It was the duty of the Church of England bishops to protect their flocks from Popish practices. But there was widespread feeling amongst the more robust Protestants that, either out of sloth or a feeling of personal sympathy, the bishops were failing in their episcopal duty. So they took matters into their own hands. The Church Association began legal action in the Civil and Consistory Courts. The Manchester Protestant Thousand, and other bands of hooligans, broke up services which they believed to be conducted by clergymen of High Church disposition. John Kensit and his Wycliffe Preachers visited churches in which they believed ‘illegality and idolatry were practised … entered a protest’ and, after being careful to ‘leave the building before Holy Communion’, wrote to the appropriate bishop to demand that he ‘stopped all Romanising practices’ in his diocese.27
Within days of his enthronement, Randall Davidson had received urgent pleas to take immediate action against the rise of secularism in the Church. Before he had had time to decide how to react, he was presented with the demand that he protect the Prayer Book by stamping out ritualism. The concern about ‘Popish practices’ had spread to the House of Commons, whose Members could claim to be the legal guardians of the Book of Common Prayer. To prove that the whole nation felt alarmed about Papal effrontery, Punch began to lampoon both sides in the dispute, and a number of second-rate novelists wrote satires on the subject.* The crisis had escalated because the Anglo-Catholics had reacted as men and women under threat often do. They had grown more militant. The English Church Union had been formed and the Church Times founded to propagate their cause. And they gloried in their apostasy. ‘In going beyond what the prayer book allows, we get the results the prayer book intended.’28
Davidson’s first public meeting after he became Archbishop in 1903 was with a hundred enraged Unionist MPs.29 He procrastinated again, hoping that time would heal the House of Commons’ pride, wounded by the two years’ argument about the Prayer Book being conducted without their involvement. Quite the opposite happened. In early 1904, the Reverend Mr Bowden wrote a violently anti-Anglo-Catholic pamphlet and sent a copy to every Member of Parliament. The result was an almost immediate demand for a Select Committee to examine the degree to which the Church of England was failing to observe the form of service set out in the Prayer Book.
Davidson, all urbanity put aside, simply refused to accept a parliamentary enquiry. Because of the religious affiliations of MPs, a Committee of the House of Commons could come to only one conclusion – an outright condemnation of Anglo-Catholics and their High Church habits. That, he feared, might well lead to the schism which all Archbishops of Canterbury believe they have an overriding duty to avoid. Lord Halifax, the most patrician of High Churchmen, regarded the proposal as a ‘gross impertinence’.30 Anglicans of every sort, including some who were active in their opposition to ‘vestments’, were so offended by the proposal that Davidson thought it right to warn the government that, were a Select Committee Inquiry imposed upon the Church, the result might be immediate and irresistible demands for disestablishment. He suggested a Royal Commission as an alternative. Balfour, at first, could not agree. Indeed he was so irritated by the suggestion that he reacted with uncharacteristic emotion. ‘It is now clear to me that all the clergy, of whatever school, are equally stupid. I had thought the range of stupidity more limited. I cannot appoint a Royal Commission. It would not satisfy the House of Commons. They would vote against me if I urged it.’31
Davidson would not budge. The House of Commons, whatever its formal powers, could not sit in judgement on the Church of England. So Balfour, unwilling to challenge the Church and unable to brush the Protestant complaints aside, followed the stupid course and set up a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline under the chairmanship of Michael Hicks Beach. The House of Commons complained, but did not rebel.
The Royal Commission met 118 times. Most of the sessions were taken up with representations from the two extremes. The Protestants (prompted by Mr Bowden of leaflet fame) produced witnesses who reported churches where incense was burned and priests wore vestments? The High Churchmen, led with great dignity by Lord Halifax, brought examples of services during which the Athanasian Creed had not been said and clergymen who did not dress appropriately for Communion. They added that were they, or any of their kind, censured for their conduct, they would refuse to appear before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council whose jurisdiction over the Church they did not accept. The Royal Commission effectively endorsed their rebellion. ‘A court dealing with matters of conscience and religion must above all others rest on the moral authority if its judgements are to be effective. As thousands of clergy with strong lay support refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee, its judgements cannot practically be enforced.’
The Commission did, however, believe that some liturgical practices might be unacceptable even in a broad Church. They should be dealt with by ecclesiastical courts rather than secular authorities. It also suggested the procedures by which the Prayer Book should be revised if revision was thought necessary. The Upper House of Convocation responded to the report by setting up a sub-committee which in 1908 produced a Historic Report on Ornaments. The whole process stimulated much discussion but no change in practice.
But on one subject the whole Church of England displayed something approaching unity. ‘There were very few Church leaders who did not adopt attitudes critical of industrial organisation and social order.’32 That critical spirit was encouraged by the Christian Social Union, founded by the early (and eventually reluctant) Modernists Henry Scott Holland and Charles Gore, and the Church Socialist League, which was formed in 1906, the year of the general election which returned fifty-three Labour Members of Parliament to the House of Commons. Critics of the (often High Church) clergy who held radical views argued that they failed to attract working-class support and that they represented essentially Fabian, middle-class values.33
But ‘it was unusual, after 1900, to find a bishop who did not regard the declaration of social principle as a primary duty’.34 The emphasis on social policy had an inevitable influence on both dogma and Church membership. Despite the support of some Anglo-Catholics, ‘The drift … towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on service of men than the fulfilment of the will of God’35 had its effect on the arguments about faith which had disturbed the Church of England at the beginning of the century. It affected men on both sides of the dispute. No social conscience was more developed than that of Charles Gore – critic of the Boer War, supporter of female emancipation, advocate of equality and friend of T. H. Green, the only genuine philosopher English social democracy has ever possessed – but he was also the man who was accused of ‘worrying’ the Reverend Beeby out of his living. The man who made that accusation was Hastings Rashid, effectively the leader of the ‘modernisers’, supporter of all the social causes which Gore endorsed and member of the Christian Social Union which Gore had founded. The Church of England builds its unity on contradictions.*
The Nonconformists had emphasised the Christian duty to the poor throughout the nineteenth century; in Edwardian England, the nature of their commitment became more overtly political. At the London Temple, J. R. Campbell told his Baptist flock, ‘Go with Keir Hardie to the House of Commons and listen to him pleading for justice … and you see the Atonement.’36 The Methodists had always believed that ‘whole Christians’, who lived like Christ, performed ‘good works’, but their definition of that duty changed. Because they attracted most of their support from the working class, they developed close connections with the Independent Labour Party and the ‘new trade unionism’ of unskilled men. As a result they began to emphasise the importance of campaigning against social evils rather than performing works of individual charity. Instead of appealing for personal improvement, they argued for legislation which prohibited or limited practices of which they disapproved – drinking, gambling, prostitution and
profaning the Sabbath.37 The campaigns ‘secularised’ the chapels. Instead of praying for the Holy Spirit to purify and save, they called on Parliament to impose the rules which Christians should obey.
Methodists, who believed that only faith saved, regarded good works as the result of redemption rather than a guarantee of its achievement. The Salvation Army, the stepchild of Methodism, had little time to spend on theological speculation. But, at the turn of the century, William Booth, its nineteenth-century founder, began to wonder if his campaigns against poverty and prostitution had become ends in themselves rather than a reflection of the love of God. So in 1904 he set out on an evangelical tour of Britain, travelling in a white, open-topped motor with distinctive red wheels. By then General Booth, if not the great movement he led, had become almost respectable. In June 1904 he was given audience by Edward VII, to whom he reacted with surprising sycophancy: ‘I had come to expect a selfish, sensuous personage, popular because of lending himself to recreations etc. – showy functions – unwilling to pose as treading in the shoes of Albert the Good. All at once the embodiment of a simple genial English gentleman was sprung upon me.’38
After a wrangle with the Earl Marshal, and the postponement which followed the King’s appendicectomy, Bramwell Booth (the General’s son) was allowed to attend the Coronation in his Salvation Army uniform. Bramwell was so impressed by the ceremony that he wondered if ‘the Church of England had taken some lessons from the Salvation Army while hesitating to acknowledge it’. Perhaps he was unreasonably influenced by the creation of the Church Army twenty years earlier – undoubtedly a belated imitation of General Booth’s righteous regiments. By the time of the Coronation the Church Army had decided to concentrate on gaols and beaches. Twenty-four of the forty-six British prisons had Church Army ‘labour homes’ close by to welcome released men back into society. And in the summer, there were few holiday resorts which did not echo to the Church Army’s hymns.
The streets still belonged to the Salvation Army. The hopes of In Darkest England were dashed in Edwardian England. That plan for ending unemployment had required the creation of ‘work colonies’ in the dominions and – despite a meeting with Cecil Rhodes (persuaded by Booth to kneel in prayer in a railway carriage) and long conversations with David Lloyd George (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) and A. J. Balfour (the leader of the Opposition) – the South Africa Company could not find the requested £150,000 and the government would only pay a ‘matching amount’ of the investment which came from private sources. The Bible was vindicated on its insistence that the ‘poor are always with us’ and the Salvation Army, despite its General’s newly found pretensions, showed a devotion to them which could not be matched by any other Christian denomination. When General William Booth died on 12 October 1912, the people remembered not the pomp of his final years but the life of service which had preceded them. Sixty-five thousand mourners, many of them the poor whose lives the Army had sought to improve, filed by the coffin to pay their respects. Five thousand Salvationists marched behind the hearse which bore the General’s body to the cemetery. There were rumours, in the East End of London, that Queen Alexandra, hidden behind a widow’s veil, had marched with them. It was not true. But the myth illustrated why Modernism failed to capture the Edwardian Churches. The people still wanted romance, not reason.
*It is worth noting that D. H. Lawrence was a vigorous critic of Moore’s philosophy. He believed in moral values that did not change through time.
*In 1919 Rutherford became Cavendish Professor of Physics in the University of Cambridge. His work led Chadwick to discover the neutron in 1932. Cockcroft and Walton split the atom in the same year. Rutherford died in 1937.
*Chief amongst them were Shawn Leslie, The Anglo Catholic, and E. P. McKenzie, The Altar Steps.
*A further example of the paradoxes on which the Church of England thrives was the part that Gore played in founding the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield. The ‘moderniser’ was the first monk to become an Anglican bishop since the Reformation.
CHAPTER 18
Hardihood, Endurance and Courage
In the early years of the twentieth century, national admiration for ‘hardihood, endurance and courage’ – the qualities which Captain Scott attributed to the men who died with him in Antarctica in 1912 – was as great as at any time in British history. But another dimension was added to the popular definition of glory. The last line of Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, chosen as the epitaph on the cross which marks Scott’s icy grave, celebrated the heroism of failure: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
The two authentic heroes of Edwardian England both failed – Scott to be first at the Pole and Shackleton to reach it at all. Other explorers reached their destinations and achieved their goals. But it was Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton who caught the public imagination and inspired a generation of schoolboys to struggle on against adversity. Both of them became quintessentially British heroes – even though their heroism was not displayed in those parts of the world which Britain had previously regarded as the proper field for gallantry and daring.
Africa had been the Victorian’s continent. Britain had led ‘the scramble’ for that dark continent and taken both flag and Bible into its very heart. Burton and Livingstone sought and Speke found the true source of the Nile. Further south, Rhodes had exploited the gold and diamond mines and dreamed of a continent, British ‘from the Cape to Cairo’. Other European countries had intruded in areas which Britain had thought not worth colonisation. But Africa was essentially ‘ours’. And by 1900 there was nothing much left to explore.
Britain was late in realising the potential of the Pole. When in March 1901 the Sphere, an illustrated London weekly, wrote, with evident surprise, ‘There is a perfect run on Antarctica’, it was the Scandinavians – Nansen and Amundsen – who led the field. Allowing them to win an uncontested race would have been out of keeping with the British character. In those days it was thought that there would be very little to gain, in terms of trade or strategic influence, from planting the Union Flag in the ice and snow, but suddenly prestige was at stake. The South Pole provided another opportunity to demonstrate the indomitability that had made Britain win so many races after giving other nations a head start. In order to raise the essential funds it was necessary to present an expedition as a scientific exploration. But its real objective – and the motivation which caught the imagination of press and people – was to be first at the South Pole.
Although the British public did not know it – or knew and thought it barely worth their notice – there was a British explorer of equal resolution and greater achievement on whom their adoration could have been lavished. Marc Auriel Stein had published his Chronicles of the Kings of Kashmir at the turn of the century. He was taking part in his first expedition to Chinese Turkestan when Edward was crowned and had, during his travels, already both excavated the sites of those ancient civilisations and surveyed the head waters of the Khotan River as part of the Indian Trigonometrical Survey. Neither archaeology nor topography excited the British imagination, and Stein was a Jew who had been born in Budapest. So his achievements were not thought of as ‘quite British’. His expedition along the ‘Silk Road’ (in 1904) was two years of assiduous scholarship conducted in conditions which tested both stamina and courage, but it attracted little attention except from the Trustees of the British Museum who were the beneficiaries of his unremitting dedication to the mysteries of Buddhist civilisation.
The Edwardians had no need for complicated heroes like Stein. For in Scott and Shackleton Britain had two perfect examples of the ‘right stuff’. Their appearance was as appropriate to their role as their character. They were not only brave, bold and resolute but also possessed a stubborn streak which hovered attractively between independence and insubordination. Most important of all, they had no doubt about the task to which fate had called them. And they proceeded to fulfil it in a particularly British way. Both possessed a t
ender affection for animals. Stein’s place in the pantheon of popular appeal might have been far different had it been known at the time of his exploration that he took his fox terrier with him into Central Asia. Stein was not the material of which legends were made, Scott was.
Sir Clements Markham, for twenty years the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, had always hoped that, were he to become president, ‘the equipment and despatch of an Antarctic expedition should be the chief feature of his term of office’.1 When that happy day arrived, he claimed that the man whom he invited to lead it had been in his mind as the ideal choice for ten years or more. The young midshipman – whose captaincy of the winning crew in a West Indian boat race had so impressed Markham – was Robert Falcon Scott.
That story is inconsistent with Scott’s own account of a chance meeting in Buckingham Palace Road during June 1899. ‘It was on that afternoon that I learned for the first time that there was such a thing as a prospective Antarctic Expedition. Two days later, I wrote applying to command it.’2 We know that in 1900 Scott was not Markham’s first choice for the job. The President of the Royal Geographical Society wanted George Egerton, captain of HMS Majestic, the flagship of the Channel Squadron. Egerton was fifty-six and, on reflection, regarded himself as too old to stand the Antarctic winter. So, at least by Markham’s account of what followed, he asked Egerton’s opinion of Scott, the Majesties torpedo officer. The response was not so much a reference as an encomium. ‘He is just the fellow for it, strong, steady, gentle, scientific, a very good head on his shoulders, a very good naval officer.’3
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