In November of the same year he was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade and Paymaster General, and in January 1866 he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with a seat in the cabinet.

When Gladstone became prime minister in December 1868, Goschen joined the cabinet as President of the Poor Law Board, until March 1871, when he succeeded Childers as First Lord of the Admiralty.

He declined to join Gladstone's government in 1880 and refused the post of Viceroy of India, but he became special ambassador to the Porte, where he settled the Montenegrin and Greek frontier questions in 1880 and 1881.

When Gladstone adopted Home Rule for Ireland, Goschen followed Lord Hartington (afterwards 8th Duke of Devonshire) and became one of the most active of the Liberal Unionists.

Though he had been a leading Liberal Unionist as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Goschen did not stand against Joseph Chamberlain for the leadership of the party in 1892 following the departure of Hartington to the House of Lords as the Duke of Devonshire.

Though retired from active politics he continued to take a great interest in public affairs, and when Chamberlain started his tariff reform movement in 1903, Lord Goschen was one of the weightiest champions of free trade on the Unionist side.

[2] In educational subjects Goschen had always taken the greatest interest, his best known, but by no means his only, contribution to popular culture being his participation in the University Extension Movement.

His published works indicate how ably he combined the wise study of economics with a practical instinct for business-like progress, without neglecting the more ideal aspects of human life.

In addition to his well-known work on The Theory of Foreign Exchanges, he published several financial and political pamphlets and addresses on educational and social subjects, among them being,The Cultivation of the Imagination, Liverpool, 1877, and that on Intellectual Interest, Aberdeen, 1888.

This culminated a long-standing project to refute allegations of Jewish ancestry,[1]: 1  giving his earliest ascertainable ancestor as a Lutheran pastor named Joachimus Gosenius, recorded in 1609.

He was succeeded by his eldest son George (1866–1952), who was also a Conservative politician, served as Governor of Madras and married the daughter of Lord Cranbrook.