Gladstone: A Biography (26 page)

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,

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
quotation
³¹
to illustrate the benefits of the burying of religious strife and the consequent ebbing of religious bitterness. ‘Are you’, he
turned upon the Whigs,

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.

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill further enhanced Gladstone’s reputation as a dominant parliamentary figure, and marked an important stage in his move towards liberalism, although not
towards the leaders of the Whig party. It also underlined the slightly self-righteous separateness of the Peelites – ‘a limited but accomplished school’ as Disraeli mockingly
called them. But it did not begin to provide Gladstone with any firm moorings for his political future. He looked powerful but idiosyncratic and isolated rather than on the verge of the glorious
blossoming of his career which was to come in 1852–3.

P
ART
T
WO

A MIDDLE-AGED MID-VICTORIAN STATESMAN

1852–1868

T
HE
C
HANCELLOR
W
HO
M
ADE THE
J
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T
HE
R
USSELL GOVERNMENT
staggered on for another seven months, with Parliament in recess for most of them, after the sad farce of
the passage into law of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in July 1851. It had tried to divest itself of office, for which it had lost all appetite, in the late winter of 1851. But Stanley, the
alternative Prime Minister as the leader of the majority of the Conservative party which had opposed Peel in 1846, took one look at his followers and decided that, when he had failed to add
Gladstone or Graham to them, they were simply not up to constituting a government. ‘These are not names I can put before the Queen,’ Disraeli recorded him as dismissively concluding the
attempt to create an administration.
¹