage of copper and skilled foundrymen. The casting was eventually completed in November 1920 by the Compagnie des Bronzes in Brussels. The green colour of the figures is the result of natural patination (or verdigris) caused by the prolonged exposure of the bronze to air and rainwater.
The Great War had also postponed implementation of Irish Home Rule which Parliament had finally passed in 1914. The Irish War of Independence broke out in January 1919 and was not concluded until the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 which partitioned the country, establishing the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion, while allowing the six counties of Northern Ireland ro remain in the United Kingdom. The treaty split republican opinion and led to a civil war which raged until May 1923. Against this backdrop of violent turmoil, Dublin City Council was understandably reluctant to accept a monument to a British statesman. Hughes’s memorial to Queen Victoria had already proved controversial, especially since it was situated outside Leinster House, home of the new Irish parliament. It was eventually removed in 1948 and put into storage. It currently stands outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, on loan from the Irish government since 1987.
The original location for Gladstone’s monument was to be in the People’s Gardens in Phoenix Park, close to that of the 7th Earl of Carlisle, a former Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. This unpopular statue was dislodged by a bomb in 1956 and removed to Castle Howard in Yorkshire. The Park was an unhappy choice, being notorious as the scene of the 1882 assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. The murder was a personal blow to Gladstone, since Cavendish had been his protegé, having previously served as his private secretary. He was also married to Catherine Gladstone’s niece Lucy Lyttelton (who is commemorated by the window of St Lucy in the south porch of Hawarden church).
In 1924 a new site for the monument was proposed - the grounds of the Viceregal Lodge (now the official residence of the Irish President), being considered less vulnerable to any attack. However, by this time, ‘due to the present condition of Irish politics’, the National Memorial Committee (guided by Gladstone’s sons Herbert and Henry) decided to offer the monument to the trustees of St Deiniol’s Library. Although Hughes agreed to this proposal, he was privately disappointed that his sculpture would be removed from its original context and ‘placed out of sight of everybody who counts’.
The Library’s Warden, John Du Buisson, was also not altogether happy with the proposal. He was concerned that the monument’s scale would detract aesthetically from the view of the Library’s frontage, and he feared that the attention attracted by a public statue would disturb the residents’ privacy. Other locations were considered, including Trueman’s Hill and the entrance to Hawarden Park, but the monument was finally erected with little fanfare in alignment with the Library and the War Memorial, enclosed within beech hedges, by the Library’s architects, Douglas, Minshull & Muspratt of Chester in April 1925.
After such tribulation, it seems only appropriate that Gladstone’s monument now rests outside the library established as his greatest memorial. And it is also fitting that it found a home in Wales for, as Herbert Gladstone wrote to his brother Henry, ‘England rejected Father’s policy till it was too late. Wales did not. The statue will stand in Wales as a constant and deserved reproach to England’.
By Jonathan Hopson. This article was first published in The Voice (Hawarden parish magazine) in summer 2023.