📍Hawarden Castle, Hawarden, Flintshire CH5 3NY, UK
1839 – 1898“Hawarden came to me through love. In July 1839 I married Catherine Glynne, whose family had owned this castle and its great park near Chester for generations, and from then on, if anywhere was home to me, it was here. Catherine's brother Sir Stephen owned the estate, and when it was nearly ruined by a failed ironworks venture in the 1840s I threw myself into saving it, and our family and the Glynnes lived side by side under one roof. We raised our eight children here, among the ruins of the old castle in the park, the woods and the little town below. Catherine was the true mistress of the place: warm, untidy, endlessly charitable, opening a convalescent home and an orphanage, and dashing about with no regard for ceremony. My refuge was my study, which I called the Temple of Peace, with its desks for different kinds of work and books on every wall. When politics grew too much I took an axe into the park and felled trees, and crowds of trippers came by train to watch the Prime Minister at work and carry off chips as souvenirs. I read some twenty thousand books in my life, and I wanted others to have the chance I had. In my eighties I founded a library in Hawarden for students and clergy, St Deiniol's, and helped wheel tens of thousands of my own volumes down the road from the castle in a wheelbarrow. It is now Gladstone's Library, the only prime ministerial library in Britain, where readers can still stay the night among the books.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today