by Roy Jenkins
So some provision for resort to the courts on what was and what was not a fair rent was inevitable. Gladstone was inclined to make it as elaborate as possible because he liked complicated schemes. The Cabinet accepted any regulation with reluctance. The Tories, who did not divide against the second reading of the bill, fought hard against the relevant clause. The Lords amended it by substituting an ‘exorbitant rent’ for an ‘excessive rent’ as the trigger which set off the process. Gladstone, under pressure from Granville as the leader of the Lords, accepted with reluctance the apparently minor change. Although the only dictionary difference between the two words is that ‘excessive’ means to exceed the proper amount and that ‘exorbitant’ means to do so grossly, the difference nonetheless enabled the courts to interpret the protection narrowly enough to render it almost a dead letter.
For the rest the bill contained an obeisance to a scheme of tenant land purchase with some Treasury assistance, which was Bright’s favoured solution but which was a very pale forerunner of the effective Conservative measures for peasant proprietorship which were taken around the turn of the century thirty years later. Altogether the Land Bill of 1870 assaulted some shibboleths and pointed a way for the future much more effectively than it changed the reality of agrarian life in Ireland. Unlike the Church Bill it did not settle the issue to which it was directed. It raised questions rather than disposed of them. To the end of his first government, however, but not much longer, Gladstone persisted in the over-sanguine belief that he had dealt with Irish land as effectively as he had with the Irish Church. He thought that if he could add the third achievement of a bill dealing with Irish university education (as he tried to do in 1873) he would have achieved a triple crown and gone far towards fulfilling his proclaimed mission ‘to pacify Ireland’. And beyond that, as he genuinely believed, lay the hope of an honourable retirement from politics as soon as his government (he thought of it not as his first but as his only one) was over. He could then devote ‘an interval between parliament and the grave’,5 not exactly to repose but to God and Homer and his other religious and intellectual interests. As he wrote to the Queen in March 1873 (using the habitual third person), ‘he has the strongest opinion against spending his old age under the strain of that perpetual contention which is inseparable from his present position’.6
Hammond believed there were two central reasons why Gladstone did not get Irish land as right as he got the Irish Church. The first was that he had not adequately prepared influential opinion or provided himself and others with a background of more or less incontrovertible facts. In an age of ‘blue books’, which had proved particularly effective on factory reform and public health, he ought to have fortified himself and indoctrinated others by setting up a quickly reporting Royal Commission or other enquiring body as soon as the government came into power. This enquiry could have investigated and deliberated during 1869 and greatly strengthened the Prime Minister’s hand in 1870.
Second, Hammond thought that while Gladstone had immersed himself in Irish history, he was not well informed about the realities of mid-Victorian life in ‘John Bull’s other island’. He had never been there, and he was curiously inhibited about talking to those who knew well the situation on the ground. Unionist sentiment, which at that time was not challenged in the Liberal party, was dedicated to maintaining the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, even though at that stage its sixty-nine-year-old history was both brief and dismal and its future fifty-two years were to contain little but searing trouble. The union was sacrosanct to establishment opinion in Britain, but the instinctive reaction of such opinion was to treat talking to and being influenced by the indigenous Irish as almost the equivalent of ‘nigger loving’.
Gladstone was on the threshold of devoting the last third of his life to Ireland, yet he was not immune from this approach. The fifth Earl of Bessborough tried hard to persuade Gladstone to consult Sir John Gray about the Bill. Gray was the proprietor and editor of the Freeman’s Journal, which was pre-eminently the paper of Irish tenant farmers. He was also MP for Kilkenny and had been knighted by the Palmerston government. Furthermore, Gladstone had been warned by O’Hagan, his Irish Lord Chancellor, that ‘the success of the Land Bill depends on the Freeman’s Journal; if it says, We accept this as a fixity of tenure, every priest will say the same, and vice versa.’7 Yet Gladstone would not see Gray. Instinctively he approached the problem of Irish government almost in a Colonial or Indian spirit. He became prepared to sacrifice the unity and future of the Liberal party to trying to right the wrongs of Ireland, but he made it, in Morley’s phrase, ‘almost a point of honour . . . for British cabinets to make Irish laws out of their own heads’.8
In the same way he used Manning as effectively his sole channel of communication with the Catholic Church in Ireland. This was odder in 1870 than it had been in 1869 with the Irish Disestablishment Bill. Manning knew something about both the Anglican and the Roman Churches in Ireland, but he knew next to nothing about Irish land tenure. And an ill-informed conduit is always a potentially misleading one. Further more any renewal of relations of trust and friendship with Manning, which had seemed possible the previous year, had been shattered by Gladstone’s deep disapproval of the Archbishop’s role in urging Pope Pius IX forward to what for Gladstone were the excesses of ultramontanism and the pernicious, divisive and unhistorical doctrine of papal infallibility. Manning’s activities in this direction were at their height in the spring and summer of 1870, and Gladstone’s anti-Roman feeling became incandescent. It was a minor and lucky miracle that he waited five years to compose and publish his pamphlet entitled The Vatican Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation rather than dashing it off immediately and publishing it, maybe under an easily pierced veil of anonymity, while he was still Prime Minister.
Such partial knowledge and imperfect channels meant that Gladstone’s bill strained the loyalty of the Whigs without achieving much of a response in Ireland. This double-barrelled coolness was perhaps inevitable, but it was nonetheless marked. Gray himself voted against the second reading, the bishops said that it could not be regarded as a settlement of the question, and the Dublin Municipal Council passed a resolution of inadequacy. Nor was the passage through Parliament nearly as solidly assured as had been that of the Church Bill. Then the Tories could be depended upon to oppose, and the Liberal majority to support. With the Land Bill the Tory opposition was more sporadic and therefore more dangerous, because it helped to make unanimous Liberal support less reliable. Indeed the most damaging enemy of the bill in the Commons was Roundell Palmer, who had been Attorney-General in the Palmerston and Russell governments and Gladstone’s adjutant in several past parliamentary struggles. However, Gladstone, with that mixture of simple generosity and willingness to stoop to conquer which were equally persistent parts of his character (and which he had previously shown to Lowe) made him Lord Chancellor when Hatherley resigned in 1872 and employed him in the same capacity (as well as advancing him to the earldom of Selborne) in 1880–5.
Despite these hazards the Land Bill got through the Commons by Whitsun. Gladstone celebrated by allowing himself to be taken by Granville to Epsom for the Derby. His reaction again illustrated his mixture of naivety and enthusiasm (’no one of such great simplicity had ever before been found in so exalted a station’, Jowett, the Master who made the Balliol of good jobs for the well-qualified boys, said of him when he became Prime Minister). Gladstone’s diary entry read:
Went off at 11.45 to the Derby by the S.E. Railway, with Granville, who most kindly arranged everything, including two drives through beautiful country. I was immensely interested in the scene, and the race. Conversation with P. of Wales – Admiral Rous [the public handicapper, a fine title] – and many more. The race gave me a tremor. We reached Walmer at 7¾ . . . .9
The measure then survived the Lords and a little shuttle between the two Houses, including the acceptance by the Commons of the unfortunate ‘exor
bitant’ for ‘excessive’, to become law by the end of July. Gladstone had two associated disappointments. First he was forced to accompany the Land Bill with a Coercion Bill (the curiously brutal name commonly used in the late nineteenth century for Irish bills giving special powers to courts and police against politically motivated crime). He was very loath to do this, but a combination of Fenian activities on the ground and the pressure of his colleagues forced him into it. This combination also postponed for a year the implementation of his desire, as an assuaging measure, to release another batch of Fenian prisoners beyond the forty whom the government had freed (with beneficial results according to the Viceroy) in early 1869. When this second batch were eventually let out it was with the short-sighted provision that they should be banished from both Britain and Ireland itself; so they went to the United States and acted as dedicated agents of terrorist recruitment and fund-raising.
The other disappointment was that his desire, embraced even more strongly by Hartington as Irish Chief Secretary, to improve the infrastructure of the Irish economy by nationalizing and extending its railway system, ran into the sand of Cabinet opposition and postponement. Gladstone did not push this as hard as he ought to have done, but he was nonetheless always somewhat predisposed towards railway nationalization for England, both when he was President of the Board of Trade in the 1840s and in the Palmerston government in the early 1860s, and for Ireland a decade later.
By the spring of 1870 Gladstone’s attention was increasingly engrossed by English education, both lower and higher. The middle or secondary range was, unfortunately for national purposes, left to look after itself, that is confined to the public schools and to a few haphazardly placed ancient grammar schools. This persisted until Balfour grasped the nettle in 1902 and thereby, such can be the perversity of political rewards, helped to produce the Conservative electoral débâcle of 1906. In 1870, however, it was the need for an elementary education bill which was regarded as urgent, as was that for removing the remaining Oxford and Cambridge religious tests. Legislation on elementary education was eagerly sought within the government by de Grey (Ripon) and W. E. Forster. As Lord President and Vice-President of the Council, these two carried the ministerial responsibility for education, such as it then was. This eagerness was shared by many of the Liberal party’s most prominent provincial supporters, as well as by several other Cabinet members (notably Bruce, the Home Secretary), but not by the Prime Minister.
Gladstone was never very interested in popular education. He was half willing to go along with a fashionable view that the crushing of France by Germany in 1870 owed a great deal to the Prussian system of state education. However, he was far from giving the highest priority to military victories and his mind was set much more on Eton than on the Technischen Hochschulen of Bismarck’s Berlin. He was an unashamed elitist. To him education meant the rigours of traditional classical scholarship. Although it was of course manifestly impractical to provide this sort of instruction for more than a tiny minority, he did not easily embrace the utility of more humble forms of teaching. He could not, however, contest the inevitability of a major measure of reform.
The existing position, in which of 4.3 million children of school age (in England and Wales), only 1.3 million were in state-aided schools, 1.0 million in purely voluntary (and often very inefficient) schools, and 2.0 million outside any educational provision, was not defensible. Confronted with this reality Gladstone’s own preference was for increasing the grant to the existing Anglican (and Roman Catholic) schools, and filling the gap with new state schools – Board Schools as, because they were administered by local education boards, they came to be called – which would provide only secular education on the rates, while allowing the priests or ministers of the various denominations to come in at their own expense and provide full doctrinal instruction for the children of their own adherents. This, he wrote to Bright, provided the only prospect of ‘solid and stable ground’.
His approach to the education of the ‘uneducated’ classes was at least as much that of a churchman as of a reformer. He no longer believed that Anglicanism should be imposed upon everybody, but he was most unwilling to see the existing Church of England schools absorbed into a secular national system. To illustrate the matter with particularity, he would have been horrified if at Hawarden his brother-in-law Henry Glynne, or his son Stephen Gladstone when he succeeded Glynne as rector in 1872, had been inhibited from religious instruction, and instruction which embraced the Anglican ‘formularies’, in the Church school there. Simple education should be for piety as much as for knowledge, and piety (for Anglicans at any rate) involved some understanding of the dogma and structure of the apostolic Church. A religion based solely on Bible teaching intermingled with some vague ethical principles would always be for Gladstone a poor and sterile thing.
His only solid ground was not however ground which he was able to hold. Hardly anyone except himself was in favour of the position. It did not satisfy the Anglican lobby, which was less tolerant of ‘lesser breeds without the law’ than Gladstone had become; it did not satisfy the Dissenters, who wanted simple Bible teaching on the rates; and it did not satisfy the mostly Erastian members of the Cabinet who wanted a more politically attractive solution. This was provided nearly three months after the introduction of the bill into the House of Commons by the Cabinet’s decision on 14 June to accept what became the famous Cowper-Temple amendment. Cowper-Temple was the Whig member for South Hampshire who had been intermittently a junior minister for the quarter-century from 1841 to 1866 but whom Gladstone had not included in 1868, although with another touch of magnanimity he was to make him a peer in 1880. Cowper-Temple’s amendment provided for basic or Nonconformist religion, that is the Bible and a few hymns, on the rates. It went through the House of Commons on 16 June, for which day Gladstone’s diary entry included the stoical entry: ‘Explained the plans of the Govt in modification of the Bill to an eager and agitated House. . . . Exhausting Siroccolike heat.’10
Gladstone was half self-willed ideologue and half parliamentary old trouper who would expound with vehemence to the House of Commons a decision of his government even when he had accepted it with the utmost reluctance. His reluctance on this occasion was so great that it probably contributed to the exhaustion at least as much as did the humidity of the weather. Matthew describes the Cabinet decision as ‘a major personal blow for Gladstone’ and his acceptance of it as ‘a concession which rankled more deeply’ than any other obeisance he made to hold his government together.11
The concession made, the Education Bill ground on through the Commons until it completed its course amid the opening distractions of the Franco-Prussian War. It was not seriously contested by the Conservative opposition (although they modified it as soon as they came to power in 1874 in a way that Gladstone regarded as constitutionally improper),75 and as a result it was not seriously interfered with by the House of Lords. In several of the many divisions Tory votes were an essential contribution to the government majority. Thus on 30 June an amendment moved by Jacob Bright, John Bright’s younger brother, which proclaimed the doctrine that religious teaching in state schools should not be in favour of, or opposed to, the tenets of any denomination, was defeated by 251 votes to 130. The 130 were all Liberals. The majority was effectively provided by over a hundred Conservatives. It was not a happy dependence or one which was good for the cohesion of the government party.
Matters were made worse by the insertion in the bill of a provision which became the much denounced and therefore famous Section 25 and enabled school boards to pay to denominational schools the fees of poor children. This led to an excited Nonconformist conference of opposition at Manchester in 1872, and to an agitation in which Joseph Chamberlain first came to national prominence. Chamberlain did not win his battle – the ground for which he chose to fight was in fact ludicrously narrow, for very few school boards contemplated doing any such thing – but he made life very uncomfortable for a High An
glican leader of the Liberal party, and also set a depressing pattern, which persisted until terminated by the Butler Act of 1944, of making British education policy more a battleground for denominational and social dispute than a basis for improving the instruction of children.
Gladstone did not therefore set the schools issue to rest by his reluctant swallowing of Cowper-Temple. And no sooner had he imbibed this disagreeable medicine than he was confronted with a second nauseous potion in the form of the University Tests Bill. More than fifteen years previously Gladstone had been converted to the admission of non-Anglicans to the University and to its bachelors’ degrees. (There were of course two universities involved, but he found it very difficult not to believe that the intellectual life of the universe centred on Carfax, or that even the greater Trinity in the Fens could hold a candle to Christ Church.) But he was still loath to allow non-Anglicans any place in Oxford’s controlling institutions, including the membership of Convocation which would follow from their being allowed to take masters’ degrees. Admission to headships of houses, professorships and membership of the governing bodies of colleges through fellowships he recoiled from still more strongly. In 1865, when Goschen, then a backbench Liberal MP for the City of London, had brought this matter to the fore by an (unsuccessful) private member’s bill, Gladstone had somewhat extremely written to a Nonconformist correspondent: ‘I would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion regulated in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso.’12 76 By 1870 the matter had advanced to the stage of Coleridge, later Chief Justice and at the time Gladstone’s Solicitor-General, being allowed to make another attempt to end the tests, provided he brought forward the bill in his private capacity and not as a law officer of the Crown.