Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  In view of the quietist approach of Aberdeen to Don Pacifico and one or two other issues this cavalier attitude was (and was intended to be) a source of embarrassment for him, and should perhaps have been so for Gladstone too. The latter, however, so far from showing any sign of dismay, compounded his sin by publishing a Second Letter to the Earl of Aberdeen, dated the day before the publication of the first and incorporated with it in subsequent or translated editions of the pamphlet. The second letter, only half the length of the first’s 13,000 words, was a less impressive document than its predecessor. In the first Gladstone achieved a compelling tautness of style which was unusual for him, and dealt authoritatively with the travesty of justice involved in the trial of Poerio and others, as well as with the cruel squalor in which they were held. In the second letter he reverted to his more convoluted style, got over-involved with the articles of the Neapolitan constitution, and attempted to make far too much of a ‘Philosophical Catechism’ for use in elementary schools published in 1850, which he claimed must be the work of the government because nothing was printed or taught in Naples without its consent. He also dealt unhappily with the Naples government’s refutation of his claim that there were 20,000 political prisoners in the Regno. The true number, they said, was 2000. Two thousand was bad enough, was in effect his reply, and over twice that number had been semi-officially suggested to him in Naples.

  The longer-term effects of the whole chapter were that it gave Gladstone great fame and much increased his standing with the liberals of Europe while sowing a new distrust of him among the conservatives. It also slightly loosened his relations with Aberdeen and his other Peelite colleagues, who doubted his steadiness. It did not reconcile him to Palmerston, but it did incline his mind towards Italian unity, the importance of which he had not hitherto apprehended. It made little direct difference to the conditions in the dungeons of Naples. If anything, it made conditions even worse in the short run, but it assisted the undermining of the Bourbon regime in the Two Sicilies, and thus helped to prepare the way for Garibaldi and his patriotic invasion of 1860.

  In the midst of composing the first letter to Aberdeen, on Tuesday, 25 March 1851, Gladstone delivered another of his marathon parliamentary speeches, and the one which was probably his most distinguished to date. Morley indeed thought it ‘in all its elements and aspects one of the great orator’s three or four most conspicuous masterpieces’.10 It was on the second reading of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and was made on the seventh night of the debate, which had begun, almost unbelievably, on the previous Friday week and had occupied every intervening parliamentary day except for the then short Wednesday sitting. Gladstone at the beginning of his speech admitted the truth of the earlier statement of Russell (the Prime Minister) that the debate was already exhausted, that the best arguments for and against the bill had already been deployed. His excuse for speaking in spite of this was that he was the only member for an English university, and thus the only representative of a large body of Anglican clergy (with whose predominant view he strongly disagreed) who had not hitherto done so.

  Having admitted Russell’s point he then proceeded to contradict it by making the best speech of the whole debate, and deploying a unique authority on the subject with more unforced ease and equable temper than he habitually showed, despite the fact that he was addressing a largely hostile and occasionally noisy House. But he took thirty-two columns of Hansard and nearly two and a half hours of the time of the House to do so. And although, as usual, there was no diary evidence that he had devoted time to direct preparation, the prospect of the speech seemed to agitate him more than usual. He had tried to speak on the previous night, but had not been called, and had written: ‘H of C 7–12½: waiting – wh[en] so much prolonged produces great nervousness.’ And on the night when he did speak and was in the House from ‘5–6½ and 8¼–3’, he recorded that ‘My head being hot I poured water over it with a large sponge before dinner, and this seemed at once to clear the brain.’11

  The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill has been described by Professor Owen Chadwick as ‘the most foolish act of Russell’s political career’12 (which lasted sixty-five years). The bill arose out of the decision of Pope Pius IX, announced in mid-October 1850, to re-establish, for the first time since 1584, the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. The flamboyant, high-living and Romano-centric Dr Wiseman was to be Cardinal Archbishop of the metropolitan see of Westminster, and the rest of the country was to be divided into twelve dioceses. His new Eminence (whom, partly as a result of his high living, his Irish servant was said to be in the habit of addressing as ‘Your Immense’) proclaimed the new regime in a pastoral letter of more resonance than tact addressed from ‘out of the Flaminian Gate’. ‘Catholic England’, it said, ‘has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished.’

  The concession to English susceptibilities was that the new sees did not duplicate the names of Anglican dioceses. To some Protestant minds, however, this did not nearly make up for the presumption of any territorial titles, and in particular for the taking of a name so central to the tradition of the English state as Westminster for the archbishopric. Papal aggression became the widely used term. However, neither the head of Bagehot’s ‘dignified’ part of the state nor the head of his ‘efficient’ part at first reacted strongly. The Prime Minister wrote to the Queen on 25 October (from the Archbishop of York’s palace at Bishopsthorpe):

  [Lord John Russell] has also read the Pope’s Bull. It strikes him that the division into twelve territorial dioceses of the eight ecclesiastical vicariats is not a matter to be alarmed at. The persons to be affected by this change must be already Roman Catholics before it can touch them.

  The matter to create rational alarm is, as your Majesty says, the growth of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices within the bosom of the [Anglican] Church. Dr Arnold said very truly, ‘I look upon a Roman Catholic as an enemy in his uniform; I look upon a Tractarian as an enemy disguised as a spy’. . . . Sir George Grey [the Home Secretary] will ask the Law Officers whether there is anything illegal in Dr Wiseman’s assuming the title of Archbishop of Westminster. An English Cardinal is not a novelty.13 29

  The Queen did not demur. Under the influence of the Prince Consort she liked a Protestant Church, and under the influence of her position as its Supreme Governor she liked an Erastian one. So did Russell. His rigid Whiggery made him believe in religious liberty, but not in religious presumption. It was only when the two ran counter to each that he got into difficulties, and he did not for the moment see the papal action as creating such a conflict.

  Ironically the immediate reaction of some old English Catholics to the actions of the Pope and of Wiseman was more hostile than was that of the Queen and her Minister. The old Catholics liked a quiet and gentlemanly religion and were already somewhat disturbed with the attention which the new elements in their Church were devoting to populist authoritarianism for Irish labourers on the one hand and to the drama and opulence of new churches for middle-class converts on the other. The proclamation of the hierarchy acted as a catalyst which brought these discontents to the surface. Lord Beaumont declared that English Catholics could not accept the hierarchy without violating their duties as loyal subjects of the Queen, and the thirteenth Duke of Norfolk took his disapproval to the extent of proclaiming himself an Anglican convert (on the issue) and receiving holy communion in the Arundel parish church. Newman, who was sympathetic to much of the spirit of the old Catholics, even though he was a very new one himself, was also unenthusiastic. He thought seminaries and education were more important than sees. But, somewhat typically, he allowed himself to be persuaded that it was his duty to preach a supportive sermon, and did so on 26 October in the new St Chad’s Cathedral at Birmingham. His voice was barely audible, but his arguments only too resonant and provocative. Lord Shrewsbury, who was instinctively sympathetic to what was sometimes known as pageant Catholicism and the romanizing of t
he English recusant tradition, was almost the only grand Catholic layman to be enthusiastic for the Pope.

  With these internal stresses in English Catholicism, particularly when accompanied by his own calm initial reaction, a wise Prime Minister would surely have allowed the popular storm (there were a few minor anti-papist riots) against the proclamation of the hierarchy to blow itself out, and the Roman Church to draw up its own balance sheet of the value or otherwise of the change. Russell, however, although brave and dedicated, was frequently unwise. He got himself committed, in a way which although half accidental served him right, to attempt legislation against the Pope. But as the Pope was manifestly outside the jurisdiction, this in practice meant against those who obeyed papal instructions on a matter relating to the organization of their religion.

  This, to say the least, was an unhappy position for a quintessential Whig who had based his whole career on being for liberty and against the pretensions of authority, whether in state or Church. Russell was led into this course by too much converse with Whig prelates. There were not many of them, but they nearly all seemed to cause him trouble. In this instance it was the most senior, Maltby, who had been sent to Chichester by Grey in 1831 and to Durham by Melbourne in 1836, who lit the fuse. Too old at nearly eighty to be considered for York or Canterbury, Maltby lived remotely but grandly in his northern fastness and disapproved of Tractarians as much as they distrusted him. He wrote to Russell – an old friend – towards the end of October denouncing the Pope’s aggression as insolent and insidious. Russell replied on 4 November, agreeing with Durham and promising that the existing law would be examined and if found deficient to deal with the aggression new legislation would be considered. This was the essential and fatal import of the letter, although he surrounded it with obiter dicta which combined some of the dismissive good sense which he had expressed to the Queen with a few insults to the Pope (‘a foreign prince of no great power’) and an attempt to use popular indignation against Rome to damage Anglican Ritualists who led ‘their flocks . . . step by step to the very verge of the precipice’. His final sally was that ‘the great mass of the nation looked with contempt upon the mummeries of superstition’.14

  The letter having been written on the eve of Guy Fawkes day, Russell was subsequently blamed for instigating the more than usually boisterous celebration of that anti-papist feast. In fact more violence was threatened than took place. A few Catholic churches were besieged, a few windows broken and a few priests menaced. But insults were more rife than physical damage. A typical ‘celebration’ was that at Salisbury where guys in the shape of Wiseman, the Pope and the twelve diocesans were all destroyed on a giant bonfire which was ignited after a torchlight procession and the singing of the national anthem. The not very serious words of the twentieth-century revolutionary song,

  Build the burning pyre,

  Higher up and higher

  Pile the bleeding bishops on,

  One by bleeding one,

  achieved a rare and not very serious approach to reality, in effigy at least.

  Whatever was responsible for these manifestations, however, it was not the Prime Minister’s letter, for that was published only on 7 November, at the request of Durham and with the consent of Russell. And it was Russell himself and not the Pope or the new Cardinal, or the twelve adjutants, that it then harpooned. From then onwards, for no very clear reason, the whole government became mesmerized with the idea that legislation was inevitable. This was in spite of few ministers being in favour of it. Russell’s letter was deeply disapproved of, inside and outside the government, as being ill-considered and beneath the dignity of a Prime Minister. The Queen disapproved, so did Lansdowne, Lord President and Russell’s closest colleague, so did Clarendon, the President of the Board of Trade, so from outside did John Bright, the moral voice of Nonconformity, who rebuked Russell most mightily for unnecessarily offending eight million of his Catholic countrymen.30 Yet the Cabinet decided on 13 December to go ahead with legislation. The third Earl Grey, Secretary for War and Colonies, who had bought Gladstone’s Carlton House Terrace house but had been very slow to pay, probably caught the general mood as well as providing a classic example of an argument for bad legislation. ‘I disapprove of such legislation very much’, he wrote in his diary, ‘and most reluctantly assent to its being attempted, but the country has got into such a state that I believe still greater mischief would result from doing nothing.’15

  The bill which was presented to Parliament in February 1851 provided for a penalty of £100 to be imposed on any archbishop, bishop or dean who assumed a territorial title. More severely it also provided that the endowments of any such sees or persons should be forfeited to the Crown. It was against this bill and against this background that Gladstone spoke late at night on 25 March. The main thrust of his argument was that the bill could be defended only by those who were prepared to turn their backs on the whole Whig tradition of extending religious liberty. Early in his somewhat extended but nonetheless extremely effective peroration (‘one unbroken torrent of energetic declamation’, Stanley called it) he used a (then) well-known and evocative Virgil quotation31 to illustrate the benefits of the burying of religious strife and the consequent ebbing of religious bitterness. ‘Are you’, he turned upon the Whigs,

  going to spend the second half of the nineteenth century in undoing the great work which with so much pain and difficulty your greatest men have been achieving during the first half. . . ? Your fathers and yourselves have earned a brilliant character for England. Do not forget it. Do not allow it to be tarnished. Show, if you will, the Pope of Rome that England as well as Rome has her semper eadem: and that when she has once adopted the great principle of legislation which is destined to influence her national character and make her policy for ages to come, and affect the whole nature of her influence among the nations of the world – show that once she has done this slowly, and with hesitation and difficulty, but still deliberately, but once for all – she can no more retrace her steps than the river which bathes this giant city can flow backwards to its source. . . . We cannot turn back the profound tendencies of the age towards religious liberty. It is our business to guide and to control their applications. Do this you may, but to endeavour to turn them backwards is the sport of children, done by the hands of men; and every effort you may make in that direction will recoil upon you with disaster and disgrace.16

  So the monumental peroration rolled to its conclusion, and so Gladstone, still aged only forty-one, began to assume his best-remembered parliamentary style of a prophet who came down from the hills and denounced the sins and errors of his opponents.

  There were a number of subsidiary points: that if the territorial titles of Roman Catholic prelates were to be forbidden, so must also be suppressed, unless there were to be the most blatant anti-papist discrimination, those of bishops in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, which, given that it was not the Queen’s Church north of the border, were equally presumptuous; that a diocesan structure was in fact the enemy of the centralization of power in Rome, for it gave to the diocesan bishops certain rights against the Pope and it gave to the diocesan clergy certain rights against their bishop, which existed not at all so long as the Roman Church in England was treated as a missionary Church and administered by vicars-apostolic who were under the direct control of the Office of Propaganda at the Vatican; and that the appointment of bishops within a non-established Church was a spiritual not a temporal act, and therefore one with which Parliament had no right to meddle. All this was argued with an impressive wealth of historical and canonical knowledge and allusion. But it was essentially subordinate to the central argument of the peroration, which was the almost determinist one that in the second half of the nineteenth century the movement towards religious equality could not be set back. And Gladstone was right to the extent that the bill was the last promoted by a British government which endeavoured to discriminate between religious denominations.

  When Gladstone
sat down at 1.00 a.m. he was followed by Disraeli and a brittle sharpness replaced the uplifting orotundities with which the member for Oxford University had endeavoured to persuade the House. This does not, however, count as the first in the series of great Gladstone–Disraeli duels of the third quarter of the century. That memorable event came only at the end of 1852. On Ecclesiastical Titles they did not sufficiently engage with each other. They each spoke as from a different planet. Disraeli continued until half-past two in the morning. Then the vote was taken. Although few speakers had supported the bill with any enthusiasm, Russell and Disraeli between them had the big battalions, and the opposition of Gladstone, most of the other Peelites, thirty or so Irish Catholics, John Bright and Joseph Hume was crushed by 438 votes to 95. It was a discreditable vote in the sense that the huge majority was mostly provided by those without conviction of the merits of the measure but who believed they might assuage popular sentiment by voting aye.

  The bill was then considerably amended in committee. The forfeiture of endowment clause was removed with only the £100 penalty on individual clerics remaining, and special adjustments were inserted to except the Scottish bishoprics, thereby making the measure still more discriminatory against Roman Catholics. But it mattered little. The bill received royal assent on 31 July 1851, but was never implemented. It was largely ignored by the Roman Catholic community, but there were no prosecutions. After twenty years as a dead letter it was repealed, appropriately by the first Gladstone government, in 1871.

  His famous speech and other interventions on the bill did not do Gladstone much good with the electors of the University of Oxford. But they did not do him much harm either. He took his stand absolutely, but he took it on narrow ground. He was not in favour of the ‘division of England into Romist dioceses’. ‘Amicable prevention’ he desired. ‘Spiritual and ecclesiastical resistance’, he approved. But he would not countenance discrimination by law: ‘I would far rather quit parliament for ever than vote for so pernicious a measure.’17 As is usually the case when resolute Burkeism is proclaimed, Gladstone gained in respect at least as much as he lost through disagreement, and at the general election in the summer of 1852 he markedly improved his result over that of 1847. He got 1108 votes against Inglis’s 1368 (which was a halving of the 1847 gap) and was comfortably ahead of the challenging and ‘protestant’ candidate, Warden Marsham of Merton, who received only 758.