For sale: the Kensington townhouse that hosted Gladstone and Tennyson

Queen Victoria famously described William Gladstone as a ‘half-mad firebrand’ who ‘addresses me as if I were a public meeting.’ The monarch reluctantly put up with the Liberal politician as her prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894, while considering him – among many other things – ‘arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate.’

Quite what she made of George Warren, the 2^nd Baron de Tabley, who Gladstone appointed as her Treasurer of the Household at the start of his first term as premier, is unclear – but we do know he quit his job monitoring the widowed, querulous and reclusive monarch’s finances on behalf of Parliament two years before Gladstone’s electoral defeat of 1874.

On renouncing this tricky role – at a time when Victoria’s personal expenditure was under close public scrutiny – de Tabley swapped what is believed to be a grace-and-favour apartment in Kensington Palace for his own power pad: a swanky new-build townhouse, in Cranley Gardens, off Queen’s Gate in South Kensington.