At this time Mr. Maurice wrote to his son: ‘I am glad you have seen Gladstone, and have been able to judge a little of what his face indicates. It is a very expressive one – hard-worked, as you say; not, perhaps, especially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory, but not without promise of that. I admire him for his patient attention to details, and for the pains which he takes to prevent himself from being absorbed in them. He has preserved the type which I remember he bore at the University thirty-six years ago, though it has undergone curious developments.’
When in February, 1868, Parliament met, it was announced that Lord Derby, owing to failing health, had resigned – that Mr. Disraeli was to be Premier. And then came Mr. Gladstone’s turn. The Liberal party, once more united, had things all their own way. Mr. Gladstone brought in a Bill to abolish compulsory Church rates, and that was carried. He announced that he held the condition of the Irish Church to be unsatisfactory. In March he moved: ‘1. That in the opinion of this House it is necessary that the Established Church of Ireland should cease to exist as an Establishment, due regard being had for all personal interests and to all individual rights of property. 2. That, subject to the foregoing considerations, it is expedient to prevent the creation of new personal interests by the exercise of any public patronage, and to confine the operations of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to objects of immediate necessity or involving individual rights, pending the final decision of Parliament. 3. That an humble address be presented to Her Majesty, humbly to pray that, with a view to the purposes aforesaid, Her Majesty will be graciously pleased to place at the disposal of Parliament interest in the temporalities, in archbishoprics, bishoprics, and other ecclesiastical dignities and benefices in Ireland and in the custody thereof.’ ‘I am sorry,’ writes Bishop Wilberforce, ‘Mr. Gladstone has moved the attack on the Irish Church. It is altogether a bad business, and I am afraid Gladstone has been drawn into it from the unconscious influence of his restlessness at being out of office. I have no doubt that his hatred to the low tone of the Irish Church has had a great deal to do with it.’
For many years the subject had been before the public. A Royal Commission had been appointed to deal with the question, and it had given rise to more than one debate in the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone’s own adoption of the policy of Disestablishment had been made evident in a speech delivered July, 1867, although he abstained from voting. His relation to the question had, however, as he indicated, been practically declared for more than twenty years. A year later, on a motion by Mr. Maguire, ‘that this House resolves itself into a Committee with the view of taking into consideration the condition and circumstances of Ireland,’ Mr. Gladstone spoke more decidedly, declaring that, in order to the settlement of the condition of the Irish, the Church as a State Church must cease to exist, and in consequence of this declaration Mr. Maguire withdrew his motion. On the first division on Mr. Gladstone’s resolutions he obtained a majority of sixty against Government. Subsequent divisions having confirmed and increased this majority, Mr. Disraeli announced on May 4 that he had advised Her Majesty to dissolve Parliament in the coming autumn, in order that the opinion of the country might be taken on the great issue put before it. Great was the excitement everywhere, and many were the public meetings held on the subject in all parts of England. At a meeting of Church supporters held in St. James’s Hall in May, Archbishop Longley in the chair, there were twenty-five bishops on the platform, besides an array of peers and M.P.’s. Archbishop Tait, who moved the first resolution, referring to a speech of his own on the Church Rate Bill, writes to his son: ‘Gladstone fell foul of it somewhat roughly on moving his Irish Church resolutions, but last Sunday your mother and I went to the little church in Windmill Street which Mr. Kempe has built for the poor of St. James’s, and there found Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone taking refuge from the glare of London for a quiet Sunday morning; and as we all walked home together, I had some most agreeable conversation with him. I wish he was not so strangely impetuous, for he is certainly a good Christian… I almost hope that something may be done to bring him to reason about reforming, not destroying, the Irish Church. This, no doubt, is what the Old Whigs really desire, if only they could get Disraeli out.’ Mr. Disraeli soon gratified – at any rate, to a certain extent – the Old Whigs. In November the constituencies replied to the appeal made to them by Mr. Disraeli by an almost unprecedented majority for his opponent. The national verdict could no longer be opposed. Mr. Disraeli himself recognised the fact by resigning office without waiting for the meeting of Parliament. When Parliament met in February, Mr. Gladstone was Premier. Defeated in Lancashire, he had been elected for Greenwich.
There were, of course, party cavillings when the member for Greenwich was gazetted in August, 1873, as Chancellor of the Exchequer without vacating his seat for the Metropolitan borough; but the polemics in the press gradually ceased upon the subject, without materially weakening his influence upon his pledged supporters, and the public at large hardly found time to listen to the controversy. Trade was good, and remunerative enterprise continued to advance by leaps and bounds – to borrow one of Mr. Gladstone’s famous phrases. On one occasion, when a Tory member argued against a certain measure that it was not the right time to introduce it, Mr. Bernal Osborne wittily exclaimed: ‘Not the right time, sir? We take our time from Greenwich.’
No sooner had Parliament met than the Queen, in order to smooth the difficulties of the question, wrote to Bishop Tait, who had then become Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘The Queen has seen Mr. Gladstone, who shows the most conciliatory disposition. He really seems to be moderate in his views, and anxious, so far as he properly and consistently can do so, to meet the wishes of those who would maintain the Irish Church. He at once assured the Queen of his readiness – and, indeed, his anxiety – to meet the Archbishop and to communicate freely with him on the subject of this most important question; and the Queen must express her hope that the Archbishop will meet him in the same spirit.’ The Government could do nothing that would tend to raise a suspicion of their sincerity in proposing to disendow the Irish Church, and to withdraw all State endowments from all religious communities in Ireland, but with these conditions accepted, all other matters connected with the question might, the Queen thought, thus become the subject of discussion and negotiation. The interview, when it took place, seems to have much relieved the Archbishop’s mind, especially as Mr. Gladstone at that date had not made public any authoritative statement of the shape which his Disestablishment policy was to assume. The Archbishop used to say in after-years that his position after the interview for about ten days was the most difficult he had ever known. In addition to the necessarily urgent correspondence of such a time, he had to grant interviews to men of every sort and condition who came to consult, inform or interrogate him upon the absorbing topic which was on every lip; and he had not merely to give attention to larger comments and conjectures, and to say something suitable in reply, but to keep entirely secret all the while the scheme which Mr. Gladstone had unfolded to him, and even the fact that such a communication had taken place.
At length came Monday, March 1, and Mr. Gladstone unfolded his scheme. For some three hours and a half Mr. Gladstone occupied the attention – the absorbed attention – of an eager House. It was one of his grandest oratorical triumphs. Complicated details, which in other hands would have been dry and lifeless, kept the listener spellbound. ‘It was strange,’ writes the Archbishop, ‘to hear Gladstone on Monday last unfold his scheme in the House of Commons, knowing beforehand what it was all to be, and having, indeed, had a rehearsal of it in my library.’
Mr. Gladstone’s Bill was in accordance with the resolutions he had moved when in opposition. The actual moment of Disestablishment he proposed to postpone until January 1, 1871; but from the passing of the Act the creation of private interests was to cease, and the property of the Church was to pass at once into the hands of Commissioners appointed for the purpose. All the ecclesiastical laws of the Disestablished Church were to exist as a binding contract to regulate the internal affairs of the Disestablished Church until such time as they should be altered by the voluntary agency of whatever new governing body would be appointed. The churches and burial-grounds were to become on application the property of the Disestablished Church, and the glebe-houses as well, on payment of the somewhat heavy existing building charges. The whole value of the Church property was estimated at sixteen millions; of this sum, £8,500,000 would be swallowed up in the necessary compensation of various kinds, and the remaining seven and a half millions would be applied to the advantage of the Irish people, but not to Church purposes. Special provision was made for incumbents and unbeneficed curates. As to the post-Reformation grants, Mr. Gladstone fixed a dividing line at the year 1680, agreeing that all grants made from private sources subsequent to that year should be handed over intact to the Disestablished Church. As to the remaining seven millions and a half, it was to be devoted to the relief ‘of unavoidable calamities and suffering not provided for by the Poor Law,’ to the support of lunatic and idiot asylums, institutions for the relief of the deaf and dumb and blind, and other kindred objects. These details, one after another, were set forth with great clearness, and the speech was closed with a magnificent peroration, which drew a warm tribute of admiration even from the bitterest opponents of the Bill.
In the House of Commons the Bill was carried triumphantly, in spite of good debating on the part of its enemies. On the second reading, the division was 368 for, 250 against. But it was in the Lords that the battle was chiefly fought, when the second reading was carried, after a debate which lasted till three in the morning, by 179 against 146. Upon a division being called, the two English Archbishops, amid a scene of intense excitement, retired to the steps of the throne, which are technically not within the House; Bishop Wilberforce and several Conservative peers withdrew. Among the Conservatives who voted with the Government were Lord Salisbury, Lord Bath, Lord Devon, Lord Carnarvon, and Lord Nelson. The only Bishop who voted with the Government was Bishop Thirlwall, of St. David’s. Thirteen English and three Irish Bishops voted on the other side. But in Committee the Lords tacked on sixty-two amendments. Punch had a clever cartoon on the occasion. The Archbishop of Canterbury was represented as a gipsy nurse giving back a changeling instead of the child that had been presented to him, saying, ‘Which we’ve took the greatest care of ’m, ma’m,’ while Mrs. the Prime Minister replies, ‘This is not my child – not in the least like it.’ The Ministerialists described the Bill to be so mutilated as to be practically useless, and the vociferous Radical cheers which greeted Mr. Gladstone as he rose on July 15 to move that the Lords’ amendments be considered were significant of the temper of the House. Nothing could be more uncompromising than his speech. He made no attempt to soften down the differences; he even accentuated their gravity, as he recounted the amendments one by one, and called upon the House to reject the preposterous proposals of men who had shown themselves to be as ignorant of the feelings of the country as if they had been ‘living in a balloon.’ He insisted on the rejection of each and every clause which involved, however indirectly, the proposal of concurrent endowment; he declined to sanction the postponement of the date of Disestablishment; and he declined to leave the disposal of the anticipated surplus to the wisdom of a future Parliament. He consented, however, to allow a reconsideration of the commutation terms, and he went further than some of his supporters in agreeing to give the lump half-million in lieu of the private endowments which had been so much discussed. His unyielding attitude made the Lords furious. When the Peers met, after a debate of quite unusual warmth, they resolved by a majority of 74 to agree to the first and most important of their amendments – the authorization of the principle of concurrent endowments. Lord Granville immediately adjourned the House to take counsel with his colleagues. It seemed as if a collision between the two Houses was inevitable. However, Mr. Gladstone and Lord Cairns met, a compromise was effected, the danger of a collision between the two Houses was avoided, and the Bill for Disestablishing and Disendowing the Irish Church – which Mr. Gladstone had enthusiastically and somewhat sanguinely believed to be a message of peace to Ireland – became law. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been one of the chief instruments in the negotiations, writes in his diary: ‘We have made the best terms we could, and, thanks to the Queen, a collision between the Houses has been averted; but a great occasion has been poorly used, and the Irish Church has been greatly injured without any benefits to the Roman Catholics.’
In Ireland the scheme was met with mingled emotions. The Church party were in despair, and their attachment to England was undoubtedly weakened. One of the ablest of Irish patriots – Mr. John O’Neill Daunt – wrote: ‘The scheme, as set forth, is to some extent undoubtedly a disendowment scheme, but objectionable in not going so far in that direction as Mr. Gladstone might have done with propriety and with full consideration for the vested interests of existing incumbents. His capitation scheme is, in fact, a plan for re-endowment, by which several millions of money, obtained by the sale of Church property, will be permanently abstracted from the Irish public and appropriated to the ecclesiastical uses of the present State Churchmen and their successors. This is anything but equality, and cannot be accepted as a final settlement by the Irish nation.’ Again he writes: ‘The Lords have passed Mr. Gladstone’s Bill, with some mutilations, to which the Commons finally assented in a conference. The Bill is a wretched abortion – in fact, it is such a sham as might have been expected from an English Parliament. It pretends to disendow the State Church, which it re-endows with about five-eighths of the Church property in a capitalized shape… If Gladstone were an honest friend of Ireland, he could have averted all this danger by withholding the power to capitalize. To be sure, it is a queer disendowment that sends off the parsons with five-eighths of the money in their pockets.’ Again he writes: ‘On the whole, I dare say we have a sort of qualified triumph – nothing to boast of, considering that the result of nearly thirteen years’ agitation is a measure that enables the parsons to walk off with ten or eleven millions of our money in their pockets, that still exacts from us the rascally rent-charge, and that swindles Ireland of the amount of Irish taxes heretofore kept in the country by Maynooth and the Regium Donum.’
Nor were the English Dissenters, by whose aid Mr. Gladstone had carried the Bill, very much elated about it. Their organ, the British Quarterly Review, at some length showed how Mr. Gladstone’s pretended disendowment had given back the State Church property to the disestablished clergy in a capitalized shape. It was enough for the mob to feel that Mr. Gladstone had put an end to the Irish State Church – that upas-tree which had long blighted the country. Be that as it may, nothing was more beautiful than Mr. Gladstone’s peroration when he moved his resolutions. Said he: ‘There are many who think that to lay hands on the National Church Establishment is a profane and unhallowed act. I sympathize with it. I sympathize with it, while I think it is my duty to overcome and suppress it. There is something in the idea of a National Establishment of religion – of a solemn appropriation of a part of the commonwealth for conferring upon all who are ready to receive it what we know to be an inestimable benefit; of saving that part or portion of the inheritance from private selfishness, in order to extract from it, if we can, pure and unmixed advantages of the highest order for the population at large. There is something attractive in this – so attractive that it is an image that must always command the homage of the many. It is somewhat like the kingly ghost in “Hamlet,” of which one of the characters of Shakespeare says:
‘“We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
But it is as the air invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.”
But, sir, this is to view a religious Establishment upon one side only – upon what I may call the ethereal side; it has likewise a side of earth. And here I cannot do better than quote some lines written by the present Archbishop of Dublin at a time when his genius was devoted to the Muses. He said, speaking of mankind:
‘“We who did our lineage high
Draw from beyond the starry sky,
Are yet upon the other side,
To earth and to its dust allied.”
And so the Church Establishment, regarded in its theory and its aim, is beautiful and attractive. Yet what is it but an appropriation of public property – an appropriation of the fruits of labour and skill to certain purposes; and unless those purposes are fulfilled, that appropriation cannot be justified. Therefore, sir, I think we must set aside fears, which thrust themselves upon the imagination, and act upon the sober dictates of our judgment. I think it has been shown that the cause for action is strong – not for precipitate action, not for action beyond our powers, but for such action as the opportunities of the times and the condition of Parliament, if there is a ready will, will amply and easily admit of. If I am asked as to my expectations of the issue of this struggle, I begin by frankly avowing that I, for one, would not have entered into it unless I had believed that the final hour was about to sound. “Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum.” And I hope that the noble lord will forgive me if I say that before last Friday I thought that the thread of the remaining life of the Irish Established Church was short, but that since Friday last, when at half-past four o’clock in the afternoon the noble lord stood at that table, I have regarded it as being shorter still. The issue is not in our hands. What we had and have to do is to consider deeply and well before we take the first step in an engagement such as this, but, having entered into the controversy, there and then to acquit ourselves like men, and to use every effort to remove what still remains of the scandals and calamities in the relations that exist between England and Ireland, and to make our best efforts, at least, to fill up with the cement of human concord the noble fabric of the British Empire.’
Mr. Gladstone triumphed. Mr. Disraeli contented himself with the victory of his great rival. Mr. M‘Cullagh Torrens writes that he happened to pass near the Conservative leader in the cloisters as he muffled to resist the outer air, and could not help asking him what he thought of Gladstone’s speech in introducing the Bill. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘perfectly wonderful! Nobody but himself could have gone through such a mass of statistics, history, and computations.’ And then, after a pause: ‘And so characteristic in the finish to throw away the surplus on the other idiots.’