High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  A difficulty for the old universities was not just that so many of their fellows were in favour of ending the tests: it was the question of, as Forster put it in a speech in 1869, ‘how well the Nonconformist bodies had done without the Universities, giving instances in which they have flourished and advanced in science because they have not had a University education.’95 Sir John Coleridge, the Solicitor-General, introduced the University Tests Bill in May 1870. It was designed to scrap the tests entirely rather than allow individual colleges to decide whether to administer them or not, as had been intended by an unsuccessful bill the previous year. This was to preserve ‘unity of feeling’ in the universities; but also to ensure religious teaching and worship could be carried on as before, something it was feared the scrapping of the Act of Uniformity might imperil.96 Coleridge felt it ‘a most highly improbable event’ that the educated classes, as represented by fellows of Oxbridge colleges, would ever become estranged from Anglicanism.97 The Church was so wealthy, and had such a hold over education, that it could not possibly suffer from the scrapping of the tests. Rather, that Act would breathe new life, he believed, into these old institutions.

  Spencer Walpole, MP for Cambridge University and the former Home Secretary, said he did not wish to deprive non-Anglicans of an education at the old universities; but he felt the estrangement of the universities from the Church would lead, soon, to disestablishment. He believed the bill gave too much to the Nonconformists, but allowed too few safeguards of the religious character of the universities. He was distressed that the bill prescribed the end of compulsory chapel; and by wording that seemed to encourage Roman Catholics to fill offices intended for Anglican clergy, or to become masters of colleges. Walpole also noticed that the bill promised to repeal a part of the Act of Uniformity that had specified that ‘no form of prayer, administration of sacraments, rites and ceremonies, shall be used in any church or chapel, or other public place, in either of the Universities, excepting that which is prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer.’98 Why, he asked, repeal that? It had not been designed to exclude dissenters, but to give worship in Anglican chapels the protection of Parliament.

  Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, who had recently come down from Cambridge and was the younger son of Lord Lansdowne, ridiculed the fact that Oxford had harboured Jews in the thirteenth century, when they had been thrown out of England, yet a Jewish Senior Wrangler in the nineteenth century could not become a fellow of Trinity. Only twenty years old, Fitzmaurice showed the generational shift in thinking about these matters. Since the Act of Uniformity had pulled the universities into line ‘the century and a half after [it] was the darkest and dreariest period in the history of the Universities. They became a by-word, not only in England but on the Continent. They were the home of Jacobite Toryism; they published declarations against civil and religious liberty . . . of educational work there was little or none, and religion showed its presence chiefly by those libations of port wine of which Gibbon preserved so keen a recollection.’99 Things had only begun to improve when the barriers against dissenters had begun to be relaxed: to pass this bill would complete the process.

  Gladstone set out his own creed: that ‘it would be wise, if practicable, with safeguards, of what character I know not precisely, to settle this question on the basis of the withdrawal of every religious test which forms a barrier to the free and equal personal enjoyment of all except purely ecclesiastical and spiritual offices by the subjects of Her Majesty, irrespective of religious professions.’100 This was exactly the view of Jowett, one of the leading campaigners for reform at Oxford.

  There was a strongly contrasting view. Charles Newdegate, the Tory MP for North Warwickshire, was thirty years’ Fitzmaurice’s senior, a landowner and Tory ‘ultra’ with a consistent record of opposition to the relief of Catholic disabilities and a strong advocate of the Protestant settlement and its privileges. He believed those who agitated against the tests were jealous of the privileges enjoyed by the ancient universities, and their fellows. He felt dissenters behaved in a way ‘consistent only with despotic government’ in seeking to have the State interfere with the private property rights of an institution such as a collegiate university.101 Above all, he warned dissenters directly that if they sought to humiliate the Church of England ‘retaliation will become a necessity’: ‘You forget that you are trifling with a great issue. You forget that, in violating with exultation every Protestant feeling in the breasts of members of the Church of England, and in striking down those rights and privileges which are characteristic of their freedom, you are inviting us not to respect your own.’102 The High Victorian mind remained not just staunchly Anglican, but in its resistance to the interference of the State profoundly eighteenth century.

  The bill had its second reading, despite this yell of outrage; and helped by the MP for Tiverton, George Denman, recalling that Dr Whewell, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had warned him that he would come a cropper if he did not go to chapel one Sunday afternoon. No harm had come to him, and therefore he realised conformity was neither here nor there. It passed serenely through its committee stage but then the Lords rejected it, saying they wished to be satisfied that religious teaching in the universities would not be undermined. An inquiry was promised into this aspect of the problem: and having been satisfactorily completed, the bill was introduced again in 1871, when Gladstone argued the necessity of its now being passed in order to enrich the talent pool in the universities and to improve and widen their teaching.

  Some on his side, however, wanted still more. He had to resist the growing demand for men who were not in holy orders to be allowed to hold the headship of and certain fellowships in many of the colleges. He argued, instead, that the bill should be presented to the Lords in the same form as in 1870 in order to maximise its chances of succeeding. It had a second reading unopposed, but an attempt was then made to amend it to widen opportunities for those not in holy orders. ‘The object of the Bill’, said Fitzmaurice, ‘was to completely overthrow religious inequality at the Universities; but how could anyone admit this object would be carried out as long as the holding of certain Fellowships was confined not only to the members of, but actually to the clergy of, a particular sect?’103 He felt no need to appease the Lords by sending back an identical bill. However, Gladstone – who pleaded that raising the question of fellowships would be a mistake – and his solicitor-general both argued against the amendment, and narrowly won the day.

  Lord Kimberley, who piloted the bill through the Lords, told peers that the decision to admit Nonconformists to the universities made it inevitable that the religious tests would become unacceptable. He also claimed there was ‘a large body of graduates, both at Oxford and Cambridge, in favour of the Bill’, including, at Oxford, ‘a majority, I believe, of the tutors in the different colleges.’104 He felt all that was at stake was privilege, and that that was an obstacle to ‘the promotion of sound and useful learning in every branch of knowledge’ that universities supposedly existed to perform.105 Salisbury tried to amend the bill to force university teachers to make a solemn declaration that they would not teach anything contrary to the Bible, claiming freedom of thought at Oxford in particular was getting out of hand. Kimberley rejected this new test that Salisbury had invented, not least on the grounds that it would be impossible to define just what teaching contrary to the Bible was. In his support came the Archbishop of York, who observed that ‘if Oxford is, as it is said to be, sunk in infidelity—though I deny the truth of the statement—then that is a strong comment upon the system of tests already existing.’106 He dismissed Salisbury’s proposal as ‘useless’ and said it would do nothing to protect the teaching of the Church of England. Salisbury, he felt, sought to legislate from ‘panic’.107 After all that had happened in the climate of religious opinion in the preceding thirty years, it was striking that one of the most senior prelates should have owned up to the realities of spiritual life in modern England.

  Afte
r several bishops had gone against the Archbishop, and highlighted the alleged depravities of Oxford in particular, the amendment was carried by five votes. A further amendment barred Nonconformists from holding certain posts in the universities. What other peers termed ‘a collision’ with the Commons now seemed inevitable, and Salisbury refused to back down.108 What he was seeking to prevent was what one of only two renegade Liberal peers, Lord Lyttelton, termed ‘open attack on the Bible being made by college tutors’.109 The bill passed its third reading in the Lords duly amended: the collision was on. On 23 May 1871 the Commons reversed the amendment exempting heads of house from the provisions of the bill. On 13 June, with Salisbury having signalled he would insist on his ‘test’ for those holding offices in the colleges, the Lords debated whether to press its views on the Commons again. He forced another vote. This time he lost by forty, and, in a rather sour temper, declined to force votes on anything else. The Commons got its bill at last.

  It was a defining moment in the history of the old universities, a crucial step not just in their modernisation, but in their ability to capitalise on the opportunities of the modern world. Dean Stanley preached in Oxford just after the Act had received Royal Assent. He spoke of ‘the glorious prospect’ of Oxford now becoming ‘the neutral, the sacred ground, where the healing genius of the place and the equal intercourse of blameless and generous youth shall unite the long estrangements of Judah and of Ephraim, of Jerusalem and Samaria’.110 More to the point, no one would be prevented from proceeding to the highest academic distinction simply on account of his faith.

  The scrapping of tests was, however, viewed by some as another step not only towards secularisation, but to undermining of the Anglican Church. An anonymous pamphlet of 1871 entitled Shall We Give It Up?, in which the writer mused on whether there was any longer any point in subscribing to the Conservative party, referred to the end of the tests as a measure of the party’s impotence. He wrote that the Oxbridge colleges would now ‘exhibit no foolish attachment to the Church of England, or, indeed, for any religion at all, but just to go the way which chance or indifferentism may happen to lead them.’111

  He added that the passage of the bill was not ‘the only slap in the face which the Church of England has received during the last session. The Commons have again passed a bill to enable ministers of all denominations to officiate in churchyards . . . the so-called Conservatives, who would have rallied bravely upon any personal matter between Mr Gladstone and Mr Disraeli, did not think it worth while to make a party fight of it. In that impossible hypothesis of my being a Liberal, possessed with the usual Liberal hatred to the Church of England, I can scarcely conceive a fact more calculated to give me pleasure than the approaching triumph of this measure.’ For, the writer asked, would a dissenting minister be made to stand outside the building – notably in bad weather – while a funeral service was being conducted inside the church? He added that what with the clamour for the secret ballot, and Gladstone’s apparently hinting that universal suffrage could not be long delayed, ‘a faster gallop towards Secularism and Democracy I cannot imagine.’112

  CHAPTER 14

  THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN: DIVORCE, THE VOTE AND EDUCATION

  I

  THE EXTENSION OF the meritocratic principle in the Army, Civil Service and universities during the first Gladstone ministry applied only to men. Emancipating women would prove a far more contentious and difficult exercise. John Stuart Mill likened the condition of women – of all classes – in the mid-nineteenth century to slavery, and with reason. ‘Women’s rights’ was an oxymoron: women and any assets they brought into their marriage, or inherited while married, were the property of their husbands. If married, a woman could own no property. She had no right to any earnings she might make. She could not make a will. She had no separate existence in law. She could not conclude contracts or leases with another party. If she attempted to flee her husband, he had the legal right to enter the property of anyone harbouring her, and remove her by force. She could sue for ‘cruelty that endangers life or limb’, but had she condoned such behaviour before that her suit would fail. She could not sue for divorce, however atrociously her husband behaved. If he sued her for it, which required a hearing in an ecclesiastical court, followed by one for ‘criminal conversation’ (or adultery) in a common law court, followed by an Act of Parliament, she could not defend herself, or to be represented in the legal arguments. Nor was her husband bound to keep her: he was bound merely to see no one else went to that expense. If a deserted or wronged wife had funds, she was expected to support herself: but before her divorce, her husband could appropriate those funds. That was largely a problem for spirited women of the middle and upper classes. Working-class women had to stay and take it.

  On top of their legal disadvantages, women bore the frequently lethal burden of having children. The sharp decline in infant mortality figures during the nineteenth century only partly reflects a decline in women dying in or shortly after childbirth. Even Queen Victoria, not spared the most lavish medical care money could buy, had some difficult and excruciatingly painful births having her nine children. For less privileged women, if they survived, the experience was often hideous.

  While an improvement of women’s healthcare depended to an extent on scientific advances, the promotion of their liberties relied upon a Parliament that was universally male. The first female MP would not sit until 1919; and although there were a few peeresses in their own right – mostly ancient creations that allowed descent by the female line, but also including contemporary ones such as Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the philanthropist – they were barred from sitting in the House of Lords. With universal female suffrage not being attained until 1928, equal employment rights taking until 1975, and an Equality Act being deemed necessary in 2010, such steps as the Victorians took to empower women were the first on an exceptionally long road. The only woman with complete freedom of manoeuvre was the Queen herself, precisely because she was in these respects without the law.

  Other high-born women were small in number. They had lives of ease, but also quite often of stultifying boredom. The difficulty began with their education, if they had one. In the 1860s the parents of Miss Frances Cobbe paid £500 a year for her to attend a school in Brighton whose aim was to produce ‘ornaments of society’. She studied mainly music and dancing.1 The wretched Mrs Transome in Felix Holt, a once-beautiful but now desiccated woman, old in her mid-fifties, epitomises the fate of even privileged females in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome’s life; that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.’2

  Since such women were not expected to work, their fathers regarded education as pointless. An exception, as we shall see, was the case of the Nightingale sisters, Parthenope and Florence. However, the part-training of their minds only served to increase their frustration when they could find no useful occupation. Although it drove Florence into nursing, with great social benefits, it also seems to have made her an obsessive: as was her sister, more damagingly as Parthenope had a mental breakdown. The home education the Nightingale sisters had was about the best that could be hoped for: there were relatively few formal establishments for girls and young women. Middle-class women, who might be called upon to earn their living as governesses or teachers, were more fortunate; not least because their fathers had often climbed up the social ladder through education, and saw the value and necessity of it as a means to improvement. There were exceptions, such as the five Brontë sisters, the elder two of whom died in girlhood after being sent to a brutal school for the daughters of the clergy in Lancashire, their plight only eventually occasioning concern in their widowed father. The right for women to work in professions such as medicine or law came slowly – although there were women doctors by the mid-1870s the first woman would not be called to the Bar until 1922. The necessary e
ducation was hardly available.

  For working-class women, with little or no hope of a serious education, life was relentless drudgery. Those who did not die in childbirth had their lives shortened by the grind of physical labour. Ashley had in 1843 successfully made Parliament prevent women from suffering the degradation of going down coal mines; but they laboured for five and a half long days a week in mills and sweatshops. In 1851 there were 600,000 women operatives in textile factories alone. Working-class women would rely on the social superiors of their sex to secure liberties before them as a necessary prelude to their securing them themselves.