The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume I Part 32

Gladstone to second him. He was content with a few words of sorrow and with the quotation of Scott's moving lines to the memory of Pitt:--

'Now is the stately column broke, The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke, The trumpet's silver sound is still, The warder silent on the hill!'

These beautiful words were addressed, said Mr. Gladstone, 'to a man great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert Peel.'

'Great as he was to the last,' wrote Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes in 1851, 'I must consider the closing years of his life as beneath those that had preceded them. His enormous energies were in truth so lavishly spent upon the gigantic work of government, which he conducted after a fas.h.i.+on quite different,--I mean as to the work done in the workshop of his own brain,--from preceding and succeeding prime ministers, that their root was enfeebled, though in its feebleness it had more strength probably remaining than fell to the lot of any other public man.'

Peel may at least divide with Walpole the laurels of our greatest peace minister to that date--the man who presided over beneficent and necessary changes in national polity, that in hands less strong and less skilful might easily have opened the sluices of civil confusion. And when we think of Walpole's closing days, and of the melancholy end of most other ruling spirits in our political history--of the mortifications and disappointments in which, from Chatham and Pitt down to Canning and O'Connell, they have quitted the glorious field--Peel must seem happy in the manner and moment of his death. Daring and prosperous legislative exploits had marked his path. His authority in parliament never stood higher, his honour in the country never stood so high. His last words had been a commanding appeal for temperance in national action and language, a solemn plea for peace as the true aim to set before a powerful people.

To his father Mr. Gladstone wrote:--

_July 2, 1850._--I thought Sir R. Peel looked extremely feeble during the debate last week. I mean as compared with what he usually is. I observed that he slept during much of Lord Palmerston's speech, that he spoke with little physical energy, and next day, Sat.u.r.day, in the forenoon I thought he looked very ill at a meeting which, in common with him, I had to attend. This is all that I know and that is worth telling on a subject which is one of deep interest to all cla.s.ses, from the Queen downwards. I was at the palace last night and she spoke to me with great earnestness about it. As to the division I shall say little; it is an unsatisfactory subject. The majority of the government was made up out of our ranks, partly by people staying away and partly by some twenty who actually voted with the government. By far the greater portion, I am sorry to say, of both sets of persons were what are called Peelites, and not protectionists. The fact is, that if all calling themselves liberal be put on one side, and all calling themselves conservatives on the other, the House of Commons is as nearly as possible _equally_ divided.

QUESTIONS OF LEADERs.h.i.+P

I have already described how Mr. Gladstone thought it a great mistake in Peel to resist any step that might put upon the protectionists the responsibilities of office. In a note composed a quarter of a century later (1876), he says: 'This I think was not only a safe experiment (after 1848) but a vital necessity. I do not, therefore, think, and I did not think, that the death of Sir R. Peel at the time when it occurred was a great calamity so far as the chief question of our internal politics was concerned. In other respects it was indeed great; in some of them it may almost be called immeasurable. The moral atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite the same, and is now widely different. He had a kind of authority there that was possessed by no one else. Lord John might in some respects compete with, in some even excel, him; but to him, as leader of the liberals, the loss of such an opponent was immense. It is sad to think what, with his high mental force and n.o.ble moral sense, he might have done for us in after years. Even the afterthought of knowledge of such a man and of intercourse with him, is a high privilege and a precious possession.'

An interesting word or two upon his own position at this season occur in a letter to his father (July 9, 1850):--

The letter in which you expressed a desire to be informed by me, so far as I might be able to speak, whether there was anything in the rumours circulated with regard to my becoming the leader in parliament of the conservative party, did not come to my hands until yesterday. The fact is, that there is nothing whatever in those rumours beyond mere speculation on things supposed probable or possible, and they must pa.s.s for what they are worth in that character only. People feel, I suppose, that Sir Robert Peel's life and continuance in parliament were of themselves powerful obstacles to the general reorganisation of the conservative party, and as there is great annoyance and dissatisfaction with the present state of things, and a widely spread feeling that it is not conducive to the public interests, there arises in men's minds an expectation that the party will be in some manner reconst.i.tuted. I share in the feeling that it is desirable; but I see very great difficulties in the way, and do not at present see how they are to be effectually overcome. The House of Commons is almost equally divided, indeed, between those professing liberal and those professing conservative politics; but the late division [Don Pacifico] showed how ill the latter could hang together, even when all those who had any prominent station among them in any sense were united....

Cornewall Lewis wrote,'Upon Gladstone the death of Peel will have the effect of removing a weight from a spring--he will come forward more and take more part in discussion. The general opinion is that Gladstone will renounce his free trade opinions, and become leader of the protectionists. I expect neither the one event nor the other.'[230] More interesting still is something told by the Duke of Buccleuch. 'Very shortly,' said the duke in 1851, 'before Sir Robert Peel's death, he expressed to me his belief that Sidney Herbert or Gladstone would one day be premier; but Peel said with sarcasm, If the hour comes, Disraeli must be made governor-general of India. He will be a second Ellenborough.'[231]

FOOTNOTES:

[227] Parker, iii. p. 536.

[228] Fragment of 1897.

[229] Mr. Gladstone's Don Pacifico speech is still not quite out of date.--June 27, _Hansard_, 1850.

[230] _Letters_, p. 226.

[231] Dean Boyle's _Recollections_, p. 32.

CHAPTER V

GORHAM CASE--SECESSION OF FRIENDS

(_1847-1851_)

It is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with.--GLADSTONE (1894).

The test case of toleration at the moment of the Oxford election of 1847 was the admission of the Jews to sit in parliament, and in the last month of 1847 Mr. Gladstone astonished his father, as well as a great host of his political supporters, by voting with the government in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities. No ordinary degree of moral courage was needed for such a step by the member for such a const.i.tuency. 'It is a painful decision to come to,' he writes in his diary (Dec. 16), 'but the only substantive doubt it raises is about remaining in parliament, and it is truly and only the church which holds me there, though she may seem to some to draw me from it.' Pusey wrote to him in rather violent indignation, for Mr. Gladstone was the only man of that school who learned, or was able to learn, what the modern state is or is going to be. This was the third phase, so Gladstone argued, of an irresistible movement. The tory party had fought first for an anglican parliament, second they fought for a protestant parliament, and now they were fighting for a Christian parliament. Parliament had ceased to be anglican and it had ceased to be protestant, and the considerations that supported these two earlier operations thenceforth condemned the exclusion from full civil rights of those who were not Christians. To his father he explained (December 17, 1847): 'After much consideration, prolonged indeed I may say for the last two years and a half, I made up my mind to support Lord John Russell's bill for the admission of the Jews. I spoke to this effect last night. It is with reluctance that I give the vote, but I am convinced that after the civil privileges we have given them already (including the magistracy and the franchise), and after the admission we have already conceded to unitarians who refuse the whole of the most vital doctrines of the Gospel, we cannot compatibly with entire justice and fairness refuse to admit them.'

His father, who was sometimes exacting, complained of concealment. Mr.

Gladstone replied that he regarded the question as one of difficulty, and he therefore took as much time as he possibly could for reflection upon it, though he never intended to run it as close as it actually came. 'I know,' he says, in a notable sentence, 'it seems strange to you that I should find it necessary to hold my judgment in suspense on a question which seemed to many so plain; _but suspense is of constant occurrence in public life upon very many kinds of questions, and without it errors and inconsistencies would be much more frequent than even they are now_.' This did not satisfy his father. 'I shall certainly read your speech to find some fair apology for your vote: good and satisfactory reason I do not expect. I cannot doubt you thought you withheld your opinions from me under the undecided state you were in, without any intention whatever to annoy me. There is, however, a natural closeness in your disposition, with a reserve towards those who may think they may have some claim to your confidence, probably increased by official habits, which it may perhaps in some cases be worth your inquiring into.' The sentence above about suspense is a key to many misunderstandings of Mr. Gladstone's character. His stouthearted friend Thomas Acland had warned him, for the sake of his personal influence, to be sure to deal with the Jew question on broad grounds, without refining, and without dragging out some recondite view not seen by common men, 'in short, to be _as little as possible like Maurice, and more like the Duke of Wellington_.' 'My speech,' Mr. Gladstone answered, 'was most unsatisfactory in many ways, but I do not believe that it mystified or puzzled anybody.'

JEWISH DISABILITIES

The following year he received the honour of a D.C.L. degree at Oxford.

Mrs. Gladstone was there, he tells his father, and 'was well satisfied with my reception, though it is not to be denied that my vote upon the Jew bill is upon the whole unpalatable there, and they had been provoked by a paragraph in the _Globe_ newspaper stating that I was to have the degree, and that this made it quite clear that the minority was not unfavourable to the Jew bill.'

_July 5._--I went off after breakfast to Oxford. Joined the V.-C.

and doctors in the hall at Wadham, and went in procession to the Divinity schools provided with a white neckcloth by Sir R. Inglis, who seized me at the station in horror and alarm when he saw me with a black one. In due time we were summoned to the theatre where my degree had been granted with some _non placets_ but with no scrutiny. The scene remarkable to the eye and mind, so pictorial and so national. There was great tumult about me, the hisses being obstinate, and the _fautores_ also very generous. 'Gladstone and the Jew bill' came sometimes from the gallery, sometimes more favouring sounds.

II

After the whig government was formed in 1846, Mr. Gladstone expressed himself as having little fear that they could do much harm, 'barring church patronage.' He was soon justified in his own eyes in this limitation of his confidence, for the next year Dr. Hampden was made a bishop.[232] This was a rude blow both to the university which had eleven years before p.r.o.nounced him heretical, and to the bishops who now bitterly and fervidly remonstrated. Grave points of law were raised, but Mr. Gladstone, though warmly reprobating the prime minister's recommendation of a divine so sure to raise the hurricane, took no leading part in the strife that followed. 'Never in my opinion,' he said to his father (Feb. 2, 1848), 'was a firebrand more wantonly and gratuitously cast.' It was an indication the more of a determination to subst.i.tute a sort of general religion for the doctrines of the church.

The next really marking incident after the secession of Newman was a decision of a court of law, known as the Gorham judgment. This and the preferment of Hampden to his bishopric produced the second great tide of secession. 'Were we together,' Mr. Gladstone writes to Manning at the end of 1849 (December 30), 'I should wish to converse with you from sunrise to sunset on the Gorham case. It is a stupendous issue. Perhaps they will evade it. On abstract grounds this would be still more distasteful than a decision of the state against a catholic doctrine.

But what I feel is that as a body we are not ready yet for the last alternatives. More years must elapse from the secession of Newman and the group of secessions which, following or preceding, belonged to it. A more composed and settled state of the public mind in regard to our relations with the church of Rome must supervene. There must be more years of faithful _work_ for the church to point to in argument, and to grow into her habits. And besides all these very needful conditions of preparation for a crisis, I want to see the question more fully answered, What will the state of its own free and good will do, or allow to be done, for the church while yet in alliance with it?'

The Gorham case was this: a bishop refused to inst.i.tute a clergyman to a vicarage in the west of England, on the ground of unsound doctrine upon regeneration by baptism. The clergyman sought a remedy in the ecclesiastical court of Arches. The judge decided against him. The case then came on appeal before the judicial committee of the privy council, and here a majority with the two archbishops as a.s.sessors reversed the decision of the court below. The bishop, one of the most combative of the human race, flew to Westminster Hall, tried move upon move in queen's bench, exchequer, common pleas; declared that his archbishop had abused his high commission; and even actually renounced communion with him. But the sons of Zeruiah were too hard. The religious world in both of its two standing camps was convulsed, for if Gorham had lost the day it would or might have meant the expulsion from the establishment of calvinists and evangelicals bag and baggage. 'I am old enough,' said the provost of Oriel, 'to remember three baptismal controversies, and this is the first in which one party has tried to eject the other from the church.' On the other hand the sacramental wing found it intolerable that fundamental doctrines of the church should be settled under the veil of royal supremacy, by a court possessed of no distinctly church character.

THE JUDGMENT

The judgment was declared on March 8 (1850), and Manning is made to tell a vivid story about going to Mr. Gladstone's house, finding him ill with influenza, sitting down by his bedside and telling him what the court had done; whereon Mr. Gladstone started up, threw out his arms and exclaimed that the church of England was gone unless it relieved itself by some authoritative act. A witty judge once observed in regard to the practice of keeping diaries, that it was wise to keep diary enough at any rate to prove an _alibi_. According to Mr. Gladstone's diary he was not laid up until several days later, when he did see various people, Manning included, in his bedroom. On the black day of the judgment, having dined at the palace the night before, and having friends to dine with him on this night, he records a busy day, including a morning spent after letter-writing, in discussion with Manning, Hope, and others on the Gorham case and its probable consequences. This slip of memory in the cardinal is trivial and not worth mentioning, but perhaps it tends to impair another vivid scene described on the same authority; how thirteen of them met at Mr. Gladstone's house, agreed to a declaration against the judgment, and proceeded to sign; how Mr. Gladstone, standing with his back to the fire, began to demur; and when pressed by Manning to sign, asked him in a low voice whether he thought that as a privy councillor he ought to sign such a protest; and finally how Manning, knowing the pertinacity of his character, turned and said: We will not press him further.[233] This graphic relation looks as if Mr. Gladstone were leaving his friends in the lurch. None of them ever said so, none of them made any signs of thinking so. There is no evidence that Mr.

Gladstone ever agreed to the resolution at all, and there is even evidence that points presumptively the other way: that he was taking a line of his own, and arguing tenaciously against all the rest for delay.[234] Mr. Gladstone was often enough in a hurry himself, but there never was a man in this world more resolute against being hurried by other people.[235]

EXCITING EFFECT OF THE JUDGMENT

We need not, however, argue probabilities. Mr. Gladstone no sooner saw the story than he p.r.o.nounced it fiction. In a letter to the writer of the book on Cardinal Manning (Jan. 14, 1896) he says:--

I read with surprise Manning's statement (made first after 35 years) that I would not sign the declaration of 1850 because I 'was a privy councillor.' I should not have been more surprised had he written that I told him I could not sign because my name began with G. I had done stronger things than that when I was not only privy councillor but official servant of the crown, nay, I believe cabinet minister. The declaration was liable to _many_ interior objections. Seven out of the thirteen who signed did so without (I believe) any kind of sequel. I wish you to know that I entirely disavow and disclaim Manning's statement as it _stands_. And here I have to ask you to insert two lines in your second or next edition; with the simple statement that I prepared and published with prompt.i.tude an elaborate argument to show that the judicial committee was historically unconst.i.tutional, as an organ for the decision of ecclesiastical questions. This declaration was ent.i.tled, I think, 'A Letter to the Bishop of London on the Ecclesiastical Supremacy.' If I recollect right, while it dealt little with theology, it was a more pregnant production than the declaration, and it went much nearer the mark. It has been repeatedly published, and is still on sale at Murray's. I am glad to see that Sidney Herbert (a _gentleman_ if ever there was one) also declined to sign. It seems to me _now_, that there is something almost ludicrous in the propounding of such a congeries of statements by such persons as we were; not the more, but certainly not the less, because of being privy councillors.

It was a terrible time; aggravated for me by heavy cares and responsibilities of a nature quite extraneous: and far beyond all others by the illness and death of a much-loved child, with great anxieties about another. My recollections of the conversations before the declaration are little but a ma.s.s of confusion and bewilderment. I stand only upon what I _did_. No one of us, I think, understood the actual position, not even our lawyers, until Baron Alderson printed an excellent statement on the points raised.[236]

III

For long the new situation filled his mind. 'The case of the church of England at this moment,' he wrote to Lord Lyttelton, 'is a very dismal one, and almost leaves men to choose between a broken heart and no heart at all. But at present it is all dark or only twilight which rests upon our future.' He busily set down thoughts upon the supremacy. He studied Cawdry's case, and he mastered Lord c.o.ke's view of the law. He feels better pleased with the Reformation in regard to the supremacy; but also much more sensible of the drifting of the church since, away from the range of her const.i.tutional securities; and more than ever convinced how thoroughly false is the present position. As to himself and his own work in life, in reply I suppose to something urged by Manning, he says (April 29, 1850), 'I have two characters to fulfil--that of a lay member of the church, and that of a member of a sort of wreck of a political party. I must not break my understood compact with the last, and forswear my profession, unless and until the necessity has arisen.

That necessity will plainly have arisen for me when it shall have become evident that justice cannot, _i.e._, will not, be done by the state to the church.' With boundless exaltation of spirit he expatiated on the arduous and n.o.ble task which it was now laid upon the children of the church of England amid trouble, suspense, and it might be even agony to perform. 'Fully believing that the death of the church of England is among the alternative issues of the Gorham case,' he wrote to a clerical friend (April 9), 'I yet also believe that all Christendom and all its history have rarely afforded a n.o.bler opportunity of doing battle for the faith in the church than that now offered to English churchmen. That opportunity is a prize far beyond any with which the days of her prosperity, in any period, can have been adorned.' He does not think (June 1, 1850), that a loftier work was ever committed to men. Such vast interests were at stake, such unbounded prospects open before them. What they wanted was the divine art to draw from present terrible calamities and appalling future prospects the conquering secret to rise through the struggle into something better than historical anglicanism, which essentially depended on conditions that have pa.s.sed away. 'In my own case,' he says to Manning a little later, 'there is work ready to my hand and much more than enough for its weakness, a great mercy and comfort. But I think I know what my course would be, were there not. It would be to set to work upon the holy task or clearing, opening, and establis.h.i.+ng positive truth in the church of England, which is an office doubly blessed, inasmuch as it is both the business of truth, and the laying of firm foundations for future union in Christendom.' If this vision of a dream had ever come to pa.s.s, perhaps Europe might have seen the mightiest Christian doctor since Bossuet; and just as Bossuet's struggle was called the grandest spectacle of the seventeenth century, so to many eyes this might have appeared the greatest of the nineteenth. Mr. Gladstone did not see, in truth he never saw, any more than Bossuet saw in his age, that the Time-Spirit was s.h.i.+fting the foundations of the controversy. However that may be, the interesting thing for us in the history of his life is the characteristic blaze of battle that this case now kindled in his breast.

VIEW OF THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

On the eve of his return from Germany in the autumn of 1845, one of his letters to Mrs. Gladstone reveals the pressing intensity of his conviction, deepened by his intercourse with the grave and pious circles at Munich and at Stuttgart, of the supreme interest of spiritual things:--

In my wanderings my thoughts too have had time to travel; and I have had much conversation upon church matters first at Munich and since coming here with Mrs. Craven and some connections of hers staying with her, who are Roman catholics of a high school. All that I can see and learn induces me more and more to feel what a crisis for religion at large is this period of the world's history--how the power of religion and its permanence are bound up with the church--how inestimably precious would be the church's unity, inestimably precious on the one hand, and on the other to human eyes immeasurably remote--lastly how loud, how solemn is the call upon all those who hear and who _can_ obey it, to labour more and more in the spirit of these principles, to give themselves, if it may be, clearly and wholly to that work. It is dangerous to put indefinite thoughts, instincts, longings, into language which is necessarily determinate. I cannot trace the line of my own future life, but I hope and pray it may not always be where it is....

Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm, the minister of G.o.d's retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions--G.o.d grant that we may have courage to look them in the face, and to work through them. Were they over, were the path of the church clear before her, as a body able to take her trial before G.o.d and the world upon the performance of her work as His organ for the recovery of our country--how joyfully would I retire from the barren, exhausting strife of merely political contention. I do not think that you would be very sorrowful? As to ambition in its ordinary sense, we are spared the chief part of its temptations. If it has a valuable reward upon earth over and above a good name, it is when a man is enabled to bequeath to his children a high place in the social system of his country. That cannot be our case. The days are gone by when such a thing might have been possible. To leave to w.i.l.l.y a t.i.tle with its burdens and restraints and disqualifications, but without the material substratum of wealth, and the duties and means of good, as well as the general power attending it, would not I think be acting for him in a wise and loving spirit--a.s.suming, which may be a vain a.s.sumption, that the alternative could ever be before us.

The fact that in Scotland, a country in which Mr. Gladstone pa.s.sed so much time and had such lively interests, the members of his own episcopal church were dissenters, was well fitted to hasten the progress of his mind in the liberal direction. Certain it is that in a strongly-written letter to a Scotch bishop at the end of 1851, Mr.

Gladstone boldly enlarged upon the doctrine of religious freedom, with a directness that kindled both alarm and indignation among some of his warmest friends.[237] Away, he cried, with the servile doctrine that religion cannot live but by the aid of parliaments. When the state has ceased to bear a definite and full religious character, it is our interest and our duty alike to maintain a full religious freedom. It is this plenary religious freedom that brings out in full vigour the internal energies of each communion. Of all civil calamities the greatest is the mutilation, under the seal of civil authority, of the Christian religion itself. One fine pa.s.sage in this letter denotes an advance in his political temper, as remarkable as the power of the language in which it finds expression:--

It is a great and n.o.ble secret, that of const.i.tutional freedom, which has given to us the largest liberties, with the steadiest throne and the most vigorous executive in Christendom. I confess to my strong faith in the virtue of this principle. I have lived now for many years in the midst of the hottest and noisiest of its workshops, and have seen that amidst the clatter and the din a ceaseless labour is going on; stubborn matter is reduced to obedience, and the brute powers of society like the fire, air, water, and mineral of nature are, with clamour indeed but also with might, educated and shaped into the most refined and regular forms of usefulness for man. I am deeply convinced that among us all systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle of absolutism, must of necessity be, not indeed tyrannical, but feeble and ineffective systems; and that methodically to enlist the members of a community, with due regard to their several capacities, in the performance of its public duties, is the way to make that community powerful and healthful, to give a firm seat to its rulers, and to engender a warm and intelligent devotion in those beneath their sway.[238]