English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  How much did Bradlaugh mind? Hard to say. He was compassionate but he was also ruthless and single-minded. Any of his collaborators who got in his way were sidelined or pushed out:

  James Thomson; Edward Aveling, Marx’s son-in-law; Annie herself when she took up socialism and then theosophy, equally detestable aberrations in Bradlaugh’s eyes. Like Annie, he had no sense of humour and not much imagination. His own wife, Susannah, declined into chronic alcoholism and retired to live with Bradlaugh’s parents in a Sussex cottage. She died there aged forty-five, sending ‘great love to dear Papa’. Niblett records all this without much comment, but it is hard not to see Susannah as having been bundled out when she became an embarrassment to the cause. Bradlaugh liked fishing – he held the record for the largest carp caught with rod and line – and dogs. He doted on Annie’s St Bernard, Lion, which looked remarkably like him. Yet in private life there was something unappealing about him, an unyielding, flinty quality.

  Which no doubt he needed to persist in his extraordinary struggle to take his seat in the House of Commons. He was elected for Northampton in 1880 at the fourth attempt, on a 90 per cent turnout. His fellow candidate for the town, Henry Labouchère, who was as cynical and free-living as Bradlaugh was earnest and straitlaced, remarked on hearing the news: ‘Oh! They’ve swallowed Bradlaugh after all, have they?’ But after a repellent display of prejudice and self-contradiction on the part of the House, Bradlaugh was not allowed to affirm. Although the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 had given this right to ‘Quakers, and every other Person for the time being permitted to make a solemn Affirmation or Declaration instead of taking an oath’, the Tories maintained that such ‘permitted Persons’ did not include avowed atheists. At the same time, a second select committee found that Bradlaugh was not a fit person to swear the oath of allegiance either, since he didn’t believe in it. Again and again, Bradlaugh pleaded at the Bar of the House, again and again he was chucked out, and again the voters of Northampton returned him at by-election and general election alike.

  Bradlaugh sued the sergeant-at-arms, Captain Gossett, and lost. But in his judgment in the case of Bradlaugh v. Gossett, the lord chief justice, Lord Coleridge, ruled that ‘what is said or done within the walls of Parliament cannot be inquired into in a court of law. The jurisdiction of the Houses over their own members, their right to impose discipline within their walls, is absolute.’ This judgment remains the classic authority on the powers of Parliament over its members.

  And so on it went. Finally, years after being first elected, Bradlaugh was at last allowed to take his seat thanks to a cool and masterly coup by the speaker, Arthur Wellesley Peel, Sir Robert’s youngest son. No sooner had Peel been re-elected speaker on 12 January 1885 than he got up and said: ‘I have come clearly and without hesitation to the conclusion that it would neither be my duty to prohibit the honourable gentleman from coming nor to permit a motion to be made standing between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it.

  What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at the outset. Even more remarkably, he took it twice, because the crowd around the speaker’s chair was so great that the clerk was not sure he had done it the first time. So twice he swore allegiance to the Queen whom he wanted to see the back of, in the name of a God in whom he did not believe. Twice he kissed the Bible. And he shook hands with the speaker and everyone agreed that it was all a good show. Three years later, Mr Bradlaugh MP introduced a Private Members’ Bill consisting of two short clauses, permitting anyone who objected to being sworn to affirm instead. The bill sailed through, and even Lord Randolph and the Archbishop of Canterbury voted for it, for all the world as though they had never thought anything else. There’s progress for you.

  For a deeper insight into what was happening, it is worth going back to the debates on the Affirmation Bill that Gladstone’s government (not the GOM himself, who was recuperating in Cannes at the time) had formulated in February 1883. In the event, the Tories defeated the bill by three votes, 292–289, but Gladstone very nearly swung it with his amazing speech. When he first became an MP, he had had an almost theocratic vision of politics. In 1838, he had violently objected to the renewal of the modest government grant to the Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s Maynooth, and through the 1840s zigzagged to and fro on the issue. In The State in Its Relations with the Church, he had passionately argued that the state had a duty to uphold the national Church and so by extension to deny recognition to any other Church, let alone to atheists. Now, fifty years later, he told the House that they must ‘leave no distinctions between man and man on the ground of religious differences’. And he quoted, in Latin, six lines from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which he described as ‘noble and majestic’ and translated as meaning: ‘Divinity exists in remote inaccessible recesses of which we know nothing; but with us it has no dealing, with us it has no relation.’ Niblett tells us that members were visibly moved, by the learning of the prime minister as much as by the meaning of the words.

  But there was more to it than that. Here was the embodiment of Victorian Christianity quoting, as a clinching authority, the words of the most famous materialist of the ancient world. The gods took no interest in our affairs; they were unmoved by our merits or demerits; we were on our own. One can hear the hinge of history creaking, with Bradlaugh rattling at the doorknob.

  What may seem in retrospect so surprising is how popular he remained throughout his struggles, among a far wider public than his fellow atheists and republicans. When he was ill with Bright’s disease towards the end of his life, several churches offered up prayers for him, setting off false rumours that he was no longer an atheist. He was popular in part because he was a fine fellow, but also because he didn’t add socialism to his atheism and republicanism. He was no threat to property. He remained a thoroughgoing Gladstonian Liberal all his life, claiming that ‘socialists are the most unwise and illogical people you can happen to meet.’ He asserted that property owners in England were in the enormous majority. ‘All savings in the Savings Bank, the Co-operative Store, the Building Society, the Friendly Society and the Assurance Society are property, and I will show you that there are millions of working men in that condition.’

  Even his republicanism was of a kind familiar to us, witty, sardonic, but ultimately harmless: ‘I do not pretend to have pleaded for republicanism. I have only pleaded against the White Horse of Hanover . . . I loathe these small German breast-bestarred wanderers, whose only merit is their loving hatred of one another. In their own land they vegetate and wither unnoticed; here we pay them highly to marry and perpetuate a pauper prince race.’ Like many modern republicans, he didn’t call for the Queen to be thrown out; he merely wanted to avoid the Prince of Wales succeeding.

  In this sense he posed no immediate or serious threat to the status quo. There can have been few men who brought about more change and gave less offence.

  As he lay dying, the resolution of June 1880, denying him the right either to take the oath or to affirm, was expunged from the journals of the House, very nearly nem. con. In supporting the motion, Gladstone reiterated the point he had made at the start of the whole miserably protracted business: that in trying to exclude a properly elected MP, the House was overreaching its jurisdiction. ‘In an assembly possessed of almost immeasurable powers and with no possibility of appeal, excess of jurisdiction is the greatest fault the House can possibly commit. It is one of the highest functions of this House to limit its own functions and jurisdiction.’ This problem of self-limitation remains as pressing as ever; it steams from every manure heap and quacks from every duckhouse. What hay Bradlaugh would have made with it all.

  MR GLADSTONE’S RELIGION

  What is Gladstone trying to tell us? Through the matted undergrowth of his prose, with its
vatic pronouncements, its interminable subordinate clauses, its ponderous hesitations and protestations, its sudden whimsical excursions and conjectures, something – not a message exactly but not a philosophy either, perhaps the only word would be a mind – is struggling to declare itself. A mind, moreover, that insists on its continuing vivacity, and claims our attention not merely as a brilliant relic of its own time but as an unstilled voice in the conversation of ours. We may explore and even admire the minds of Gladstone’s mentors and contemporaries: Peel’s earnest reforming zeal, Palmerston’s gung-ho gunboat liberalism, Disraeli’s sugar castles of Empire – though each is splendid in its way, they do not speak to us directly. But Gladstone haunts us still; he is the greatest of the undead.

  Over the past ten years and more, I have become aware – a little reluctantly because he never used to be one of my heroes – that we are faced in Britain with an agenda that Gladstone would have recognized as his own: the devolution of power to the four nations of the United Kingdom, the revival of the little platoons and the protecting of local government from the pretensions of Whitehall, the shrinking of the overblown state (‘retrenchment and reform’, to use the resonant phrase so often attributed to Gladstone but actually coined by John Bright), and then the most ticklish question of all, how to undo the disadvantages of the poor without denting their self-confidence and damaging their independence. In the wider world, our present agenda has an even more Gladstonian ring: the defence of human rights, the protection of small, faraway oppressed nations, the defeat of piracy and terrorism, the restoration of the European balance. Is there a single theme that Blair has articulated which Gladstone did not articulate before him, and with greater resonance? More than once in the past couple of years, politicians have been unable to resist quoting Gladstone’s reminder that ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.’

  The Gladstonian agenda does not apply solely to government, or even to a single party. Over the past two decades, each of the three main parties has experienced a Gladstonian moment: first, Labour came to understand that individual self-development was not compatible with state socialism and that only free trading could maximize prosperity. Then the Conservatives came to the conclusion that there was such a thing as society after all; or rather they remembered that they had always thought so and wondered why they’d ever found themselves spouting such crude Manchester liberalism. Finally, the Liberal Democrats rediscovered retrenchment and reform and began to shuffle away from the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen, whose thoughts were captured in the so-called Orange Book – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – were the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man.

  Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting elected. Gladstone himself, whose eye for the main chance remained undimmed, would not have thought that an unhealthy motive. But there were deeper motives at work, too. In all three parties there was a dawning awareness that the dogmas they had come to adopt did not fit the case: they failed either to relate to the circumstances of modern British society or to echo the underlying philosophy that was supposed to drive the party. Gladstone would have recognized these intimations: he felt them at recurring moments both in his long political career and in his personal religious and philosophical life.

  Why then are we not more eager to attend to Gladstone’s revisions and recantations as the forerunners of our own? Why is David Bebbington’s The Mind of Gladstone such a lonely enterprise? First, because of the sheer difficulty of reading Gladstone. His contemporaries often found his writings ‘diffuse and laboured’, a criticism that with his habitual self-chastisement he took to heart by underlining it. ‘Sometimes,’ the Athenaeum remarked in 1879, ‘we have a sentence so long and involved that nothing but a passionate intensity of meaning and a profuse vocabulary could have avoided a disastrous collapse.’ T. H. Huxley, perhaps the most ferocious and unwavering of all Gladstone’s opponents, accused him, with some justice, of rhetorical artifice. Many other critics, such as Mrs Humphry Ward, denounced him for lacking any sense of evidence and for being ready to make sweeping deductions from narrow premises.

  Gladstone was well aware of his defects as a writer. As early as his thirties, he confessed to his brother-in-law that he wrote ‘not by a genuine elasticity of spirit but by a plodding movement’. He knew his shortcomings as a scholar, too, and resolved in his diary that he would in future be ‘avoiding scholarship on account of inability’. He noted of a damning review by E. A. Freeman of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that it ‘ought to humble me’.

  But it didn’t. On the contrary, he went on and on, and then some. His early Church Principles Considered in Their Results, which he described as ‘a work of very sanguine Anglicanism’, was 528 pages long. Much taken by Farini’s Stato Romano, largely for its denunciation of the Jesuits, he translated it into four volumes of about 400 pages each – and then reviewed it himself, anonymously, in the Edinburgh Review. Studies on Homer, by no means his only writings on Homer, ran to three volumes of 576, 533 and 616 pages respectively. Then there were his sermons, mostly delivered to his family and servants, which fill a further three volumes. As prime minister, he became worried that he might be thought to devote too much time to these pursuits and hastened to write a letter to the Spectator denying the allegation that he began every day with ‘his old friend Homer’.

  The verdicts that these massive works provoked were often scorching. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Gladstone’s successor as chancellor of the exchequer and a formidable classical scholar, said that he was ‘fundamentally wrong’ about Homer. Tennyson thought his opinions on Homeric religion ‘hobbyhorsical’. Huxley denounced Gladstone’s ventures into palaeontology as ‘the intrusion of an utter ignoramus into scientific questions’. True, Huxley was also increasingly enraged by Gladstone’s appeal to the masses and by his failure to provide more state funding for science (plus ça change), but on this occasion he was on strong ground, since Gladstone’s attempt to defend the historical veracity of the account of creation in Genesis had carelessly argued that birds came before land creatures.

  This amateurishness, combined with the intolerable length of Gladstone’s writings, has provided posterity with an excuse for not reading them and justified his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerizingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the Church as he does to the contents of the book itself.

  There is, besides, the natural tendency of political biographers to concentrate on the political struggle. Roy Jenkins’s life gives us an entrancing account of the life of Victorian politicians: when they went to bed and got up, what they drank, what trains they took (Jenkins was a Bradshaw buff). But about what went on in Gladstone’s head Jenkins leaves us not much the wiser. Here was a marvellous character, a great man, no doubt of that. But what precisely was he on about? Gladstone’s contemporaries were just as puzzled. The knockdown vigour with which he put forward his opinions was equalled only by the alacrity with which he abandoned them. Gladstone said of his great mentor that ‘there is a manifest and peculiar adaptation in Peel’s mind to the age in which he lives and to its exigencies and to the position he holds as a public man.’ But Peel’s ‘adaptations’ were nothing compared with Gladstone’s.

  ‘The rising hope of those stern unbending Tories’ (the opening phrase of Macaulay’s lacerating review) began political life by passionately opposing the Great Reform Bill in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘
the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were interpreted by many of his associates not as a journey of honest discovery but as timeserving in the most literal sense.

  Is there then anything more coherent, more deserving of our attention, than the zigzags of a charismatic, volcanic politician whose make-up was a queer mixture of genuine piety and ill-disguised humbug? Are Gladstone’s U-turns and doublings-back prompted by anything more profound than a politician’s need to respond to the great challenges of the middle and later nineteenth century: Irish nationalism, the rise of the industrial working class, the decay of faith and the unstoppable march of Darwinism (‘the darling of our age’, Gladstone called the doctrine, while at the same time claiming that ‘there is nothing in his account of the production of man which ought in the slightest degree to shake the faith of the Christian’ – God had simply farmed out the business of creation to natural selection, a matter of devolution rather than evolution)? Was Gladstone engaged in anything more intellectually formidable than a lifelong rearguard action?

  Bebbington, in his patient, clear-sighted way, demonstrates both that Gladstone’s thought does possess a coherent purpose and that this purpose is what makes him so alive and relevant. The Mind of Gladstone has at least three virtues that its subject’s works seldom exhibit: it is unfailingly lucid, it is not a word too long and it never strays into overarguing its case. Bebbington takes Gladstone’s mind seriously. He is not blind to the self-seeking aspects of his conduct or the embarrassing weaknesses of his outpourings, but his working assumption is that we shall never understand him properly unless we follow him all the way down. It is not enough simply to mark his classical and religious studies according to how far they measure up to the scholarship of his day or ours. Gladstone did like to be thought well of by contemporary scholars in the fields into which he so blithely trespassed, and he badgered them for sources that might help to prop up his dicier speculations. But his ultimate aim was not so much to provide scientific explanations as to recreate imaginative realms from which political, social and religious lessons might be drawn.