Under the guidance of his elder sister, Anne, Gladstone had his family's evangelical Anglicanism broadened and deepened to the point where he seriously contemplated a career in the Church. Dissuaded from this path by his father, he first entered the House of Commons in 1832 under the patronage of the Tory Duke of Newcastle. Two years later, at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed a junior Lord of the Treasury at the outset of Sir Robert Peel's abortive Conservative government of 1834-1835. Only a month later Gladstone became under secretary of the War and Colonial Office when that position fell unexpectedly vacant. Although his tenure there was extremely brief, he made a sharp and profound impression upon Peel and the other leaders of the party, thus ensuring his promotion when the Conservatives next resumed office.
On 25 July 1839 Gladstone married Catherine Glynne, the sister of Sir Stephen Glynne, ninth and last baronet of Hawarden Castle, Flintshire. Gladstone and his wife took up residence in London in 1840 and over the next fourteen years had eight children: William (1840), Agnes (1842), Stephen (1844), Catherine (Jessy) (1845), Mary (1847), Helen (1849), Henry (Harry) (1852), and Herbert (1854).
