High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Grey met Ashley at the beginning of May 1848. They agreed to have the meeting in a smaller venue, the Freemasons’ Hall, and to make it an all-ticket occasion. Ashley wrote to the Prince confirming that the tickets would be available only through ‘the most respectable booksellers’.54 On the day itself, he continued, ‘all the front benches will be occupied by our friends, and we propose to have in the hall, seated in groups, here and there, of two and three, about one hundred stout, hearty fellows, inmates of the Lodging Houses, who will have both an interest, and a desire, and a capability too, to keep the peace.’ He added, reassuringly: ‘I am sure that no-one will attempt so unpopular a thing, as to disturb Your Royal Highness when engaged in such work.’

  Albert’s press cuttings show his deep interest in the upheavals on the Continent: but nothing would deter him. He went with officers of the Society to visit the model lodging-houses from which the ‘stout, hearty fellows’ who would police his meeting would come. On 17 May, the day before it, Russell offered to go with him, but Albert told him that if he wished to he should go on his own, in a personal capacity, and not be seen to be offering the government’s endorsement of the occasion.55

  Albert’s presence caused the hall to be ‘besieged’: ‘every seat and standing room in the spacious and magnificent hall was occupied a few moments after access could be obtained, and more than an hour before the proceedings were advertised to commence,’ according to the report in The Times.56 The Prince arrived at noon, ushered in by Ashley, the Duke of Argyll, the Marquis of Westminster, Lord John Russell, a brace of earls, five bishops and several MPs. The draft of the speech the Prince proceeded to give is in his own hand.57

  He said he was speaking up for ‘that class of our community which has most of the toil and least of the enjoyments of this world.’ He extolled the ‘disinterested’ influence of the upper classes being brought to bear on these problems: he spoke of the model lodging-houses, the loan funds and the allotments provided by the Society to improve the lives of the lower orders: things that would enrich them all the more when they had an input, such as in the domestic improvements made in the lodging-houses. He described what a sound investment such things were for those with capital; they, and the people who used them, could profit from them. This had been the aim of the Society since its foundation in 1844: not to dole out food and clothes, but to provide the bases for the lower classes to help themselves become more prosperous, and better housed.

  Four new lodging-houses had been provided in central London, giving clean and wholesome accommodation to working men: and it was profitable. Lodgings had been provided for poor widows: and the allotment idea had caught on in 2,000 parishes. The notion of self-help was properly established. Existing lodging-houses were often squalid, with beds of straw. Some had another life as brothels. They also exploited their clientele, charging an unnecessarily high rate and ensuring the workmen had little disposable income left to save for their betterment. Men were often trapped in this lifestyle because renting even a humble property was beyond their means. Thanks to Ashley (who became Lord Shaftesbury during the passage of the legislation), an Act was passed in 1851 to allow local authorities to inspect these lodging-houses, and to close them if necessary. In London, where such houses were famously squalid, the Metropolitan Police took over the inspection, and within a few years standards had risen dramatically.

  ‘Depend upon it,’ the Prince added, ‘that the interests of the often contrasted classes are identical, and it is only ignorance which prevents their uniting to the advantage of each other.’ He said the work of the Society served as an example for others to follow: it encouraged ‘self-reliance and confidence in each other’ among the lower classes. He warned those ‘who under the blessing of Divine Providence, enjoy station, wealth, and education’ to ‘be careful, however, to avoid any dictatorial interference with labour and employment that frightens away capital.’ Such interference was, however, bad for a yet more important reason: it ‘destroys that liberty of thought and independence of action which must be left to every man if he is to work out his own happiness.’ Albert’s message was clear: the quality had had a lucky escape on 10 April, and it should do nothing to provoke the working classes in future, but leave it to make its bargains with the mercantile class, and to become slowly more prosperous. It might have been odd coming from the mouth of the husband of the Queen, but was close to an announcement of the beginning of the end of deference.

  Many in the upper and upper-middle classes were still shaken by the close shave they felt Britain had had in avoiding widespread disturbances or a revolution, as in continental Europe; and were anxious to find ways of keeping the lower orders sufficiently content to be under control. Albert was not so cynical. His commitment to social reform long pre-dated Kennington. He saw the contentment of the labouring classes as vital to the British constitutional settlement, and because the European ruling class from which he came remembered well the events of 1789 and after in France. Albert’s desire to see improvements went far beyond simply making the workers happy. He had an instinctive understanding that the greater success of all sections of society would not merely cause wealth to trickle down from top to bottom, but would also stimulate the philanthropy to enable the spread of education, the improvement of public health and the building of better housing. He also understood that the more successful industry and commerce were, the more the culture of invention and innovation in industry could be developed, and the more the growth of infrastructure would allow communications to be modernised and facilitate trade and other commercial activity.

  Russell told the Queen that Albert’s speech was ‘exactly what it should be, the best principles in the best language – it cannot fail to do good.’58 The Times, in a leading article, paid what it presumably considered to be the highest compliment to the Prince, saying that it was ‘thoroughly English in feeling, English in language, and English in sense.’59 The paper felt Albert ‘understands the philosophy of life, the principles of British society, and the several claims of capital and industry, union and independence, as well as any gentleman born and bred in this country.’ They contrasted what Albert had said with what had lately happened in France, with what it called communist demands for a ‘utopia’. No doubt things were bad in Britain, but revolution was not the way to make things better.

  It complained of the amount of stabling in the metropolis, there not for the purposes of business, but of pleasure. ‘The back streets of whole districts are for horses, not men . . . the poor of London are most miserably, most discreditably housed.’ The only solution, it felt, was for the wealthy to ‘interfere’, not least by providing more of the model lodging-houses suggested by the Prince. The next day the paper wrote more on the subject, referring to underfunded hospitals and the shortage of bathhouses for working men. Referring to the slowness in completing one particular public baths, the paper noted the Queen and Prince Albert, and the dowager Queen Adelaide, had each donated £100 to the completion fund. Another £3,000 was needed: and The Times asked why the metropolitan rich could not find that ‘trifling amount’ – ‘for what is £3,000 to the wealthy of this metropolis?’60

  Albert kept cuttings of the press’s favourable response to his words. John Bull noted that ‘it has not often fallen to our lot to see a greater amount of sound sense and sound feeling compressed within a few simple, yet forcible, words . . . never could such an expression of the genuine sympathy for the labouring classes which animates Royalty, have come more opportunely than at the moment when, under no ordinary degree of pressure – pressure felt throughout every class of the community – the working classes have united with them who are above them in station but not in true English feeling – in demonstrations of unshaken loyalty.’61 The Examiner said that ‘A Royal Personage who has the good sense in these days to come forward and proclaim the identity of his interest with that of the lowest and least fortunate in the state, not wanting the courage to imply that it befits no man in exalted
station to be contented while the masses of men beneath him have just cause for discontent, is entitled to a hearing of the most respectful kind.’ The Morning Herald spoke of Albert’s ‘sound judgment and practical sense’.62 However, this was as close to politics as Albert, now more experienced in the ways of the British constitution, felt able to go. Soon he would find a serious project to occupy him, and fulfil his high-minded desire to lead the improvement of his wife’s people.

  PART II

  THE VICTORIAN MIND

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GODLY MIND: NATIONAL APOSTASY AND THE VICTORIAN CHURCH

  I

  IN THE 1840S Britain’s institutions were underpinned by Protestantism. The Monarch was Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Fellows of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge had to sign the Thirty-nine Articles when elected. Outside the Established Church there were numerous Nonconformist and dissenting Protestant sects – Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and sects within those sects. These had grown in strength with industrialisation and the rootlessness it caused. The dominance of Protestantism was linked in the public mind to the success of the country. It also encouraged a sense of anti-Catholicism, and one that flew in the face of the liberties granted to Catholics by the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which allowed them to sit in parliament and join the professions. Greater rights for Catholics had helped entrench militant Protestant feeling. Catholicism was widely considered unBritish and foreign. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, one of the most radical architects of the time and one who had converted to Catholicism, once made the mistake of crossing himself in a railway carriage. A lady who saw him do this cried out: ‘you are a Catholic, sir! Guard, guard, let me out – I must get into another carriage!’1

  But if Protestantism retained a popular hold, the Established Church’s influence had been waning since the growth of dissent in the eighteenth century. Secularisation had been implicit in the Reformation and, from the Glorious Revolution onwards, religion had been moved away from the centre of British society by the development of capitalism. Old communities broke up, and the towns to which thousands moved during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had few places of worship and no settled parish structure. Fewer people attended church. Those who had once had a recognised place in a social order in which the Church played a key part became anonymous in the great industrial cities. The move from the land broke the last bonds of feudalism, and the working classes formed a relationship instead with the forces of capital, themselves often secularist in nature.

  The nineteenth century was a time when the expansion of knowledge fuelled rationalism and changed the terms of trade for religion. One of the finest scholars of secularism, Owen Chadwick, explored whether the idea had taken off because people knew more, or whether for reasons of class and physical upheaval they felt alienated from the Church.

  Orthodox Christianity was proved untrue because miracles became improbable, and Genesis was proved to be a myth by science, and philosophical axioms were transformed by intellectual processes derived from the Enlightenment, and the intellectual revolution passed from universities to newspaper, and from newspaper to drawing-room, and drawing-room to housekeeper’s parlour, the newspaper to working-men’s clubs – are ideas what move the souls of men? Or did the working man, thrust by economic development into a new and more impersonal class-structure, develop a consciousness of his class, and distrust or hatred of the middle class, and find the churches middle-class institutions, and start to beat them with whatever sticks lay to hand, and found the weapons of atheist pamphleteers and potted handbooks of evolutionary science?2

  The State fought to maintain religion. Since the Church Building Acts of 1818 and 1824 – a response to the fears of the ruling class about the effect of the absence of organised religion and worship in the newly expanded urban areas – large amounts of government money had been granted for the building of Anglican churches in those areas. Although the Chartist movement to an extent anticipated Christian socialism, atheism began to become more apparent among radicals. As the mood in society towards the rejection of God changed, so prominent thinkers such as John Stuart Mill eventually admitted their scepticism about religion. Works such as On Liberty and The Subjugation of Women display a cast of mind at odds with traditional doctrine. However, for all that, perceptions remained of Britain as an overwhelmingly Christian country.

  Christianity’s defenders could be, and were, as militant as those who sought to expose it as a sham. Even to a man so sophisticated in his theology as Gladstone, it became essential not merely for preserving the social order, but for facilitating progress. In a memorandum written in the early 1840s, he outlined what he believed would happen in a state of ‘Christianity abolished’: ‘1. Gladiatorial shows. 2. Human sacrifices. 3. Polygamy. 4. Exposure of children. 5. Slavery. 6. Cannibalism.’3 Also in the 1840s, in another undated memorandum, he noted that ‘in the present, as a critical period, it is more especially expedient to scrutinise our state: not external alone with reference to the common enemy, but internally too, for the foe is everywhere, both where effective Christian principle dwells, and where it dwells not.’4 In another, apparently from the same period, he reflects upon the pressure that the modern world puts on observance of religion. ‘It is impossible for me to fulfil (I use the phrase in the restricted sense in which alone it ever could be realised) all the duty of an English Churchman while I continue in political life: or in other words there are kinds and degrees of co-operation which I might be able like others to render, but which cannot be rendered in my present position.’5

  At least he tried. Even before Mill’s rationalism, or Darwin’s evolutionary science, it was hard for many to make time for God. ‘Pity’, he wrote much later, in the early 1880s after reading Froude’s life of Carlyle, ‘that Carlyle could not substitute a soothing dependence upon God for his usual and assuredly most valiant strain, defiance of the devil.’6 He had noted that when Carlyle ‘writes to his mother he assumes the phraseology of a Christian . . . this is not hypocrisy but it is fiction; it is deception, beginning possibly in self-deception.’ With John Henry Newman, the leading Anglo-Catholic (who, going over to Rome in 1845, eventually became a cardinal), he was much more gentle. In an effusive letter to him of 18 February 1866, he wrote that ‘the internal condition of the great and ancient Church, which has for its own one half of Christendom, cannot be matter of indifference to Christians beyond its borders . . . we see before us an ever growing actual necessity, in the world of thought, for a new reconciliation of Christianity and mankind.’7

  The Church militant was in evidence around the Great Exhibition in 1851: the clergy of London made elaborate plans, and raised subscriptions, for the greater availability of places of worship for the ‘unprecedented influx of strangers’: a measure of which Prince Albert entirely approved.8 This was, though, a time of relative ease in the Established Church, for all Gladstone’s concerns about the receding Sea of Faith. Butler wrote that ‘between 1844, when Vestiges of Creation appeared, and 1859, when Essays and Reviews marked the commencement of that storm which raged until many years afterwards, there was not a single book published in England that caused serious commotion within the bosom of the Church. Perhaps Buckle’s History of Civilisation and Mill’s Liberty were the most alarming, but they neither of them reached the substratum of the reading public.’9

  Because of the obsession among the leading minds with theological questions – notably questions of doctrine – it is easy to forget the simple faith of the average person that still prevailed, and whose prevalence was indicated by the vast programme of church-building in England between the 1840s and the 1870s: and of the building of dissenting chapels too. Secularisation may not have been confined to the educated classes, but the Church tried to temper its impact on the lower orders, when the buttress of religion could help maintain morale, show an alternative to hard materialism, and even create a sense of community.

  Nevertheless, faith was ebbing
away slowly. In Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, Mr Hale – having resigned his Anglican ministry because of doubts – finds himself talking to the weaver Higgins, whose daughter has died after her lungs were destroyed by the toxic air inhaled in the mill. Higgins tells the clergyman that his peers, ‘real folk’, have abandoned religion: ‘They don’t believe i’ the Bible – not they. They may say they do, for form’s sake; but Lord, sir, dy’e think their first cry i’ the morning is, “What shall I do to get hold on eternal life?” or “What shall I do to fill my purse this blessed day? Where shall I go? What bargains shall I strike?” The purse and the gold and the notes is real things; things as can be felt and touched; them’s realities; and eternal life is all a talk . . .’10 It is hard for Hale to convince Higgins of the existence of God with his daughter lying dead, aged nineteen; nonetheless Hale succeeds in persuading him, before he leaves the house, to kneel with him and his daughter and join in their family prayers, despite his being an ‘infidel’. ‘It did them no harm,’ notes Gaskell.11 For many working men, however, capitalism had made the old social order, with God at the top of it, incomprehensible.