High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Strachey was having none of this. He set the tone in discussing Arnold’s childhood: ‘It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett’s History of England?’75 The gulf that separated the England of 1918, when Strachey wrote his essay, from that of 1842, when his subject died, contained two seismic events. The first was secularisation, which made Arnold’s almost theatrical devotion appear absurd. Strachey quotes, from Stanley, Arnold’s dictum that ‘nowhere is Satan’s work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.’76

  The second was the Great War, which destroyed the credibility of values such as Arnold propagated. The products of the Victorian and Edwardian public-school systems of which he was the father were buried, in sickeningly large numbers, in the cemeteries of the Western Front: killed in a conflict in which Strachey’s own physical feebleness prevented him from participating – his exemption from military service on grounds of health prevented him from the satisfaction of registering as a conscientious objector. He uses psychological inquiry in his writings to present new perspectives on his subjects, an approach diametrically at odds with the Arnoldian. Strachey’s could be an entirely destructive intelligence and, in Eminent Victorians, largely was.

  However, while Strachey notes that Arnold did little to improve the intellectual attainment of English public schoolboys (an unfair assertion, given the numbers of scholarships his pupils won to universities), he does concede that ‘by introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education he altered the whole atmosphere of Public School life. Henceforward the old rough-and-tumble, typified by the regime of Keate at Eton, became impossible. After Dr Arnold, no public school could venture to ignore the virtues of respectability.’77

  After being widowed Mary Arnold wrote to Congreve of her husband’s legacy: ‘the happy thoughts that you are and will be one of those active influences for good by which I feel that my adored husband still lives even here. And it is in the thought of this double life – his own life with God and his . . . life in the hearts and lives of those he has left, that I find my best consolation.’78 She added, with reference to the inheritor of the mantle, ‘with dearest Matt, the present is a most critical and important period and I have been greatly encouraged and have felt how gratified his beloved father would have been by symptoms of growing thoughtfulness.’

  Arnold typifies the Victorian high mind. He exemplifies what Matthew, in a notable letter to Arthur Hugh Clough, called ‘great natures’.79 One of his twentieth-century defenders, Basil Willey, described Arnold as having that characteristic of ‘leading men’ of his era, that he was ‘conscious of a destiny and a duty, whose fulfilment, whether conceived as an obligation to God or to one’s fellow-creatures, would make life significant and satisfying’.80 Such men felt that life had ‘momentous meaning’, and it was their job to realise it. The march of secularism required such militant foes as Arnold, but his effects would be limited.

  Those, like Strachey, minded to mock have formidable scope to do so. But Arnold concerned himself in his professional, and much of his private, life only with the great questions: good and evil, Church and State, the moral and the immoral. A whole governing class would be shaped in a variation of his image. His own children and pupils consciously expanded his legacy; as did their pupils, their congregations, those who read their writings and those over whom, in all walks of life, they exerted influence. Arnold had been conscious that he was training boys to be men, and leaders of men. He was not alone in setting the tone for the decades to come: but few set it so much as Thomas Arnold.

  VII

  Many of Arnold’s pupils, such as Clough, Stanley and Matthew Arnold, went on to play formidable parts in shaping society: though Clough became almost stunted during his short life by the overwhelming religious sense that Arnold had instilled in him. Arnold’s direct influence on education was enormous, at a time when the public schools were expanding to cope with the demand created by new prosperity, and reforming to deal with the new challenges of an industrial age. Arnold’s name and example were cited during the Clarendon Commission, twenty years after his death, when the political establishment realised the great public schools had to leave the eighteenth century. Many who had neither studied nor taught at Rugby felt inspired by what they knew of Arnold’s achievement to reform and improve their own schools, not least because they saw that, with sufficiently strong leadership, such a thing was possible. But his disciples led the transmission of his example. A. O. J. Cockshut, in his study of Stanley’s biography, wrote that Arnold ‘was not a Victorian. But he trained Victorians. . . . His pupils changed the face of education.’81

  James Prince Lee, one of Arnold’s assistant masters, became headmaster of King Edward’s, Birmingham, in 1838. George Cotton, the model for the ‘young master’ in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was one of Arnold’s housemasters. He became headmaster of Marlborough in 1852, and introduced organised games to sap the excess energies of boys who might otherwise cause trouble. Cotton became Bishop of Calcutta in 1858, but died after slipping off a plank by which he was boarding a boat, falling into the Ganges and being swept away, never to be seen again. George Bradley succeeded him at Marlborough and served until 1872. Bradley had been a pupil of Arnold, and a master at Rugby, and later succeeded Stanley (his tutor at Oxford, and for whom he felt the sort of reverence Stanley felt for Arnold) as Dean of Westminster. In 1859, Henry Walford, a contemporary of Hughes, became Head Master of Lancing.

  One of those instrumental in turning Repton round in the late 1840s and 1850s was G. S. Messiter, a boy under Arnold at Rugby; the headmaster of Repton with whom he worked closely, Stuart Pears, had been a housemaster at Harrow under another of Arnold’s products, Vaughan. Henry Highton, who came to the school as a boy the year after Arnold, in 1829, subsequently served as a master there, and in 1859 became Principal of Cheltenham College. His exact contemporary, A. H. Wratislaw, became headmaster of Felsted, where he served from 1852 to 1856. J. D. Collis was headmaster of Bromsgrove School from 1843 to 1867. Later on Edward White Benson, who served as a master at Rugby in the 1850s – after Arnold’s time but where he would have acquired the Arnoldian ethos – became the first Master of Wellington College, from 1859 to 1872: and was later Archbishop of Canterbury. John Percival, at Rugby as a master in the early 1860s, became the first headmaster of Clifton in 1862, serving until 1879: and was later headmaster of Rugby from 1887 to 1895. These last two men demonstrate the ease with which Arnold’s influence seeped into the foundations of the mid-Victorian age; there were numerous others who felt it indirectly.

  The most notable of Arnold’s protégés is, however, also the most notorious: Charles Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow from 1844 to 1859. Vaughan was one of Arnold’s favourites. He was also Stanley’s brother-in-law, exemplifying the closed and almost incestuous society that was one of Arnold’s legacies. He was born in 1816, the son of a clergyman, and joined Rugby the year after Arnold, in 1829. A superb classicist, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and applied unsuccessfully for the headmastership of Rugby in succession to Arnold, despite being just twenty-five. His consolation was to have the same parish in Leicester, St Martin’s, as his father had had, and then, still only twenty-seven, to gain the appointment at Harrow. As Arnold had, he became a doctor of divinity soon after taking up his post.

  Harrow was a shambles when Vaughan took it over: he was warned ‘not to throw himself away’ on it.82 However, he was soon credited with transforming it: though this seems as much to have been a victory of propaganda as of fact. The school grew from seventy boys on Vaughan’s arrival to 460 on his departure, so he certainly created a momentum. He imposed Arnold’s monitoria
l system on the school and backed his monitors to the hilt, even when in 1853 one of them thrashed a boy so severely as to cause him serious injury and provoke a minor scandal. God was at the centre of Vaughan’s world, as in Arnold’s, and he ensured the chapel was rebuilt not least to give him a decent pulpit in which he could emulate Arnold’s methods of extending influence and building morale by sermonising.

  All was not, however, what it seemed: though it would be more than 100 years after Vaughan’s sudden retirement from Harrow in 1859, aged just forty-two, before the world knew precisely what a hypocrite he was. One of his boys, from 1854 to 1858, was John Addington Symonds, later a celebrated aesthete and homosexual. Symonds wrote his memoirs just before his death in 1893, but refused to have them published: and his literary executor, who died in 1926, gave the manuscript to the London Library with the instructions that they were not to be published until fifty years after his own death. However, the Library made the manuscript available to scholars in the 1950s. It was used as a basis for Phyllis Grosskurth’s life of Symonds, published in 1964, before she published an edition of the memoirs in 1984.

  It was in the biography, with Symonds and Vaughan both in their graves for seventy years or so (Vaughan had died in 1897) that the most scandalous story of Victorian public-school life at last came out. In a chapter in his memoirs entitled ‘Painful circumstances connected with the last year of my life at Harrow’, Symonds begins with the observation: ‘One thing at Harrow very soon arrested my attention. It was the moral state of the school.’83

  He continues: ‘Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s “bitch”. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories and studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys together in bed. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing.’

  What Symonds describes (and he depicts various boy-on-boy activities with an alarming degree of detail) was probably common currency in more schools than just Harrow: and to judge from the public-school memoirs of the later Victorian era and the early twentieth century, would be familiar to generations then unborn. That Vaughan failed to police this depravity suggests he lacked Arnold’s rigour. Eventually he acquired a note passed from one boy to another, requesting an assignation, in which some of these activities became apparent. He summoned the whole school together, without any other master present, and read the letter out. He condemned the use of female names. He ordered one of the boys to be flogged and the other – whose only crime was being pursued – to write some lines. Symonds calls this a ‘very inadequate form of punishment’ that failed to recognise ‘how widespread was the evil in our school’.84 It was then that the thunderbolt came.

  In January 1858 a friend of Symonds, Alfred Pretor, wrote to him to say that Vaughan had started a ‘love affair’ with him.85 Symonds thought Pretor was lying, an impression dismissed rapidly when Pretor showed him ‘a series of passionate letters’ written to him by Vaughan. If Vaughan was mad to start an affair with Pretor, putting his feelings in writing was, given his position, beyond insanity. The revelation troubled Symonds in more ways than one: it was not merely that Vaughan was ‘a man holding the highest position of responsibility, consecrated by the Church . . . a man who had recently prepared me for confirmation, from whose hands, kneeling by the side of Alfred Pretor, I received the sacrament, and whom I had been accustomed to regard as the pattern of my conduct’; it was also that Symonds himself was homosexual, but had imagined such feelings would die out in adulthood. Vaughan’s behaviour showed that was not the case. Despite his disgust for Vaughan, he also felt ‘a dumb persistent sympathy’ for him.

  Pretor kept Symonds up to date with the affair, showing him new letters as Vaughan sent them. Symonds found the matter alternately amusing and disgusting: but after a while, wondered whether he ought not to tell his father. He hesitated, but urged Pretor to end the affair. Pretor would not be persuaded. Symonds considered confronting Vaughan about it, in ‘the study, which was the scene of his clandestine pleasures’ with Pretor.86 Before summoning the courage to do this Symonds was one day with the headmaster, discussing Greek iambics, when ‘he began softly to stroke my right leg from the knee to the thigh’. This was the turning point. ‘I never liked the man; he did not possess the intellectual qualities I admired. Now I began positively to dislike him.’ Symonds found the moral clarity he sought by a close reading of Plato. He spent his last term at Harrow in what he described as a state of indifference: but on reaching Balliol in the autumn of 1858 started to put a distance between himself and his school. By the following summer he told an Oxford friend what had happened: and the friend told him, unequivocally, to tell his father.

  Dr Symonds believed his son’s story, and wrote at once to Vaughan. He said he would not expose him, provided he resigned his post at Harrow immediately, and that he sought no preferment in the Church: it was almost de rigueur at the time for headmasters from great public schools, being usually clergymen, to become bishops. Vaughan’s instinct on receiving Dr Symonds’s letter was to confront his accuser, and he went at once to Bristol, to the Symondses’ house at Clifton, to see what proof of his misconduct could be offered. Shown a letter from Pretor discussing it, he did as he was told: but not before Mrs Vaughan – Stanley’s sister – had come to Clifton too, and literally thrown herself on Dr Symonds’s mercy. She ‘flung herself at my father’s knees. “Would Dr Symonds not withhold the execution of his sentence? Her husband was subject to this weakness, but it had not interfered with his usefulness in the direction of the school at Harrow.”’87

  However, Dr Symonds was having none of it. ‘My father remained obdurate though he told me he suffered keenly at the sight of this unhappy woman – a Stanley – prostrate on the ground before him. He judged it would be wrong to hush up such a matter of such grave importance to a great public school.’ In this, according to Symonds, his father had the support of none other than Stanley himself, brother of the prostrate woman. So Vaughan extricated himself suddenly but skilfully from Harrow, claiming no man could survive more than fifteen years at the helm of a great public school; and, as Symonds puts it, ‘the public acclaimed this act of resignation with enthusiasm’.88

  The government, of course, knew nothing of the true reasons for Vaughan’s departure, and therefore made him the apparently compulsory offer of a bishopric – Worcester. Vaughan, with equal compulsion, turned it down. A few months later Palmerston, who was not merely Prime Minister but also chairman of the governors at Harrow, offered him another – Rochester. This time Vaughan accepted, imagining, no doubt, that the wrath of Dr Symonds had been appeased by his resignation from Harrow. He was wrong. The moment word reached Clifton, Dr Symonds sent a telegram to Vaughan instructing him to withdraw, or face the consequences. To the bemusement of his patrons, Vaughan changed his mind. Again, Stanley reinforced him in the view that this was the only correct course, in the interests of the reputation of the Church. As Symonds recalls in his memoirs, suspicions were aroused by Vaughan’s resignation and his subsequent refusal of two bishoprics, but no word of the truth leaked out.

  Such was the paradox that caused many then, and many more since (led by Strachey) to regard the Victorian era as a period in the history of British morality distinguished by hypocrisy. Yet it also shows how the highest minds, even when corrupted into the lowest behaviour, had a habit of regenerating themselves. Vaughan had to settle for the relatively lowly vicarage at Doncaster, where he spent most of the 1860s and enjoyed great success. He revived the town’s grammar school, gave distinguished leadership to his flock during a cholera epidemic, and was regarded with universal admiration for his work in both the spiritual and temporal spheres. While there he also trained 120 young men for ordination: by th
e end of his life he had more than 450 to his credit, including Randall Davidson, who in 1903 would become Archbishop of Canterbury. There is no suggestion of any further sexual irregularities, with any of them or with anyone else. In 1869 he became Master of the Temple and in 1879 Dean of Llandaff.

  Writing of the early 1820s Samuel Butler, who had little truck with Arnoldian approaches to Christianity and to life, said it was an age when ‘Dr Arnold had not yet sown that crop of earnest thinkers which we are now harvesting, and men did not see why they should not have their own way if no evil consequences to themselves seemed likely to follow upon their doing so.’89 John Stuart Mill, in 1867, put it less bluntly. He thought of Arnold as a ‘practical reformer’ because ‘I think that it was in practice rather than in theory that his work and his influence were most beneficial. I look upon the example he set of friendly intercourse between master and scholars, and of effort on the part of the teacher to arouse moral ambition in his pupils, as of great practical value; and if generally followed, sure to produce (as I think it has already produced) a considerable reform in the whole method and results of school teaching.’90 And, as a result of that reformed school teaching, it reformed the outlook, tone and intentions of much of society: and made, directly or indirectly, many of the men who applied their high minds to the improvement of people, the world in which they lived, and the institutions that ruled them. This was as well, for the challenges were fearsome.

  PART I

  THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 1

  THE ANGRY FORTIES: POVERTY, AGITATION AND RIOT

  I

  AT QUARTER-PAST six in the evening of Monday 30 May 1842, as Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, drove down Constitution Hill in a barouche and four from her afternoon ride in Hyde Park, a man pulled out a pistol as if to take aim at the Sovereign. ‘The powder was observed to flash in the pan, and in another instant, before the miscreant could have time to put fresh priming, a soldier of the 2d battalion of the Scotch Fusilier Guards . . . “pinned” him – that is, laid hold of both his arms at once. In this position he hurried the young man towards the Palace, and two or three other soldiers coming to his assistance, in less than two minutes from the time of the attempt he was housed in the Palace, being taken into the lodge.’1 There were others keen to claim that it had, in fact, been they who had seized the would-be assassin. One account had it that a policeman, Constable Tanner, who had been watching him loiter suspiciously, had ‘pinned’ him before the Guardsman did.