William Ewart Gladstone

Gladstone's four ministries show cabinet as a coalition of Whig grandees and Radicals. His first, from 1868, passed Irish church disestablishment, Forster's Education Act and Cardwell's army reforms through ministers he trusted to run their departments. The later cabinets fractured over Ireland: in 1886 Joseph Chamberlain resigned over Home Rule and took the Liberal Unionists with him, alongside Lord Hartington, a split that kept the Liberals largely out of power for twenty years. His final cabinet effectively forced him out over naval spending in 1894.