Abstract
Robert Peel’s decision to increase the financial support given to Maynooth College, the Catholic seminary in Co. Kildare, in February 1844 would later split his party almost precisely in half1 and unleash the gravest outbreak of popular No-Popery since the Gordon riots of the 1780s. The opponents of this measure were also divided. The Anti-Maynooth Committee established to block this legislation was itself split between a faction who decried the grant on standard anti-Catholic grounds and a more determined group who deplored any state endowment of any religious sect on principle.2 This chapter explores Gladstone’s reaction to the biggest political and religious controversy of the early 1840s. In keeping with the recent emphasis on Gladstone’s subtle cultural and intellectual development,3 it challenges the idea that Gladstone’s resignation and subsequent vote in favour of the grant followed a personal crisis or rejection of the intellectual system constructed in his book The State in Its Relations with the Church (4th ed., 1841). Focusing on Gladstone’s historical analysis of church-state relations as outlined in that book, this chapter argues that his behaviour in 1845 demonstrated a considerable degree of continuity with his earlier scholarship. It is further suggested that Gladstone’s emerging pluralism on church-state matters was not a negative phenomenon; that is, it was not the result either of his education under Peel or of his recognition that his scholarly vision was largely impractical in the 1840s.
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Notes
On the third reading of the bill, on 21 May 1845, Peel found his party split 148–149 against his proposal. For a detailed chronology of events see G.I.T. Machin, ‘The Maynooth Grant, the Dissenters and Disestablishment, 1845–1847’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), pp. 61–85.
On the split between No-Popery and voluntarism in the opposition ranks, see Gilbert A. Cahill, ‘The Protestant Association and the Anti-Maynooth Agitation of 1845’ The Catholic Historical Review, 43, 3 (Oct. 1957), pp. 273–308. For details on this ‘loose alliance of Voluntary Dissenters, Anglican Evangelicals, Wesleyan Methodists, Free Church Scots and High Anglicans’ see
Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–46 (Oxford, 2001), p. 375.
E.g. R. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (London, 2008), pp. 131–59;
Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 17–18.
H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Introduction’ in M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. III, 1840–1847 (Oxford, 1974), p. xxxi.
John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II, 1872–1898 (London, 1905), p. 89; used to good effect as well in Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 70.
Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. Matthew was careful to note, however, that Gladstone never repudiated the theory of his first book, but looked for ‘a less elevated synthesis’ after 1845 in fiscal questions. See Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–74 (Oxford, 1991), p. 73.
Boyd Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’ in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (eds.), High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (Oxford, 1983), p. 31.
Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. II, Assaults (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 79–80.
R.T. Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1, 1809–1865 (London, 1982), p. 76.
Perry Butler, Gladstone, Church, State and Tractarianism: A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–59 (Oxford, 1982), p. 95.
E.J. Feuchtwanger, Gladstone (London, 1989), p. 33.
Nockles did not consider the discussion of the grant in the 1841 revision, however. See Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 91. Machin did notice that the 1841 text had ‘significantly modified’ his argument that ‘a Government should endow only the truth’.
See G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford, 1977), p. 173, nn. 158, 160.
Gladstone’s principled distance from Tractarianism is assessed in S.A. Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004), pp. 101–16; Butler, Gladstone, Church, State and Tractarianism, esp. pp. 164, 167;
F.M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. 245, 399, 465–6.
E.g. P. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 293–4, 350; id., ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in M. Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007), pp. 25–41;
J. Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth Century Belfast (Dublin, 2008), p. 185; Biagini, British Democracy, pp. 15, 18.
Ruth Clayton, ‘W.E. Gladstone: An Annotation Key’, Notes and Queries, 246 (June 2001), p. 42.
Boyd Hilton, ‘Perry Butler’s “Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism”‘, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1983), p. 297. In a subsequent analysis, however, he seemed to lean more towards the idea that, in several important respects, Gladstone’s later career was a reversal of course from the perspective of 1838. See Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, p. 32.
Eugenio Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), p. 15.
R.J. Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’ in Bruce L. Kinzer (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays in Honour of J. B. Conacher (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1985), p. 15.
Agatha Ramm, ‘Gladstone’s Religion’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 327–40, esp. p. 333.
Jonathan Conlin, ‘Gladstone and Christian Art, 1832–54’, Historical Journal, 46, 2 (2003), pp. 341–74.
On which generally see John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981);
Burrow, ‘The Sense of the Past’ in Laurence Lerner (ed.), The Victorians (London, 1978), p. 131;
Burrow, ‘The Village Community: The Use of History in Late 19th Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Societ y in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), p. 271;
F.M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993).
Dónal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests, and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1841–1846 (Oxford, 1982), p. 260; Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxi.
D.C. Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. I (London, 1910), p. 68.
J. Brooke and M. Sorenson (eds.), The Prime Ministers Papers: W.E. Gladstone. Autobiographica, vol. II (4 vols., London, 1971–8), p. 270. For similarly egocentric arguments see ibid., p. 232, 13 Feb. 1844 (‘I had to a great extent pledged myself in the face of the public, meaning, by my book, against any such increase’); p. 245, 7 Mar. 1844 (‘whatever be the risks and threaten-ings of the times, we will not dishonour ourselves by the act’); p. 247, 7 Mar. 1844 (‘I am one whose courage has never been tried — I have no position … the public may fairly regard me as a mere adventurer, if I should part company with character’); p. 266 (reminding the Prime Minister on 16 July 1844 that ‘my convictions as to the relation of my personal character to the question remained the same as they had been in the spring; that I could not be an author of such a measure, and that if I were I could not thereafter expect to be taken for an honest man’); p. 272 (during the critical Cabinet of 6 Dec. 1844, Gladstone told Peel that ‘I viewed the matter as one of personal pledge…. And that I could not doubt that the Government having adopted the measure the best thing that could happen would be its being carried’).
Speech of S. Blackburn, 14 Apr. 1845 in A.S. Thelwall (ed.), Proceedings of the Anti-Maynooth Conference (London, 1845), p. xlvii. Gladstone’s behaviour receives special treatment in this source and he is criticised by name more often than any other major politician with the exception of Peel.
E.R. Norman, for example, echoed Gladstone’s taunters at The Record in arguing that his only rationale for his vote in 1845 was ‘the naked fact, which he two or three times repeats that “it will be a very great boon” to the Irish Romanists’. See Norman, ‘The Maynooth Question of 1845’, Irish Historical Studies, 45 (1967), p. 427.
Gladstone probably had Peel’s thinking in 1829 in mind here, since Peel initially offered to resign from Wellington’s ministry so that he could support Catholic Relief from the backbenches, thus insuring that his presence in the Cabinet would not contaminate the legislative process. See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–46 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 386–7.
J.H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘What Then Does Dr. Newman Mean?’ (London, 1864), part 2, ‘True mode of meeting Mr. Kingsley’.
These were (i) a greatly expanded argument about the criteria for recognising ‘universal’ associations that necessitated religious guidance, i.e. the family and the state, in chapter 2 of volume I; (ii) extensive treatment of the history of toleration in English and Irish history where Gladstone both celebrated the demise of the Hookerian conflation of heresy with treason and reaffirmed his belief in a Christian oath requirement prior to seating MPs (chapters 7 and 8, SRC, vol. II); and (iii) a detailed examination of the ways in which his ideal of ‘national religion’ was stillborn in the British colonies such as those in the Caribbean, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India (chapters 9 and 10, SRC, vol. II). Noted in Deryk Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’ in Peter Marsh (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State (Sussex, 1979), pp. 102–3.
On which see D.W. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004), p. 24;
David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London, 1974), p. 63. Noting that it is ‘not very easy to describe’ what precisely characterised the Aristotelian cast of mind so prized in 1830s Oxford, Newsome nonetheless picked out as representative one of Gladstone’s answers to a parliamentary question in the 1830s. Asked where the Peelites were going to sit in the House, Gladstone replied precisely that ‘taking a seat is an external sign and pledge that ought to follow upon full conviction of the thing it is understood to betoken’. That somewhat precious answer, wrote Newsome, ‘was the reply of an Oxford man with a First in Greats’.
Suggestively explored in Roland Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Parliamentary Reform’ in D.W. Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2001), p. 73. It is interesting to note here that Aristotle was not completely opposed to democratic structures. Aristotle’s qualified endorsement of democracy in certain circumstances in Book IV of The Politics was famously explored in another context in
Douglass Adair, The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer (Lexington, 2000).
For the argument that ‘he never abandoned his establishment principles as the ideal for any nation’, see D.W. Bebbington, ‘Gladstone and the Nonconformists: A Religious Affinity in Politics’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History: Church Society and Politics, vol. XII (Oxford, 1975), p. 371.
SRC, vol. I, p. 123. Noted in H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Gladstone, Vaticanism and the Question of the East’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History: Religious Motivation, Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, vol. XV (Oxford, 1978), p. 419.
On these historical anxieties in the Tractarian analysis, see generally D. MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London, 2009), pp. 838–42.
Read on 4 Feb. 1840. See Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries, with Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence, vol. XIV, Index, p. 302. On de Beaumont’s critique of the Irish Protestant aristocracy, that ‘tiny and fantastically privileged minority’, see Tom Garvin and Andrea Hess, ‘Introduction: Tyranny in Ireland?’ in W.C. Taylor (ed. and trans.), Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland, Social, Religious and Political (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. v–xv.
Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2002), pp. 148–9; Walter D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” History of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 13, 49, pp. 13–14;
Colin Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland’, English Historical Review, 109 (Nov. 1994), p. 120 (on Leland’s failure to provide an Irish ‘philosophic history’ and his ‘solidly Protestant account of the rebellion of 1641’).
Rosemary O’Day, ‘John Lingard: Historians and Contemporary Politics, 1780–1850’ in Peter Philips (ed.), Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentary of John Lingard’s Death (London, 2004), p. 91;
Sheridan Gilley, ‘John Lingard and the Catholic Revival’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Church History: Papers Read at the Fifteenth Summer Meeting and the Sixteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Studies in Church History 14) (Oxford, 1977), pp. 313–27.
John Lingard, ‘Art. X: Protestantism of the Anglican Church’, The Dublin Review, 24 (May 1842), pp. 525–55. This polemic was aimed squarely at Palmer.
On Lingard’s linking of Catholicism to the maintenance of English liberties and his emphasis on ‘the Catholicism of the Anglo-Saxon Church as the basis for English civilization and constitutional development’, see Jane Garnett, ‘Religious and Intellectual Life’ in Colin Matthew (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles: 1815–1901 (Short Oxford History of the British Isles) (Oxford, 2000), p. 223.
David Nicholls, ‘Gladstone, Newman and Pluralism’ in James D. Bastable (ed.), Newman and Gladstone Centenary Essays (Dublin, 1978), p. 31.
H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 33.
SRC, vol. II, p. 243. Gladstone’s consistent concern to firmly distinguish the spiritual and the temporal realms is thoughtfully explored from the perspective of the Gorham judgment in M.D. Stephen, ‘Liberty, Church and State: Gladstone’s Relations with Manning and Acton, 1832–70’, Journal of Religious History, 1 (1960), p. 221.
On Hooker’s theory that the state and church in England were ‘personally identical’ see R.W. Greaves, ‘The Working of the Alliance: A Comment on Warburton’ in G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memor y of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), p. 166;
Alec Vidler, The Orb and the Cross: A Normative Study in the Relations of Church and State with reference to Gladstone’s Early Writings (London, 1945), p. 31. On Hooker’s ‘tranquillizing theory of parliament as the lay synod of the church’ under the Test Acts, see Skinner, Tractarians, p. 88.
SRC, pp. 9–10. Shrewdly emphasised in Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics’, p. 18 (on how ‘Gladstone vigorously rejected the central theme of Book VIII of Hooker’s Laws, the idea that the church and the commonwealth need not be, and were not in England, two separate corporations’). See also here D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, English Historical Review, 117, 473 (Sept. 2002), pp. 807–8.
M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds.), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, vol. II (14 vols., Oxford, 1968–94), p. 631, entry for 8 Oct. 1839. On ‘the hidden meanings’ see Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 18.
T.B. Macaulay, ‘Church and State’, Edinburgh Review, 69 (Apr.–July 1839), pp. 231–80. As this review has been treated ad nauseam in the secondary literature, it is not extensively used here. Gladstone remembered its tone more than its content in old age, simply calling it ‘slashing’ in 1895. W.E. Gladstone, ‘My First Book’ in Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, vol. I, p. 57.
Gladstone’s position was, of course, complicated by the tensions between Palmerites and Puseyites during 1838–43, on which, especially the mutually suspicious relationship between Keble and Palmer, see S.A. Skinner, ‘Newman, the Tractarians and the British Critic’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50, 4 (Oct. 1999), pp. 756–7; also Turner, John Henry Newman, p. 468.
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McCarthy, JP. (2010). History and pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth grant controversy. In: Boyce, D.G., O’Day, A. (eds) Gladstone and Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292451_2
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