by Edward Short
Newman agreed that some form of Home Rule might be in order but he was leery of Gladstone’s Irish policy. In 1868, he wrote: “Had I my way I should prefer Disraeli’s mode of settling the Irish question to Gladstone’s (if Disraeli was in earnest)—and so I think would most men, but … I am a Gladstonite.” Disraeli’s policy was to endow the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church concurrently and sit back and watch Ireland destroy the Liberal Party, which, of course, eventually, it did, though too late for Disraeli, who died in 1881, “almost incidentally,” as John Vincent says, “after going out on a cold night.”94 In the same year, Newman wrote: “Gladstone the other day at Leeds complained of the little support given him by the middle class and gentry in Ireland. I think it was at the time of the Fenian rising that the Times had an article to the same effect. (Gladstone seemed to think them cowards; no, they are patriots.)”95 Elsewhere, he wrote: “I wish with all my heart that the cruel injustices which have been inflicted on the Irish people should be utterly removed—but I don’t think they go the best way to bring this about.”96 The Irish may now look askance at the Catholic faith of their fathers but Newman had seen enough of the country and its people to recognize that the nineteenth-century Irish owed a great debt to their priests. Newman’s good friend, John Hungerford Pollen, who helped him design the University Church on St. Stephen’s Green and spent a good deal of time with him in Dublin, observed that “Father Newman enjoyed a wide popularity among the priests of Ireland. In them he saw the courage, the constancy of a whole nation of confessors for the Faith; a nation to whom a debt of justice was due; a debt of which he desired earnestly to discharge his share.”97 Newman’s work for the Catholic University in Dublin was often thwarted by those convinced that he did not understand Ireland. Yet he was at once more knowledgeable and more sympathetic to the Irish than many realized. To Gerard Manley Hopkins, he wrote: “If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel … the Irish character and tastes [are] very different from the English.”98
In Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Roy Foster claims that “‘Fenianism,’ in its generalized sense, responded to the well-meaning abstractions of armchair nationalists like Cardinal Newman …”99 What “well-meaning abstractions” Foster had in mind is unclear. Nothing abstract prompted Newman to cross St. George’s Channel 56 times in the service of the Catholic University.100 Newman’s grasp of Irish affairs was much sounder and more realistic than Foster acknowledges. “This Fenianism,” Newman told his friend Maria Giberne, “is a wide spreading conspiracy against British Rule – backed up by the United States, especially the Irish there. Considering our treatment of Ireland, it is not at all wonderful.”101 To another correspondent he wrote, “Governments … if they are bad, unjust, or slovenly and do-nothing, naturally give scope and vigour to secret societies. Hence the Ribbon men, Whiteboys, Fenians etc etc of Ireland …”102 For Newman, Fenianism was a deplorable, if understandable, outcrop of misrule. He also recognized that it was less an Irish than an American movement, kept alive more by Irish-American sentimentality than incompetence at Westminster. Lastly, for Foster to claim that Newman’s work in Ireland was that of “an armchair nationalist” fails to acknowledge the true practical character of that work. The principles that Newman set forth in his Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (1852), and, later, in The Idea of a University (1873), were drawn up to revive university education, not armchair nationalism.
It is just as well that the topic of Gladstone never came up in the letters that passed between Newman and Hopkins, because the Jesuit poet detested the Grand Old Man—or, as the wags in the music halls called him, the “MOG,” the Murderer of Gordon. In one letter, Hopkins wrote: “the duty of keeping this fatal and baleful influence, spirit or personality or whatever he is to be called out of political power is a duty paramount to that of forwarding any particular measure of Irish or other politics …”103
Gladstone, for all his readiness to champion Irish home rule, never understood the Irish. The historian James Anthony Froude, who lived in Killarney, Kenmare and Kerry for extensive periods of his long life, and was friendly not only with landowners but with peasants, stated categorically that “Mr. Gladstone does not know Ireland well, nor its history well.”104 In Gladstone and the Irish Nation, the historian John Lawrence Hamilton argued that: “From his first contact with Irish politics [Gladstone] had sought to create in Ireland the conditions under which the Irish people could find a field for a self-respecting patriotism.”105 This is unpersuasive: if the Irish had not learned patriotism from Swift, Grattan, Wolfe Tone and Parnell, they were not likely to learn it from William Ewart Gladstone. Froude may have been wildly biased in some of his views on Ireland, even going so far as to claim (teasingly) that Cromwellian Ireland had been a golden age; but he was objective enough when it came to seeing the fundamental flaw of Gladstone’s policies towards that unfortunate country.106 “We have flattered ourselves that we were bestowing on Ireland the choicest of blessings,” Froude wrote, “forgetting willfully that free institutions require the willing and loyal cooperation of those who are to enjoy and use them; that the freedom which the Irish desired was freedom from the English connnexion; and that every privilege which we conferred, every relief we conceded, would be received without gratitude, and would be employed only as an instrument to make our position in the country untenable.” This was surely the more accurate view. England would not cure the evils of plantation with the half measures of paternalism. Nor could Gladstone claim any special insight into those evils. His attitude to Ireland resembled that of the Anglo-Irish diarist William Allingham, who once admitted: “I love Ireland: were she only not Catholic!”107
Ireland is central to any consideration of Gladstone and Newman because Gladstone’s failed Irish University Bill in 1873 led directly to his attack on English Catholics in The Vatican Decrees: An Expostulation (1874). After disestablishing the Irish Church and getting the Land Bill passed, Gladstone’s next priority was to reform Ireland’s educational system. “We are pledged to redress the R.C. grievance,” Gladstone announced in September 1872 to Earl Spencer, the Irish Lord Lieutenant, “which is held to consist in this, that an R.C. educated in a college or place where his religion is taught cannot by virtue of that education obtain a degree in Ireland. Beyond this, I think we desire that a portion of the public endowments should be thrown open, under the auspices of a neutral University, to the whole people of Ireland.”108 Subsequently, in a long speech that held the House of Commons “in a mesmeric trance,”109 Gladstone proposed a scheme that would give the Catholics of Ireland access to non-denominational university education. According to F. S. L. Lyons, the great Irish historian, he “attempted to create a genuinely national and non-sectarian university by abolishing the Queen’s University and one of its constituent colleges (Galway) and by bringing together within a single framework Trinity, the Catholic University, Belfast, Cork and Magee. With the massive insensitivity which that most subtle of men could sometimes muster, he thus succeeded in a single stroke in alienating every section of Irish opinion …”110 Worse, Gladstone proposed that his non-denominational university system should have no chairs for theology, philosophy or modern history. Roy Jenkins found the speech “a wonderful example of Gladstone’s expository style, compelling, daring (there are a lot of attacks on venerable institutions and practices), with the figures never boring because, if not exactly made up for the purpose, they are selectively presented so as at once to surprise the listener and carry him along with the argument.”111 Yet even Jenkins realized that for all its ingenuity the speech had an irremediable flaw: it advocated something only Gladstone wanted.112 Gladstone’s Cabinet did not want the scheme because it saw no benefits accruing from increasing the number of university-educated Catholics. The Irish Catholic hierarchy did not want it because they were opposed to non-denominational education of any stripe, Gladstonian or otherwise. Gladstone, for his part, might have argued that the future of Ireland depen
ded on the “moral and intellectual culture of her people” but by recommending the proscriptions of his “gagging clauses,” which would prevent the study of precisely those subjects that nourish culture, Gladstone was essentially suggesting that “moral and intellectual culture” in English Ireland was impossible.113 The speech exposed the gaping contradictions inherent in Gladstone’s proposed educational reforms. No wonder the House broke out in laughter when they heard the clauses.
Newman saw the breathtaking incoherence of the bill from the start and never doubted that the bishops would reject it. His own view of the matter was rooted in his pastoral understanding of the teaching office: “It is simply unnatural to educate young men without encouraging thought on the subject which more than any other must interest ardent and able minds.”114 On the eve of the vote, sensing defeat, Gladstone wrote to Manning: “I shall fight to the last against all comers, but much against my inclination which is marvelously attuned by the vision of my liberty dawning like a sunrise from beyond the hills. For when this offer has been made, and every effort of patience employed to render it a reality, my contract with the country is fulfilled, and I am free to take my own course.”115 (Once again he yearned to retire.) The bill was defeated 284 votes to 287. For Newman, the results confirmed that Cardinal Cullen “could not accept the Bill without an enormous scandal. For near thirty years the Church has been protesting against mixed education, and resisting the schemes of Ministers which looked that way …”116 What surprised Newman was “how Gladstone could have fancied he could.”117
When Gladstone surrendered the reins of power to Disraeli, Mrs. Gladstone asked her son Herbert, with blithe bigotry: “Is it not disgusting, after all Papa’s labour and patriotism and years of work to think of him handling over his nest-egg to that Jew?’118 Once free of the reins of power, Gladstone read Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds, visited Christie’s to see Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s superb china collection, and even passed up opportunities to answer Disraeli in the Commons.119 He seemed a changed man. “The future of politics hardly exists for me,” he told Manning, “unless some new phase arise and … a special call … appear: to such a call, please God I will answer; if there be a breath in my body.”120
The new call came over the Public Worship Regulation Bill (1873), which Disraeli introduced expressly to entrap his overzealous opponent. In vehemently opposing a bill that outlawed the ritualism of High Church and Anglo-Catholic clergy, Gladstone took the bait hook, line and sinker. He recognized the trap Disraeli was laying for him but could not resist walking into it. As he said to Granville, “in Disraeli I have nothing to complain of. It was quite plain that he meant business, namely my political extinction, and thought that Ritualism offered a fine opportunity …”121 Indeed, it did. Again, Gladstone had seriously miscalculated the pulse of his Party. Forster, Lowe, Goschen and especially Harcourt voted their Protestant prejudice—their contempt for the “Mass in Masquerade.” Yet, in this instance, Gladstone was very much Disraeli’s “paladin of principle, the very abstraction of chivalry.”122 He would not betray the Anglo-Catholic party. But once again his own Liberal Party branded him as someone who could not “interest himself … in matters (even when they are great matters) in which he is not carried away by some too strong attraction.”123
His political woes were compounded by personal upsets. In August, he learned that Lord Ripon, his long-standing political ally, who had been Lord President of the Council in his first ministry (1868–1873), was preparing to convert. “May he pause,” was Gladstone’s stunned reaction.124 After successfully urging Newman’s claim to the cardinalate in 1878, Ripon wrote to the aging convert for whom he had such immense respect: ‘Those who like myself owe to your teaching, more than any other earthly cause, the blessing of being members of the Catholic Church, must rejoice with a very keen joy at this recognition on the part of the Holy See of your eminent services to the Church and to so many individual souls.”125 The Saturday Review treated Ripon’s conversion as the ipso facto end of a distinguished political career, only adding that “Even if every article of the modern Romish Creed were indisputably true, a patriotic statesman ought still to regard the national interests as paramount to the policy of the Church.”126 The Times agreed: “A statesman who becomes a convert to Roman Catholicism forfeits at once the confidence of the English people.”127 However, when Gladstone became Prime Minister again in 1880, he appointed Lord Ripon Viceroy of India, where he introduced local self-government, improved Indian education, and lifted his predecessor Lord Lytton’s censorship of the press. The Anglo-Indians loathed him.128 When he tried to pass a bill that would allow Indian judges to try Europeans, they were furious because, as they saw it, Indian magistrates would try to stop them “beating their own niggers.”129 In his religious development—beginning as an Evangelical, finding common cause with F. D. Maurice’s Christian Socialists, and even acting as Grand Master of the Freemasons before converting to Rome and building up the Catholic Union of Great Britain—Ripon had charted a course not unlike that of Newman’s early mentor, Thomas Scott, who “followed truth wherever it led him.”130
After learning of Ripon’s defection, Gladstone went to visit Döllinger in Munich and found the excommunicated theologian as bitter as ever against the Ultramontanes, the faction within the Roman Church that wished to increase the power of the papal curia.131 In fact the two men ran into Döllinger’s excommunicator in the street, which must have made for an awkward encounter. Then it was on to Cologne to see Helen, his sister, whose conversion to Catholicism was a continual affront to Gladstone, though at this meeting he must have viewed her addiction to laudanum as the more alarming affliction. Despite these upsets or perhaps because of them, Gladstone vowed to fight back. As so many of his parliamentary opponents found to their chagrin, he was “terrible on the rebound.” And so he proved in October of 1873, when he sent off to the Contemporary Review an article entitled “Ritualism and Ritual” (1874) which would supply the main charges of the Expostulation. Referring to what he claimed were the designs of Rome to “Romanise” the English people and their Church, he said: “Rome has substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change of faith; … she has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused … no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and … she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”132 That Gladstone could write that last sentence after advocating the “gagging clauses” of his University Bill illustrates how oblivious he could be to his own inconsistencies. The fact that he made no mention of the Catholic Irish in his charges against the moral and mental freedom, not to mention the civil loyalty of Catholics only made those inconsistencies more glaring.
Queen Victoria saw not only inconsistency but treachery in Gladstone’s appearing to defend Roman Catholicism in the debate over the Public Worship Regulation Bill and then attacking Roman Catholics themselves in his “Ritualism and Ritual” in his Contemporary Review article along the grossest No Popery lines.133 Most of her inner circle also saw duplicity in Gladstone’s apparent inconsistency. John Brown, her Scottish confidant, told Ponsonby that he was convinced that Gladstone was a Roman. When Ripon poped, Dr. Jenner, the Queen’s physician, agreed: “Ripon was a friend of Gladstone’s and that is enough.” Disraeli told Ponsonby that Ripon would only be the first to go. Speaking of Gladstone’s liberal cabinet, he remarked, “Ah! Yes, they will all go sooner or later!” According to Victoria’s biographer, Elizabeth Longford, the rumors following Gladstone’s volte-face and Ripon’s defection gave birth to an even stranger rumor: “Queen Victoria toyed with the idea that Gladstone was a secret papist.”134
After Newman read the Contemporary Review piece, he wrote Lord Emly a letter that rehearsed many of the points that would feature in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk: the decrees did not augment the Pope’s power; his infallibility
pertained only to “general propositions on religion and morals … not on matters of expedience;” and if the Pope influenced Catholic voters this was no different from the influence special interests routinely exerted.135 There was an Anglican interest and a publican interest and a railway interest: why should Gladstone object to there being a Catholic interest? Moreover the decrees had no bearing on civil allegiance: that “remained what it was in Elizabeth’s reign, when her Catholic subjects, with great zeal took part in the defense of their country against an Armada blessed by the Pope.”136 To his friend Lord Blachford he wrote: “Gladstone has offended us … very deeply. It seems strikingly rude to Lord Ripon, and I hope it will have the effect of making some Catholic or other speak out. Gladstone’s excuse is, I suppose, the extravagance of Archbishop Manning in his ‘Caesarism’, and he will do us a service, if he gives us an opportunity of speaking. [Manning’s article, “Caesarism and Ultramontanism” (1874), took an ultramontane view of Church and State relations.] We can speak against Gladstone, while it would not be decent to speak against Manning. The difficulty is, who ought to speak.”137
At first, William Monsell, Lord Emly, seemed the right man for the job. An Irish Catholic Unionist educated at Winchester and Oriel, who became M.P. for Limerick in 1837, Monsell converted in 1850 after the Gorham Judgment and held various offices in Liberal governments, including the postmaster generalship from 1871 to 1873 in Gladstone’s first government. He was created Lord Emly in 1874. A close friend of Newman’s during the founding of the Catholic University, he also gave him good counsel during the Achilli affair and lent him the use of his house after that long ordeal was over. The two men did not altogether agree on all matters; Emly was a member of the liberal Catholic set headed up by Lord Acton and Richard Simpson and partial to the liberal Catholicism of Montalembert; but there was nothing anti-papal in his thinking as there was in that of some of his fellow liberals. In a letter to Monsell, written in January of 1863, Newman spelled out what he found objectionable about Simpson, a man whom he otherwise found likable.