One of the youngest men elected Mayor of Liverpool, he was religious but increasingly tolerant of nonconformity, emphasised by a move towards semi-socialist politics.

[2] In September 1821, sixteen-year-old Robertson was sent to attend Glasgow College, where his cousin Steuart Gladstone studied before becoming an intelligent merchant-businessman.

On his return to England he proposed that he should be allowed to visit the family estates in the West Indies, and his father agreed.

Leaving on 12 October 1828 he travelled to Demerara, British Guiana, arriving in November and remained for three months until March 1829.

Robertson Gladstone made a record of this journey in his Journal of a Voyage & Residence in the Colony of Demerara which is held in the library of the Liverpool Athenaeum.

[6] He was the first Mayor of Liverpool under the age of forty, and as he got older his politics moved to the left, as with his youngest brother William.

He had a large family of children who were all spinsters and bachelors, and his home life was entirely dependent on his wife's talent for housekeeping.

After the marriage a mansion house called Court Hey Hall was built in the same year as their family home.

[19] He was also a justice of the peace (J.P.) for Lancashire, a trustee of the Liverpool Union Mill and Bread Company and a member of the Health Committee.

To use all lawful and constitutional means of including the most rigid economy in the expenditure of the Government, consistent with due efficiency in the several departments in the public service.

To advocate the adoption of a simple and equitable system of direct taxation, fairly levied upon property and income, in lieu of the present unequal, complicated, and expensively collected duties upon commodities.

Robertson owned many properties in Liverpool's bourgeois merchant district, all of which were sold at auction on his death.

The family-minded celebrated the two churches father, John had built, confirming the Gladstones infinite capacity for nostalgia.