High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The question of why that should not be rectified remained. Cockburn, who spoke later in the debate, professed himself to be ‘one of those who had all along supported the removal of Jewish disabilities’, but said that on this occasion he had to ‘act judicially’.5 The oath may have had its origins in the desire to keep ‘Popish recusants’ from power, and been worded so as to avoid its being ‘evaded’: and there was no provision for it to be altered for Jews. He said he was ‘sorry’ to conclude that Salomons could not take his seat: but the law left him no choice.6 However, the construction others put on Cockburn’s remarks was that the Oath of Abjuration had come to apply to Jews not by design, but by accident.

  George Thompson, the Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets, was the first to come close to a question so far undiscussed: how far the reluctance to alter the law to allow Salomons and, indeed, Rothschild, to sit in the House was a question of anti-Semitism, active or passive. His constituency to the east of the City of London included the main Jewish community in Britain, and he asserted that he represented ‘the majority of the Hebrew community in the United Kingdom’.7 He was jeered when he said this, and observed that the ‘derisive and insolent’ response had given away the true feelings of many MPs about the Jews in Britain. He said that ‘they looked at the law in this case not as men caring for the law, but colouring the law to suit their prejudices.’ The choice was ‘religious liberty’ against ‘religious intolerance’. Russell said he would do everything in his power to bring forward a bill to abolish the restrictions on Jews.

  The electors of Greenwich petitioned to be heard in person at the Bar of the House. So, in the cause of Rothschild, did electors from the City of London. The House still, at the end of a second day of debate, voted to exclude Salomons. For good measure, he was fined £500 for each of the three occasions he had voted, improperly, in divisions in the House. He and those who supported him now awaited the legislation to alter the oath. Bills were brought forward in 1853, 1856 and 1857, but were thrown out by the Lords. In 1853 it had been Aberdeen, by then Prime Minister, who had sought to remove the disabilities, and who in a speech in the Lords on 29 April had attacked the ‘remnant of that prejudice’ against the Jews that had existed in much of Christendom because the Jews had been ‘under the obloquy of a crime of inconceivable magnitude’.8 Aberdeen continued: ‘Vengeance was not ours . . . it was not for us to “repay”.’ It was unacceptable that ‘the Jew, in this country, is the only person who is excluded from full civil and political rights in consequence of his religious belief.’9 He said that since Parliament imposed the burdens of Englishmen upon Jews, it should confer the rights of Englishmen upon them too.

  Aberdeen was countered, however, by Shaftesbury, the most liberal of Tories and the friend of the oppressed. He doubted the Prime Minister’s assertion that the public mood was for repeal of these restrictions. He was also, however, unhappy at the logic of a measure that would allow Jews to sit in Parliament, but forbid them from becoming Regent, Lord Chancellor, Keeper of the Great Seal, from presenting to benefices, or ‘advising the Crown in reference to the established church’.10 Shaftesbury maintained that ‘if they have a constitutional right to seats in parliament, they also have a constitutional right to all the privileges and consequences of seats.’ He was unhappy, too, that the admission of Jews would lead to them making laws that bound the Established Church of which they had no part.11 The Protestant settlement was embedded deeply in political and constitutional life, and this made the Jewish debate about far more than casual anti-Semitism.

  Shaftesbury claimed that:

  to bestow on the Jew privilege and power to exercise an influence and give a vote on laws affecting directly the Church of England, and indirectly perhaps the whole Church of Christ—to allow him to riot and revel legislatively in the indulgence of that peculiar antipathy which is the character and distinction of his name and nation—we are summoned to suppress all mention of that Name which is our glory, our safeguard, and our strength. Well, my Lords, whose freedom is there concerned? I say it is ours. We are called upon to retreat before a man who tells you that his religion solely exists by the denial of yours; and that he must and will have a seat in Parliament, to possess at least the privilege of asserting that religion, and of making laws which will have an effect upon that religion which is the opprobrium of his race.

  He mocked the Commons for being ‘good enough’ to offer an alternative oath, and condemned as ‘irreverent’ the idea that politicians should ‘twist and turn these solemn attestations to suit our political convenience’. He thundered: ‘In affirming that Parliament should not be exclusively Christian, it is desirable to weigh fairly and deliberately the effect we shall produce on the nation at large. But admitting, for the sake of argument, the possibility of political benefits, by the large inclusion, and consequent satisfaction, of many discontented and restless spirits, are there no moral mischiefs to make us pause . . .? I confess, my Lords, this seems to me to be a very novel way of conferring a privilege.’12 He feared, he said, the destruction of the existence of religion in Great Britain. The hysterical mien that Shaftesbury had displayed to Sir Robert Peel had not diminished with time.

  Other peers endorsed Shaftesbury’s view. However, one with, perhaps, a more detached view of Christianity was the Archbishop of Dublin, who suggested that not to allow Jews in the Commons was an insult to those who had elected them. In what appeared to be a veiled rebuke to Shaftesbury he observed that the measure’s opponents ‘were altogether in a false position when they proclaimed it would unchristianise the legislature by removing these disabilities, and yet said it did not unprotestantise the legislature to admit Roman Catholics, and that it did not unchurch the legislature to admit dissenters to parliament.’13 The Bishop of Salisbury disagreed with him, on the grounds of admitting blasphemers into the Commons; and he in turn was attacked by the Bishop of St David’s. After a final blast from Lord Colchester about the false analogy between Quakers and Jews – ‘at the time that the Quaker was relieved from disability . . . he professed Christianity’ – the vote was taken, and the bill thrown out by 164 to 115.

  These arguments were rehearsed again for the Oaths Bill in 1854, and the Oath of Abjuration Bill in 1856, and the Oaths Bill in 1857. The denouement came, at last, in 1858. A new Oaths Bill went through the Commons, only to have the clause applying to Jews thrown out in the House of Lords. The Lords objected to two (as they saw it) separate matters being considered in the bill: one to alter oaths generally, the other to address the specific issue facing Jews. The campaign against the bill was led by Lord Chelmsford, the Lord Chancellor, the former Sir Frederick Thesiger. Chelmsford told the Lords that he had always opposed admission of the Jews to Parliament, and intended to be consistent. Aware of the dangers of being thought prejudiced, he noted that another peer had referred to the ‘most perfect fairness and good feeling’ with which he had conducted his opposition to the relief of Jewish disabilities.14 He then proceeded to hint that while this question was always discussed in ‘tacit reference to one or two individuals who are distinguished members of the Jewish persuasion, who are regarded as types of the whole Jewish people’, perhaps not all Jews were like this (he might have observed that not all Protestants were like Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, but chose not to sow confusion in that way). To base the argument on ‘gentlemen of the highest character and respectability . . . who live in social intercourse with their Christian fellow-subjects, and who possess none of that exclusive spirit which is considered to be characteristic of the religion which they profess’ was a dangerous substitution of personal considerations for a general principle. Chelmsford did not say he feared an influx of moneylenders, old clothes sellers and others from Houndsditch, but then he did not need to.

  When even a writer considered to be so humane as Dickens could use Fagin as a representative of British Jewry, anti-Semitism was a grave problem. Yet it was also beginning to be regarded as an ugly prejudice, which would explain Chelmsfo
rd’s determination to laud himself for his fairness in the matter of the rights of Jews. However, he did not regard the term ‘civil rights’ as including ‘a claim to be admitted to political office or to parliament . . . I contend, my Lords, that no such rights exist indiscriminately for all citizens.’15 He had no sympathy for the disfranchised electors of the City of London who kept returning Rothschild to Parliament, for they knew the law when they did so. Like Shaftesbury, he protested that ‘the legislature, as a legislature, would cease to be Christian’ if Jews were admitted to it ‘because no test of Christianity would be exacted from its members.’16

  Chelmsford was politely countered by Lord Lyndhurst, who noted the numbers of prelates who had over the years supported Jews joining Parliament, without expecting the country to be dechristianised by the experience. Jews sat in parliaments in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, whose constitutions had been passed through the House of Lords: these countries had not become unchristian, and nor had their parliaments. ‘What, then, becomes of your principle – your high principle?’ he asked. ‘You throw it to the wind – you think that British subjects in the colonies are not worthy of its protection.’17 He reminded the House that when Catholic emancipation was being discussed the arguments against it were that the Catholics looked up to a foreign sovereign, and sought converts. Nonetheless, the Catholics were emancipated. The Jews, by contrast, looked up to no foreign sovereign, and did not proselytise.

  The Dukes of Rutland and Marlborough both spoke against, fearing the dechristianising of Britain. The Bishop of Cashel did too, despite protesting that ‘I am actuated by no unkind feeling towards them. I love them.’18 However, he felt moved to remind his peers that the Jews were ‘the children of Abraham, but they are degenerate children who walk not in the steps of their father’. It had been they who had cried out ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ Moreover, ‘the Jews of the present day show themselves the true children of their fallen fathers, by blaspheming that holy name and speaking evil of Him whom Christians love.’ It had only been a matter of time before someone adduced this argument.

  The Commons refused to accept this amendment. Russell, as Leader of the Opposition, moved on 10 May 1858 that the House should disagree with the Lords: his main line of argument being that the oaths objected to had been framed to counter the ambitions of seditious Roman Catholics, not Jews. It was decided to appoint a committee to examine the bill again. After a vote was passed by 251 to 196, it appointed to the committee – as it was legally entitled to do – Rothschild, who was still the Member for the City of London even though unable to take his seat. The Lords saw its hand had been forced. On 18 May 1858 a conference was convened in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster between the two Houses, to discuss the proposition that either House might admit Jews by resolution, with their taking an oath omitting the vexatious words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’.

  The conference agreed nothing, except that the peers nominated to attend it would report to their House the arguments of the Commons. Earl Stanhope, supporting the Commons’s view in a Lords debate a fortnight later, said the majority in the Commons in favour of admitting Jews had trebled in two years – from 49 to 153 – and the Lords could not sensibly go on ignoring this weight of opinion in the elected House. The alternative was a collision with the Commons, which would have widespread constitutional ramifications. There remained some diehard opponents: Lord de Ros, in the most unreconstructed contribution to the debate, asked ‘whether on any great emergencies the Jews had ever appeared in arms for the defence of this country? Why, when England was menaced with invasion, did not the Jews imitate the example of the lawyers and other professions and establish volunteer or fencible corps among themselves? Why were they not to be found in Her Majesty’s ships and in her army? The fact was that the Jew always looked upon himself as an alien in the country in which he dwelt, and that was a good reason why he should not be admitted to parliament.’19

  Matters were then delayed by Derby’s falling ill. He returned to the Lords on 1 July, at the height of the public health disaster known as the Great Stink, when the Thames was awash with sewage in a heatwave, and shocked peers by saying he had changed his mind and that, to avoid a showdown with the Commons, the Lords should agree that Jews should be admitted to Parliament. His admission of defeat was pure pragmatism: ‘I take the course which I have adopted from no other feeling than a desire to see an amicable settlement between the two Houses with regard to a question of grave interest, and with respect to which I see no other solution.’20 Those who knew Derby doubted the sincerity of his conversion. ‘It is difficult to believe that he himself ever cared a straw about the Jew question, or that his opposition had any motive except that of pleasing the bigoted and narrow-minded of his party,’ Greville wrote in his diary.21

  The compromise – that Jews could come to take the oath, object to the phrase about Christianity, and be offered a different form of words – was put by Lord Lucan, the Crimean War commander who had ordered his brother-in-law Lord Cardigan to lead the charge of the Light Brigade. Lucan’s compromise stands out in a career of one blunder after another. His callous behaviour as Lord Lieutenant of Mayo in the 1840s during the Potato Famine had made him a hate figure to the Irish, and his role in the Crimea earned him a censure (which he strongly disputed) in dispatches. The bill he had introduced to effect this device had a second reading, despite the usual clamour from those who felt the Jews remained insufficiently punished for their support for the death of Jesus Christ.

  When the bill went into committee even the diehards saw the game was up. Some claimed the Lords was being treated unconstitutionally, a synonym for being forced to accept reality. However, the bill went through without amendment at the committee stage, and received a third reading in the Lords with the sole amendment, moved by the Duke of Marlborough, that no Jew be allowed to present to an ecclesiastical benefice. The minority of opponents in the Commons tried but failed to derail the measure there. Samuel Warren, the MP for Midhurst, expressed his ‘unconquerable repugnance’ at Lucan’s bill at its third reading on 21 July, but by now such voices were very much in the minority. Thomas Duncombe, the MP for Finsbury, referred to the absurd position the Lords – a repository of ‘bigotry, prejudice and intolerance’ – had found itself in when Rothschild was put on the committee to negotiate with them, even though he could not take his seat in the chamber.22 He argued that the long struggle for Jewish equality in politics was about to end, and he was right. The third reading passed by 129 votes to 55.

  Rothschild came to the House on 26 July 1858, determined to use the new law to take his seat. Warren tried to interrupt as he was being sworn, but was told to sit down by the Speaker. Rothschild had formally to object to the oath administered to him so that the House could resolve to offer him an acceptable form of words. Warren intervened again, and this time was deemed not to be out of order. He said the House had arrived at ‘a very grave crisis in its constitutional history and that of the country, and a sense of duty will not allow me to remain silent.’23 He praised the ‘spotlessness of character’ of Rothschild and protested that ‘I have not in my heart one particle of animosity against the Jewish race’, but that what the Commons was about to do was ‘dangerous’.24 One or two other Members registered their disagreement with what was happening, prompting others to reflect on the unfortunate prejudice against the Jews. Those so attacked then denied any prejudice, but referred instead to their Christian convictions. The motion was put to allow Rothschild to take the oath.

  He then did so, on the Old Testament, with his hat on, and at last took his seat. A by-election was arranged in Greenwich, at which Salomons (who had been Lord Mayor of London in 1855) was victorious, and he took his seat in 1859. Nathaniel de Rothschild became the first Jewish peer, in 1885. Another bastion of prejudice had been breached.

  II

  The Jewish debate represented a move to a new order, one that was more secular and the result of more pragm
atic attitudes. Those who drove it through required an intelligent flexibility of mind that appreciated what was best for the national interest. William Ewart Gladstone was the most principled of men, but would sometimes adapt his beliefs when circumstances changed. His move from protectionism to free trade was perhaps the most significant example of this, creating as it did a cast of mind that forced him to change party altogether. He avoided accusations of hypocrisy, or of putting personal ambition ahead of all else, because it was so transparent that strong moral and religious principles underpinned his conduct. Yet he was a man of great inner turbulence, troubled by sexual repression and a close interest in the erotic.

  By the early 1840s Gladstone had established himself as the leader of the next generation of politicians after Peel. Carlyle, who was not disposed to praise others, in 1842 described him as ‘a most methodic, fair-spoken, purified, clear-starched, sincere-looking man.’25 Carlyle’s acquaintance with him had begun by his reading The State in its Relations with the Church, which the Sage – no more easily pleased by intellectual questions than by personalities – had found impressive in its thoughtfulness and scholarship. Gladstone published this in 1838, and a second work of theology, Church Principles Considered in their Results, in 1841. The power of Gladstone’s intellect and the force of his religious principles made his life a struggle. The earlier book expressed Gladstone’s view that the State had a moral role to play as well as a political one; the latter reasserted the primacy of Anglicanism, as the doctrine of the Established Church, within the State. He would strive to uphold these doctrines: they were the foundation of his political creed and the driving force behind his implementation of policy in a period of change and improvement. He was friendly with most of the leading lights of the Oxford Movement. He shared an Arnoldian wish for a completely religious society, but the practicality that encroached upon him in his life as a politician forced him to realise the impossibility of such a thing. He took a close interest in theological questions all his life, and as a minister paid close attention to the politics and patronage of the Established Church.