Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Gladstone and Ireland

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Also by D. George Boyce NATIONALISM IN IRELAND DECOLONISATION AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1775–1997

THE ULSTER CRISIS, 1885–1921 (Edited with Alan O’Day)

Also by Alan O’Day THE ENGLISH FACE OF IRISH NATIONALISM PARNELL AND THE FIRST HOME RULE CRISIS IRISH HOME RULE, 1867–1921 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL


NINETEENTH CENTURY IRELAND: The Search for Stability

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Gladstone and Ireland

Edited by

D. George Boyce Emeritus Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, Swansea University, UK and

Alan O’Day Formerly Fellow in History, Greyfriars Hall, University of Oxford; currently Fellow, St Bede’s Hall, Oxford


Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age

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Editorial matter and selection © D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–22194–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gladstone and Ireland : politics, religion, and nationality in the Victorian age / edited by D. George Boyce, Alan O’Day. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–22194–9 (hbk.) 1. Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809–1898 – Political and social views. 2. Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809–1898 – Influence. 3. Ireland – Politics and government – 1837–1901. 4. Home rule – Ireland – History – 19th century. 5. Liberalism – Ireland – History – 19th century. 6. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1837–1901. 7. Religion and politics – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 8. Liberalism – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 9. Great Britain – Relations – Ireland. 10. Ireland – Relations – Great Britain. I. Boyce, David George, 1942– II. O’Day, Alan. DA563.5.G44 2010 941.5081—dc22


No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

2010027510

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Acknowledgements

vii

List of illustrations

viii

Notes on contributors

ix

Introduction: Tracts for the times? The enduring appeal of Gladstone and Ireland D. George Boyce

1

1 History and pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth grant controversy John-Paul McCarthy

15

2 Gladstone, church and state Alan Megahey

41

3 Anti-Gladstonianism and the pre-1886 Liberal secession Timothy Moore

65

4 British Liberals and the Irish Home Rule crisis: the dynamics of division Graham Goodlad 5 ‘A deplorable narrative’: Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien and the ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 1880–90 Ian Sheehy 6 Gladstone and the Ulster question N. C. Fleming

86

110 140

7 Burke in Belfast: Thomas MacKnight, Gladstone and Liberal Unionism Patrick Maume

162

8 The union of hearts depicted: Gladstone, Home Rule, and United Ireland D. W. Bebbington

186

9 Gladstone and the Irish civil service Martin Maguire


Contents

208

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Contents

10 Accommodation, conciliation and cooperation: a Gladstonian legacy N. C. Fleming and Alan O’Day

233

11

256

Gladstone and the four nations D. George Boyce

Index

289


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The editors would like to thank Ruth Ireland at Palgrave Macmillan for her advice and patience in the preparation of this book, and Vidhya Jayaprakash for her assiduous work in copy-editing the manuscript.


Acknowledgements

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The Cabinet Trick A Flag of Truce Taking the Landlords at Their Word Arraigned! Whose Shall the Coffin Be? Well Done! The Grand Old Man and His Puny Calumniators The Parting of the Ways Gladstone’s Golden Wedding

191 193 194 195 197 199 201 202 204

All images are provided by and reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.


Illustrations

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D. W. Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling and author of William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (1993) and The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (2004) and a co-editor of Gladstone Centenary Essays (2000). D. George Boyce is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University. He has written books and articles on modern Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations and on British imperial history. N. C. Fleming is a research fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, University College Dublin. He is the author of The Marquess of Londonderry: Aristocracy, Power and Politics in Britain and Ireland (2005) and a co-editor of Ireland and Anglo-Irish Relations since 1800: Critical Essays (2008). Graham Goodlad is Director of Studies at St. John’s College, Southsea. He has written widely for students on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, including Gladstone (2004) and Peel (2005). John-Paul McCarthy held the Usher-Cunningham doctoral studentship in modern history from 2005 to 2008 at Exeter College, Oxford, where he is currently in the final stages of a DPhil on Gladstone’s intellectual life. Martin Maguire is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. He has written on the history of civil service trade unionism in Ireland. His publications include The Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland, 1912–38: ‘Shaking the BloodStained Hand of Mr Collins’ (2008). Patrick Maume is a researcher for the Dictionary of Irish Biography. He lives in Belfast and takes an interest in its history. He has produced numerous articles and edited texts relating to nineteenth- and twentieth- century Irish history and is the author of The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Political Life, 1891–1918 (1999). He is currently researching nineteenth-century Irish newspaper history, with particular reference to the Gladstone–Parnell era.



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x


Timothy Moore has a BA in political science from Harding University and an MSt in modern history from Oxford and is a DPhil candidate at Hertford College, Oxford, researching liberal unionism and British politics, 1886–1912. He was a former legislative correspondent for the US Senate and Academic Director of the Washington International Studies Council. Alan O’Day was formerly a fellow of Greyfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and is currently a fellow of St Bede’s Hall, Oxford. He has authored and edited more than thirty-five books, including five other co-edited volumes with D. George Boyce. Ian Sheehy completed his DPhil at Hertford College, Oxford, and teaches English and history at Southend High School for Boys.


Alan Megahey has written on aspects of the political and religious history of Britain and Ireland and of Zimbabwe. Having taught for most of his career, he is currently a parish priest in Lincolnshire.

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D. George Boyce

I Gladstone is not the only British Prime Minister whose reputation has been immortalised by one great event in a long career. For Winston Churchill it was his premiership during the Second World War; for Gladstone it was his pursuit of Home Rule for Ireland. But there is a significant difference between these two careers, in that Churchill’s wartime leadership rescued his reputation from one of persistent failure and disappointment in the previous two decades. Gladstone’s reputation was secure long before his passionate adoption of the cause of Irish self-government. Moreover Gladstone’s Irish experience was far from successful. Its crowning glory – the first Home Rule Bill of 1886 – was rejected by the House of Commons; the second Bill was passed by the Commons only to be defeated in the House of Lords, but, as Richard Shannon has remarked, the latter had a threadbare look about it. It – and its great protagonist – lacked the momentous feeling of the first great enterprise.1 Yet these failures, and the internal flaws of both bills, are still perceived as Gladstone’s finest hour: as a great opportunity finally to resolve the tragic history of Anglo-Irish relations, but as an opportunity lost – with disastrous consequences for both countries. Shannon was not the first to challenge orthodoxy – an orthodoxy whose groundwork was laid by Gladstone’s most influential biographer, John Morley, and carried on by J. L. Hammond, who argued that what distinguished Gladstone from any other politician who engaged with Ireland under the Union was his powerful and sustained moral purpose. This was a good man doing good things, or at least attempting to do them. When contrasting Gladstone with one of his greatest successors as Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, David Lloyd George, his close confidant (and


Introduction: Tracts for the times? The enduring appeal of Gladstone and Ireland

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D. George Boyce

fellow Welshman) Thomas Jones remarked that Lloyd George was ‘never, as Gladstone was, a crusader for Home Rule’.2 This was neatly illustrated when, on hearing that Asquith on 22 May 1916 had entrusted him with negotiating an Irish settlement after the Easter Rising, Lloyd George complained to his brother William that it was ‘rather interesting that when there is a special difficulty they always pick on me’.3 Gladstone was not ‘picked on’ to tackle Ireland: he chose to do so. In 1996, in a perceptive review of the relevant volumes of Professor Colin Matthew’s edition of the Gladstone Diaries, Alvin Jackson observed, ‘At the end Gladstone’s relationship with his editor and with his readers ... tells us much – but not quite everything.’4 Jackson had no doubt that the diaries and their editor’s introduction confirmed the ‘persistent and sweeping nature of [Gladstone’s] Irish concerns from his early career through to the 1890s’, that Gladstone ‘believed that his mission enjoyed divine favour’ and that he believed he owed his sustained physical and mental vigour to ‘divine intervention’.5 Jackson contrasted Matthew’s introduction with that of the first editor of the diaries, M. R. D. Foot, which was short and defensive, and a kind of prelude to the observations on Gladstonian ‘cant’ made by, in particular, John Vincent and A. B. Cooke in the 1970s.6 John Vincent’s Raleigh Lecture of 1977 summed up a revisionist view of Gladstone and Ireland. It was thoroughly researched and meticulously detailed, and he argued that Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule policy was not founded upon a Christian ethic, or indeed on any other ethic, but was the result of Gladstone’s calculation of what was the least bad option available in 1885–6. The other possible reform of the government of Ireland (the ‘Central Board’ option) seemed to offer the worst of both worlds (leaning towards but falling short of Home Rule). Thus ‘the Liberals took up Home Rule because there was no other available position’.7 In a wider context, Vincent considered the view that Gladstone’s Irish policy could be ‘normally explained in terms of continuity, intention, and natural development, rather than as sharply discontinuous, somewhat haphazard, and as much a matter of response as of initiative’.8 Famous Gladstonian observations on Ireland (‘That cloud in the west, that coming storm ...’; ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’) were not statements of firm purpose, but incidental remarks or, in the latter case, a determination to suppress Irish agrarian crime.9 John Vincent argued that when, finally, Gladstone took up Ireland in early 1867 it was because Lord John Russell was taking it up, and that his pursuit of Irish issues later in 1867 was ‘because they reunited the party and enabled him to avoid more divisive issues’. It was ‘probably


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because of Russell rather than Gladstone that by February 1867 it was generally known that the Irish Church was marked for the axe’.10 Party, not principle, gave the vital push to Gladstone’s first important step towards the government of Ireland by Irish ideas. Party, the parliamentary situation, political decision-making based on a calculation of loss and gain explained Gladstone’s predicament and choices in 1867. Motive and behaviour, cause and effect, were no more transparent in Gladstone than in any other politician. They have to be interpreted in the context of the political world that Gladstone inhabited, that he manipulated and that, in the case of Ireland, was not designed to ‘greatly change’ that country. Gladstone could not preach the virtues of Irish nationalism, so instead he denounced what he held had produced that unhappy mentality: the wickedness of the Act of Union and the failure of Britain’s stewardship in Ireland.11 Gladstone did not idealise the Irish; rather, he wanted to make them like his most favoured nations: the Scots, the Welsh and other worthy peoples.12 Vincent’s mordant view of the Gladstonian Irish project was contradicted by Matthew in his official edition of the Diaries, and this provoked Shannon to contest Matthew’s case for Gladstone as the ‘heroic but thwarted exponent of a great missed opportunity to reconcile Ireland with the British Crown’.13 Shannon cites the constitutional discrepancies and vagaries of the devolved government experiment in both the Victorian and contemporary United Kingdom (particularly the ‘West Lothian’ question) as evidence of the problems raised, not resolved, by the Gladstonian proposals that Matthew is uncritical of in his observation that these ‘still hold the field ... as the means of constitutional reorganisation of the United Kingdom’.14 Shannon had no doubt that Gladstone’s Home Rule mission was driven by his sincere belief that God approved of his actions. This was the problem: ‘Thus, instead of approaching the matter of providing enlarged powers of self-government for Ireland on the lines of rational calculations as to what Westminster might reasonably be asked to give in relation to what the Irish might reasonably be asked to accept, Gladstone approached the issue as a passionate partisan.’ This was a perfect example of what Lord Acton diagnosed as Gladstone’s faculty for living completely in what he chose to believe.15


Introduction 3

II These are contrasting and indeed contentious interpretations of Gladstone and Ireland. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive,


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because it is possible for a man convinced by his own righteousness and the purity of his motives (as Tony Blair was over his military intervention in Iraq) to deploy his formidable political skills, and even behaviour bordering on the mendacious, to get his way in Parliament and in the country. It is equally possible for such application of skills to fail to achieve the objective of their deployment and to leave the political predicament they were designed to resolve more unsatisfactory than it was before. This debate is not surprising to those who work as professional historians. What is more unusual, as Eugenio Biagini points out, is that Gladstone has been at the centre of renewed debate and interest since the mid-1980s. On the one hand, he has again become a topic of political discussion, as Thatcherite Conservatives have claimed his heritage as a public financier and political moralist. More recently, he has been elevated as the ‘prophet’ for a renewed, non-socialist Labour party.16 And it was not only in the social and economic sphere that Gladstone’s legacy was resurrected and picked over. Ireland too had its share of the debate. There was first of all the question of the Irish Question. It can be claimed that Gladstone’s Home Rule proposal was the ‘Irish settlement that never was’. If only the House of Commons and electorate had listened to Gladstone’s magnificent and moving plea in 1886 (‘Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think not of the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject the Bill’) then the deterioration in Anglo-Irish relations after 1912, the Easter Rising, the ‘Troubles’ of 1919–23, above all the later ‘Troubles’ of 1969 to the present day need not – would not – have happened. But there was also the apparently immovable fact of the Ulster Question. The unbending resistance of Unionist Ulster (in its post-1921 reincarnation as the state of Northern Ireland) to any form of government by a Nationalist-dominated Dublin Parliament and executive suggested that, in this very important aspect, Gladstone’s Home Rule bills were deeply flawed. Even if the first Bill had been passed by the Westminster Parliament, and imposed on Unionist Ulster, there could not have been any guarantee that it would establish a permanent settlement of the Nationalist/Unionist divide. The break-up of states in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the Balkans, indicates that the fractures in a multi-ethnic regime can be hidden without necessarily being resolved.


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Counter-factual history is an intriguing, if rather chancy, exercise, but because the stakes were so high (hindsight suggests) in 1886 and 1893 it can hardly be avoided when discussing the crisis of Home Rule. Not for the first time present-day concerns evoke past associations, and Gladstone is still seen as the man who not only felt the hand of history on his shoulder, but laid his own (and thereby God’s) hand on the shoulder of history. Then there is the interpretation of Gladstone’s Irish policies within Ireland itself. In a place where (to the dismay of many) historical revisionism stalked the land, tearing down Nationalist icons with abandon, Gladstone’s reputation remained secure. As Alan O’Day notes, there was not ‘a whiff of revisionism’ in the literature on Gladstone and Ireland emanating from Irish historical writing – political or non-political – up to the 1960s, and not much even after that, when a ‘third cycle of academically trained historians’ got to work. ‘And even though Gladstone does not emerge unblemished, on the whole he is less tarnished than Irish leaders, especially republican figures.’17 This lack of blemish found its way into Irish Free State school textbooks. Volume IV of James Carty’s A Class-Book of Irish History, described as ‘suitable’ for the National School Programme, and first published in 1931, quoted approvingly the description by ‘[a] famous English writer and statesman’ (John Morley) of Gladstone introducing the first Home Rule Bill, adding that ‘The veteran statesman appealed to his countrymen not to let this opportunity pass.’ Their failure to heed Gladstone’s words meant that ‘For many years afterwards “the Irish question” continued to disrupt English politics and parties.’ Carty observes that Gladstone was ‘the first English statesman since Lord Fitzwilliam (Viceroy of Ireland in 1795) to show sympathy with Irish national claims. In spite of his coercion measures, he was admired by the Irish people.’18 It is unusual for historians of Ireland who come from outside that country to fall out about their subject in a more spectacular fashion than Irish historians from within. The Irish literary critic and poet Tom Paulin revealed an uncharacteristically naïve opinion about historians when he admitted that he had always thought of them as ‘a type of Brahmin – pure vegetarians who existed at a level of consciousness far above that of politicians and other carnivores’.19 Gladstone seems to awaken the carnivore rather than the Brahmin in the historian. Shannon pointed out that Roy [Lord] Jenkins, who approved of Gladstonian Home Rule, had been a prominent front-bench spokesman and Minister in the Labour Cabinets before breaking away to found ‘what eventually transmuted into the Liberal Democratic party’; Matthew was a keen Labour Party


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member.20 David Bebbington, in Gladstone Centenary Essays, noted that the ‘High Politics’ school of historians who reacted against what might be called the more traditional interpretation of Gladstone and Ireland were ‘usually of right-wing opinions’.21 But there is a deeper significance here than the question of party political affiliation or attitude. The United Kingdom over the past thirty years has seen two important transformations of its politics. The first has been a debate on Britain itself, on the character of its people, on what constitutes the ‘British nation’.22 Mass immigration, the Northern Ireland Troubles, the rise of nationalism in Scotland and Wales, the nervous assessment of where all this leaves the English nation, all have made the Gladstonian experiment in Irish Home Rule seem more relevant than ever. Devolution in Scotland and Wales has not ‘settled’ the questions of how the new executives and assemblies are to work harmoniously and fairly with Westminster; devolved government is seen by many as a process not an event. Moreover, devolution seems to many to contradict the history of the British state; indeed, as Michael Bentley puts it, the problem with the history of the British state was that it was, indeed, history. Those who opposed Home Rule in the late nineteenth century were British nationalists, who could not ‘go beyond the limits of what the past had baptised, at least until Gladstone began to behave oddly about the Act of Union with Ireland’.23 Likewise, Mrs Thatcher took office in 1979 buoyed up by the failure of the Labour Government’s plans for devolution in Wales and Scotland, and firmly convinced that her Unionist instincts had been justified; in June 1978, at a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast, she declared that ‘our two parties show one overriding common purpose, the maintenance and strengthening of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. We shall not consider any plans for the political future of the United Kingdom which could result in the weakening of the Union.’24 But this depended on how the ‘Union’ was to be defined in the first place, and on how best it could be strengthened. The Thatcher Government came to the conclusion that it was only by some modification of the Union (the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985) that Britain could break the stalemate of Ulster politics and move towards a resolution of the problem that would be of lasting benefit to Northern Ireland and to the United Kingdom as a whole. This would be achieved by addressing the grievances of ‘constitutional nationalists’ and reducing the need for a strong military presence (or ‘coercion’ as it was called in the nineteenth century). Gladstone’s bid for an Irish settlement in 1886 could be regarded, in motivation at least, as not dissimilar.


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The second political transformation of the past thirty years has been a growing awareness of the gap between what the political elite says it is doing and what it is actually up to. As W. C. Lubenow put it in his study of parliamentary politics and the first Home Rule Bill, the ‘High Politics’ historians were characterised by ‘their scepticism, their astringency, their unwillingness to be gulled by what politicians say [and this] has led them to expose the nature of political motivation, the way in which policy is moulded, and the way decisions are taken at the highest level of government’. Lubenow criticised this ‘school’ for seeing politics as a ‘game’ of ‘action and movement. But no substance.’ It was a kind of conspiracy: ‘only insiders truly know what is going on’.25 But these historians’ approach reflected and shaped the awareness among the public that politicians were not always what they seemed to be, were not necessarily driven by ideology, and that even those who did do God indulged in Mammon as well. Did not Gladstone fit this description also? And did not an exploration on the lines of those of Vincent and Shannon help new generations to understand just what goes on in the hidden world of Westminster? Biagini rightly urges the present generation to exercise caution in how it interprets the past in the context of its own preoccupations. Gladstone was a Victorian politician working in a country in which, for example, the state’s role contrasted profoundly with its role in the late twentieth century.26 This is a book focused on aspects of Victorian politics and religion. Nevertheless, Gladstone’s Irish experience in particular is still fascinating, not only to historical researchers, but to those who question and explore what the purpose of politics is, how professional politicians operate and at what levels they do so.

III Gladstone’s Irish policy raises the issue of the place of ethics in politics, and of its ambiguous relationship to pragmatic (or meaner) political calculation. These are perennial themes: even a Gladstone, with his mind made up, worked through the prism of party politics, bowing to its exigencies and making creative use of its opportunities. In the 1830s Gladstone defended one of the most anomalous aspects of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland: the Anglican religious established church, the Church of Ireland, which could not possibly be described, in numerical terms, as the ‘national church’, since it was outnumbered by the Roman catholic majority and the Ulster Nonconformist population. Gladstone held that the Anglican state church was defensible


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because it represented religious truth, and he supported the Church of Ireland against the Whigs’ efforts to interfere with tithes that the Church derived from its established status. But he could not leave matters there. In 1845 he wrote to Bishop Wilberforce explaining that his views on the Irish Church were less clear than they had been before: ‘the working results of the last two years have disappointed me’. The Church of Ireland’s title to an establishment was, he noted, ‘questioned, vehemently, not only by the radicalism of the day, but by the Roman bishops, who lay claim to hold the succession to St. Patrick: and this claim has been alive all along from the Reformation, so that lapse of years does nothing against it’.27 In the Great Famine of 1845–9 Gladstone praised the Protestant clergy for acting ‘like ministering angels’ in coming to the aid of the starving Roman Catholic poor.28 But the wider issues raised by the Irish Church’s position could not be dismissed. In 1865, in Oxford, Gladstone recalled that he ‘had expressed himself in the House of Commons to the effect that the present position of the State Church in Ireland was unsatisfactory. It ministered to only one-eighth or one-ninth of the whole Irish population.’29 In 1868, following violent attacks by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the ‘Fenians’) in England, he rallied the Liberal Party behind the cause of disestablishing the Church of Ireland on the principle of the government of Ireland by Irish ideas. The Disestablishment Act passed in 1869 was a brilliant political manoeuvre against the Conservatives. It also seemed to herald a general attack on Protestant privilege in Ireland, especially as Gladstone defined disestablishment as ‘one of a group of questions. There is the Church of Ireland, there is the land of Ireland, there is the education of Ireland – they are all so many branches from one trunk ... and that trunk is the tree of what is called the Protestant ascendancy ...’.30 Gladstone was less successful in his desire to educate Ireland. His 1873 Act proposing a National University was defeated in the House of Commons by three votes.31 He failed to satisfy the Irish tenant farmers in his Land Act of 1870. There was as yet no inexorable march towards Home Rule. Yet there were strange ideas stirring in his labyrinthian mind. In 1872 he wrote to the French historian and former Prime Minister François Guizot recalling a conversation that he had had with Guizot in 1845 following Gladstone’s resignation from Sir Robert Peel’s Government over the proposal to make permanent the annual grant to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth. Guizot had told him that Ireland should be given justice and that Europe would sympathise with this. Gladstone now claimed that this conversation had ‘helped


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me towards what has been since done’.32 In the same year he referred to ‘making local government and local institutions strong to the uttermost point of the strength which they can develop’. This was the ‘surest source of strength for the central government’.33 In 1877 he affirmed in Dublin that the ‘three kingdoms’ were ‘one nation for every purpose of duty and power’, but he went on to say, ‘I, for my part, can set no bounds to the desire that I feel to see through these three kingdoms the people brought politically to learn in narrower spheres the public duties which belong to narrower spheres and strive to fit themselves for those higher duties which are involved in the material work of the Government.’ He did not believe that anything has contributed, perhaps nothing so much contributes at this moment, to the solidity of British institutions as the fact that the people are trained politically in the habits of self-government, that they understand political rights and understand political duty, and understanding the relations which prevail between right on the one side and duty on the other, they carry with them a talisman which is a safeguard in the main and in the long run invaluable against those dangers which have threatened and those mischiefs which have lacerated other great and distinguished nations.34 Gladstone was acutely aware of the ‘lacerations’ of Irish political violence. The agrarian agitation and disorder unleashed by the Land League’s campaign between 1879 and 1881 provoked him to affirm that there was ‘still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law and order on the one side and sheer lawlessness on the other’.35 This struck a chord with English public opinion, but it did not prevent Gladstone from passing as a remedial measure the Land Act of 1881, or from making the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ in May 1882 with the leader of the Home Rule Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, whereby Parnell was released from prison in return for using his influence to end rural disorder and further the demise of the Land League. When introducing his 1870 Land Bill, Gladstone declared that he ‘held that each successive act of justice develops feelings of content and loyalty, and narrows the circle of disaffection’.36 He did not shrink from coercion if it could be applied efficaciously, but he was too astute a politician to pursue a purely negative policy in Ireland. In 1885 he came to believe that the best way of narrowing the circle was to acknowledge that the general election of November–December 1885, in which the Home Rule Party won 85 Irish seats and the Scotland Division of


Introduction 9


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Liverpool (the 86 of ’86), demonstrated a great truth about Ireland: that, as he put it to Lord Hartington on 17 December, ‘Ireland has now spoken: and ... an effort ought to be made by the Government [that is, the Conservatives] without delay to meet her demands for the management by an Irish legislative body of Irish as distinct from Imperial affairs.’37 A week later Gladstone repeated to Lord Spencer his hopes that the Conservatives would respond to the need to lead the way; otherwise, ‘an immense loss of dignity, in a great crisis of the Empire, would attend the forcing of our hands by the Irish or otherwise’.38 This was a sanguine but not unreasonable speculation, given the Salisbury Government’s generous Irish legislative programme and its appointment of Lord Carnarvon as a Lord Lieutenant with a positive attitude to Irish self-rule. But there was no response from the Government, and events now moved towards Gladstone’s bid to implement a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. His mind was made up, and he now determined to give effect to the declaration he made to Lord Hartington in a memorandum written on 7 August 1885 that he could not ‘treat the people of Ireland as foes or aliens, or advise that less shd. be done for them than wd. in like circumstances be done for the inhabitants of any other portion of the UK’.39 Justice, responsibility, institutions representing the people, laws deriving their legitimacy from an indigenous parliament – all these seemed to characterise the essence of Liberalism’s constitutional thinking. But the crisis of 1885–6 was a political one, and one in which Gladstone drew upon his formidable political skills. It is possible, then, to attempt an accommodation between those who stress the opportunism of Gladstone’s Irish policies, and his hope for immediate political advantage from an alliance between the Liberals and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and those who see them, and their culmination in Home Rule, as events of longer gestation. Gladstone confronted a political but also, he believed, an ethical turning point in the history of the United Kingdom and the Empire. He had a personal as well as a legislative history when it came to Ireland. It was natural for him to invoke his evangelical Christian beliefs and think of the crisis in terms he used about Ireland during the Great Famine: atonement. The balance of the ‘half-atoned injustice’ that Gladstone spoke of in 1845 would now, in 1885–6, be made over, and the debt that England owed to Ireland paid in full. In a neatly paradoxical statement Professor Paul Bew summed up Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill as ‘necessary, just and disastrous – all at the same time’.40 Let us examine this. It could indeed be said that Home Rule was necessary, because in 1885, and subsequently, Nationalist


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Ireland spoke her mind, using her voice to demand a measure of selfgovernment that would seal a ‘Union of Hearts’ between Great Britain and Ireland. Just, because the coercive acts that marked British rule in Ireland could, and indeed at the time were, dismissed as the negation of governance. And disastrous, because it destroyed any hope of a consensus for an Irish settlement, perhaps by means of a reform of local government rather than the ‘restoration’ of a national parliament, with all the emotional burden of history that defined such an institution. This is a disputed view, and it will remain disputed. But there can be no doubt that Gladstone’s bid for Home Rule, and its failure, played a key role in the shaping of modern Ireland – and still does. It is always dangerous to strip out from the past material to use as tracts for the present time, yet it is hard to resist the notion that there must be something worth exploring in that part of Gladstone’s career in which Ireland and the other ‘Celtic’ nations played such a significant role. Professor Keith Robbins concluded that Gladstone was a ‘remarkable man who made Liberalism truly British’.41 Recent decades have shown that the political elite and public opinion have had to re-learn the vocabulary of nationalism, of national identity and, not least, of the destiny of the nation, issues which shook the British political system in Gladstone’s day and which cannot now be excluded, even in an old country.

IV The chapters which follow explore the great crisis and debate over Home Rule for Ireland. This was a crisis not only for Irish but for British politics. It was also one that enables historians to investigate the complex mind and motives of the greatest statesman of his age, William Ewart Gladstone. John-Paul McCarthy unravels Gladstone’s first involvement in Irish matters, his reaction to the controversy over the renewal of the state grant to Maynooth in 1845, demonstrating the significance of the ‘Anglican prism’ through which he viewed this, and subsequent, political issues. Alan Megahey pursues the religious theme, explaining the apparent contradictions in an Anglican’s decision to disestablish the Church of Ireland in 1869, and its implications for Church–state relations generally. Both Timothy Moore and Graham Goodlad consider questions of a decidedly more worldly, but vitally important character: the impact of Gladstone’s conversion to the cause of Irish Home Rule on the structure of party politics. Their chapters reveal how personal as well as principled considerations worked to effect a transformation in


Introduction 11


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British politics, one that had effects far beyond even the intense struggle over Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill in 1886. Ian Sheehy ventures into Gladstone’s formidable mind to assess the sources that influenced his reading of Irish history – reading that he drew upon to support his belief that the Union between Britain and Ireland had failed and that consequently he must ‘do justice’ to Ireland. Neil Fleming and Patrick Maume, in their contributions, highlight the difficulties that this noble cause provoked in Ireland. Fleming explains the significance of Gladstone’s failure to listen to those of his senior colleagues who advocated including safeguards for Ulster (and Irish) Protestants, a failure whose impact was magnified as the Home Rule controversy persisted beyond Gladstone’s lifetime. Maume describes the sad dilemma presented by Gladstone’s policy for the Ulster Liberals through the perspective of Thomas MacKnight, a man of letters whose ideas and interests fitted him to be a natural admirer of Gladstone, but whose role as a mentor for the admired statesman was now rendered impossible. David Bebbington presents a colourful manifestation of the Home Rule controversy through the cartoons of the Parnellite newspaper United Irishman as it moved from depicting Gladstone as the saviour of the Fair Hibernia and the maker of the ‘Union of Hearts’ to the betrayer of its champion, Charles Stewart Parnell, when Parnell’s career was ruined by the O’Shea divorce case in 1890. Yet the idea of the Union of Hearts that Home Rule might have sealed was not destroyed; it underpinned mainstream Irish Nationalism for decades. Martin Maguire describes the implications of Home Rule for the core administration of Ireland, the civil service. He shows that, for Gladstone, not the least good effect of devolution would be to save money on the Irish administration. The civil servants perceived that, paradoxically, the Union of Hearts was really an acknowledgement that Ireland was different, and that they had better make shift for themselves. Alan O’Day and Neil Fleming trace the legacy of the Home Rule crisis for Irish political thinking. The Gladstonian faith in co-operation and accommodation worked a change that did not die with the defeat of the Home Rule bills of 1886 and 1893, but was taken up by those who sought to create a ‘new Ireland’. They were sadly mistaken. George Boyce assesses the impact of Gladstone’s Celtic adventure on the four (or more?) nations that made up the British nation, showing how, in Wales, Scotland and Ireland – and also in non-Celtic England – it aroused anxieties as well as expectations, but laid the groundwork for any future consideration of the constitutional, political and religious arrangement of the United Kingdom.


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Introduction 13

1. Richard Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London and New York, 2007), p. 443. 2. Thomas Jones, Lloyd George (London, 1951), p. 187. 3. William George, My Brother and I (London, 1958), p. 254. 4. Alvin Jackson, ‘The Gladstone Diaries Completed, 1887–96’, Irish Historical Studies, XXX, 118 (Nov. 1996), pp. 255–63, at p. 263. 5. Ibid., pp. 256–7. 6. Ibid., p. 262. 7. John Vincent, ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXIII (1977), pp. 193–238, at p. 228. 8. Ibid., p. 194. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., pp. 200–1. 11. Ibid., p. 223. 12. Ibid., pp. 230–1. 13. Shannon, Gladstone, p. xxiv. 14. Ibid., p. xxiv. 15. Ibid., p. 378. 16. Eugenio Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), p. 2. 17. Alan O’Day, ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievement and Reputation’ in David Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 163–83. 18. James Carty, A Class-Book of Irish History: Books I–IV (Dublin and London, 1931; 1966 edition), Book IV, pp. 90–1, 95. 19. Quoted in D. George Boyce, ‘Brahmins and Carnivores: The Irish Historian in Great Britain’, Irish Historical Studies, XXV, 99 (May 1987), pp. 225–35, at p. 226. 20. Shannon, Gladstone, p. xxi. 21. David Bebbington, ‘Introduction’ in Bebbington and Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays, p. 4. 22. See, for example, Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989); Keith Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: England, Scotland, and Wales: The Making of a Nation (Oxford, 1989); Linda Colley, Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992, 1994, 1995); Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds.), History, Nationalism and the Question of Britain (London, 2004). 23. Michael Bentley, ‘Liberalism and Nationalism in Britain’ in Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle (eds.), Under the Sign of Liberalism: Varieties of Liberalism Past and Present (Britain and the Netherlands, vol. XII, Zutphen, 1997), pp. 78–92, at pp. 80–1. 24. D. George Boyce, ‘The Irish Connection’ in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford, 1989), pp. 226–38. 25. W. C. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 19, 21. 26. Biagini, Gladstone, p. 56.


Notes


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D. George Boyce

27. Justin MacCarthy, The Story of Gladstone’s Life, 2nd ed. (London, 1898), pp. 99–100. 28. Paul Bew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in Myles Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007), pp. 25–40, at p. 27. 29. MacCarthy, Story of Gladstone’s Life, pp. 220–1. 30. Colin Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), p. 147. 31. Ibid., pp. 198–201. 32. J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938; 1964 edition), p. 68. 33. Ibid., p. 119. 34. Alan Warren, ‘Gladstone, Land and Social Reconstruction in Ireland, 1881– 1887’, Parliamentary History, II (1983), pp. 153–73 at pp. 162–3. 35. Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), p. 155. 36. Lord Eversley, Gladstone and Ireland (London, 1912), p. 45. 37. Colin Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, June, 1883–December, 1886 (Oxford, 1990), p. 451. 38. Ibid., vol. XI, p. 467, Gladstone to Spencer, 30 December 1885. 39. Ibid., vol. XI, p. 381. 40. Bew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’, p. 40. 41. Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: England, Scotland, and Wales, p. 105.


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History and pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth grant controversy John-Paul McCarthy

Robert Peel’s decision to increase the financial support given to Maynooth College, the Catholic seminary in Co. Kildare, in February 1844 would later split his party almost precisely in half1 and unleash the gravest outbreak of popular No-Popery since the Gordon riots of the 1780s. The opponents of this measure were also divided. The Anti-Maynooth Committee established to block this legislation was itself split between a faction who decried the grant on standard anti-Catholic grounds and a more determined group who deplored any state endowment of any religious sect on principle.2 This chapter explores Gladstone’s reaction to the biggest political and religious controversy of the early 1840s. In keeping with the recent emphasis on Gladstone’s subtle cultural and intellectual development,3 it challenges the idea that Gladstone’s resignation and subsequent vote in favour of the grant followed a personal crisis or rejection of the intellectual system constructed in his book The State in Its Relations with the Church (4th ed., 1841). Focusing on Gladstone’s historical analysis of church–state relations as outlined in that book, this chapter argues that his behaviour in 1845 demonstrated a considerable degree of continuity with his earlier scholarship. It is further suggested that Gladstone’s emerging pluralism on church–state matters was not a negative phenomenon; that is, it was not the result either of his education under Peel or of his recognition that his scholarly vision was largely impractical in the 1840s. His earliest books grappled in a thoughtful manner with the problems associated with voluntarism, concurrent endowments and Ireland. These books contained a detailed scheme for accommodating religious divisions within the UK polity. In intellectual terms at least, Gladstone was well prepared to deal with the


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Maynooth issue by 1845, and his vote to endorse Peel’s proposal should not be seen as much of a surprise. Section I below briefly explores the Maynooth historiography, most of which sees 1845 as a watershed moment in Gladstone’s career, one more epiphanic episode in the jagged maturation of Peel’s most highly strung apprentice. Section II assesses his multi-layered arguments in favour of the grant in 1845, and Section III then traces these ideas to their scholarly roots in his writings, thereby demonstrating the relationship between Gladstone’s private reading and his public life in a focused manner.

I The conventional historiographical wisdom sees Gladstone’s vote in 1845 as a critical turning point in his intellectual and political life, the bridge between his juvenile High Church chauvinism and the polished pluralism that he would later display during the debates over Jewish Relief in 1847 and the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in 1851, and beyond that to Bradlaugh and Church Vestments. In Colin Matthew’s classic formulation, it was the crucible of the Maynooth crisis, the ‘Serbonian bog’, within which ‘Gladstone’s model for state and church sank to its axles’.4 Gladstone himself was tempted by this interpretation, but he could be notoriously hard on himself in retrospect. Indeed, with mischievous candour in later life, Gladstone recalled his ambitions to be ambassador to the Holy See in 1844 as a hilarious example of half-cocked adolescent folly. He told John Morley in 1894 that the plan, mercifully declined by a bemused Prime Minister Peel, ‘seems to show me that there existed in my mind a strong element of fanaticism’.5 Others have followed this argument and have written about the Maynooth resignation in terms of personal crisis and a repudiation of the ‘excessively theoretical nature of his earlier works’,6 especially his first book, The State in Its Relations with the Church, that ‘Coleridgian extravaganza’7 of 1838. Grumbling about the ‘certain complicated Byzantinism of mind’ evidenced in his early books, Maurice Cowling traced Gladstone’s rejection of the ‘idea of a confessional state’ to his resignation in 1845.8 R. T. Shannon noted his increasing disillusionment with the vulgarity of his own analysis after 1838,9 and Perry Butler saw Maynooth as a critical turning point and portrayed the entire 1841–5 period under the rhetorical rubric of ‘The ideal demolished’.10 E. J. Feuchtwanger argued that Gladstone’s pluralism was a purely negative phenomenon, that is to say, the result of his having abandoned the earlier idealistic approach under duress. He noted how Gladstone


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looked back on the crisis of the early 1840s as one that actually facilitated his maturation, ‘as it were by a process of elimination’.11 Peter Nockles characterised Gladstone as a ‘spectacular convert’ in 1845, one who moved from the traditional High Church argument that the church should reassert its constitutional claims as they were before 1828 to embrace the argument that strict Anglican confessionalism was dead in the water and that the only hope of the church was to concede to other communions that freedom it required for itself. For Nockles, ‘Gladstone fully recognised that his support [of the grant] contradicted the principle of Anglican confessionalism which he had espoused in his book in 1838.’12 Simon Skinner has suggested a roughly similar intellectual trajectory, though one that sharply distinguishes Gladstone’s 1838 composition from first-generation Tractarian polemic.13 Others have been less inclined to ascribe such extremes to Gladstone’s early intellectual life and have presented a rather more discriminate thinker. In her careful analysis of his Locke notes from 1836, Ruth Clayton showed that his understanding of the philosopher’s controversial legacy has been mangled by a wider tendency to attribute extreme polarisation to mechanisms in his thought, a tendency that has recently resurfaced in some of the specifically Irish literature.14 Gladstone’s notes suggest, however, that ‘for him attaining knowledge was a two-way process to be achieved by contending rationally with the views of others, not through irrational condemnation’.15 Clayton’s recent sensitive assessment of Gladstone qua bibliophile made similar points, and she argued that the intense theological focus of his intellectual life gave his thought an usually dynamic and subtle quality, one which pushed him away from the dogmatic pieties of his Oxford years.16 Though he has written about the important transitions in Gladstone’s intellectual life, Matthew has himself also warned against an overly schematic approach. He contrasted the tensions in Gladstone’s mind between a ‘historical and localist’ perspective and his parallel commitment to an atemporal, deductive analysis of social and fiscal relationships.17 Similarly, Matthew argued that there were strong utilitarian, even secular, aspects to the 1838 composition, his ‘life-lines’ to more Erastian shores.18 In 1983, Boyd Hilton argued that there were strong grounds for seeing the 1838 analysis as ‘a method and a state of mind rather than a blue print’.19 Distinguishing a strict policy statement from a general outline, Eugenio Biagini20 and Richard Helmstadter21 agreed that Gladstone never repudiated the ideal adumbrated in the first book but found it relatively easy to accommodate himself to the pluralist realities of the reformed UK constitution after the 1828–32 crisis. Agatha Ramm saw the first text as an essay in Aristotelian pragmatism, one built around


Gladstone and the Maynooth grant controversy 17


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the idea that after the reforms of 1828–32 it was better to accept half a confessional loaf than nothing at all. Gladstone was attracted to what she called Aristotle’s theory of ‘adaptation’, namely the idea that ‘the essential character of an institution could be discarded or be an area where adaptation to changing circumstances might take place’.22 Jonathan Conlin’s stylish analysis of Gladstone’s relationship with the French Roman Catholic art scholar François Rio in the 1840s is the best example of this more nuanced approach. Here, Conlin explored Gladstone’s political evolution in the context of his understanding of the historical process, in this case his complex, longue durée analysis of Europe’s artistic history.23 For Conlin, Gladstone understood the historical development of Europe’s Christian art tradition in a dialectical manner, as a story that stretched from the pagan paintings of the Greeks to the more refined and idiosyncratic national traditions that emerged between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries in France and Germany. Indeed, Conlin showed that Gladstone made explicit ethical deductions from his artistic analysis, stressing the way Gladstone’s analytical flexibility emerged from his subtle understanding of Europe’s tangled intellectual history. History was a winding river in Gladstone’s metaphor, directed by a series of struggles between a sensual, primal approach to art and the more refined approach which he thought the product of Christianity. Summarising the development of art between the Greeks and the era of early Renaissance artists, Gladstone wrote in a private paper, upon the whole if we look at the origin and the end [of Europe’s artistic history] I believe it contains truth: and it may be viewed as we should regard its being said of a river that it flows from such a point to the sea: not, that is to say, in a right line and by the shortest course, but with varying rapidity, and many deviations, and sometimes even increasing for a little the distance which it has to traverse, but yet with sure and with continuous movement hastening to its final destination.24 Conlin argued that ‘[s]een in this light, Gladstone’s 1840s crisis did not involve rejecting the idea of a normative relation between church and state, but the realisation that this norm could not be implemented in practice at that moment in historical time’. 25 And thus Conlin was not surprised to find that in The State in Its Relations with the Church ‘Gladstone at one point claims that a perfect manifestation of the religious personality of the state is not demanded or needed by his system: the state merely had to ensure that it was struggling in the right




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direction, towards, not necessarily to, that perfect state’.26 Conlin’s argument works well alongside Richard Helmstadter’s discussion of Gladstone’s historical approach to church–state controversies as seen in his major books. Helmstadter argued that ‘political science, for Gladstone, was an inseparable combination of the analytical and the historical, and this was the method of State and Church’. 27 Though Helmstadter saw Gladstone’s historical approach as a product of his reading of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, both he and Conlin make essentially the same point: they argue that Gladstone did not expect to see his ideal scheme of a harmonious church–state alliance ever fully realised because he understood that societies are continuously evolving as part of a larger historical process. Though they focused on different issues, these scholars agree that Gladstone’s historical scholarship fundamentally affected the manner in which he understood political life. The proposition that political loyalties shape historical narratives has been illustrated ad nauseam, especially by historians of the Victorian era.28 Yet Gladstone is a fascinating example of the converse process at work, a major politician whose analysis was subtly shaped by his engagement with a range of historical problems, especially Irish ones. In his eyes, the Maynooth proposal was as much a question about the legacy of Ireland’s seventeenth century as one about the more immediate problems thrown up by O’Connell’s sensational acquittal in 1844. Where Peel’s relatively sedate Erastian mind prioritised the destruction of O’Connell’s coalition of Repealers and reformers in 1844, Gladstone saw a wider range of issues in play, ranging from the character of Irish rural poverty to the competing claims of the contractarian as distinct from the Coleridgian state and the fissiparousness of révanchist dissent.29 As soon as one recognises that Gladstone was intellectually ambivalent about the pre-1828 confessional state as early as 1841, however, one becomes less inclined to see the Maynooth grant controversy as the cause, rather than merely the occasion, of his emergence as a principled pluralist in religious affairs. To this extent, appreciating his historical cast of mind as instanced in his early books matters very much indeed. In this light, it seems that in Gladstone’s case Peel was actually pushing at an open door between February 1844 and April 1845.



II Gladstone’s diaries and private papers from February 1844 (when Peel announced his plans in Cabinet to reorganise the Maynooth grant)


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John-Paul McCarthy

betray undeniable agitation. Dónal Kerr’s standard analysis of the Maynooth legislation as part of Peel’s general policy of conciliation in pre-Famine Ireland showed that Gladstone initially tried to persuade the Cabinet to ignore the issue indefinitely.30 Gladstone argued that the Government’s plan to make the grant permanent and to greatly increase its value, along with a one-time capital payment, was tantamount ‘in principle [to] almost reconstructing’31 the basic Anglo-Irish ecclesiastical equipoise since 1801. Furthermore, he wrote that leaving his Cabinet colleagues ‘feels, I think, much like dying’.32 When Peel began to force the pace, Gladstone’s objections took on a more personal tone. The contemporary memoranda he wrote recording the sequence of the Cabinet discussions show a not inconsiderably vanity at the heart of his objections.33 His fear that the public would mischaracterise his published opinions and that this would bring humiliation was far more pervasive in his private reflections than any principled objections to such a direct, unequivocal scheme for funding of a Catholic seminary. There are subtle differences of emphasis in Gladstone’s various accounts of his behaviour during the Maynooth debate. He described his arguments during the critical Cabinet debates of November 1844 as follows: I said I was precluded by considerations of personal honour from taking part in such a plan as a member of the Government: that I had so tied myself by the virtual pledge of my deliberate writings as to have no choice: that I had advocated a system which was daily becoming more and more impracticable: that its being so might be a good reason for the adoption of another, but not yet for my being a party to a design for departing in an important measure from the old one.34 Later, he would alter his argument about the role of his book in precipitating his resignation from Cabinet. He would claim that the basic argument of the book did not, in and of itself, preclude ameliorative legislation such as Peel’s plan. The fears he described here were not entirely imaginary, as the minutes of the Anti-Maynooth Committee would make abundantly clear. One of the opponents of the grant singled his vote out for special condemnation during a public meeting in London that spring. At a Covent Garden meeting called to protest the grant on 14 April 1845, Samuel Blackburn sneered at the vote of ‘Mr state-conscience Gladstone’.35 Gladstone portrayed his own behaviour in a subtly different light in his private correspondence. Here, he focused on his endorsement of


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the grant and wrote about his behaviour as being part of his principled personal evolution rather than in terms of force majeure. In a complex letter to John Henry Newman written after his resignation, Gladstone portrayed his decision positively, that is to say, in terms of intellectual transition. ‘The State’, he wrote, ‘cannot be said now to have a conscience, at least not by me, inasmuch as I think it acts, and acts wilfully, and intends to go on acting, in such a way as no conscience – that is, no personal conscience (which is the only real form of one) – can endure.’ Here he framed his analysis as part of the old debate about how best to characterise the modern state. ‘According to the old European and Christian civilization ... the State was a family ... . According to the modern notion the State is a club.’ He concluded that ‘with us the State is neither a family nor a club; but it is on its path of transition from the former to the latter’.36 A year later, his characterisation of his personal transition was even starker. He wrote to Henry Edward Manning arguing that he was engaged in ‘a process of lowering the religious tone of the state, letting it down, demoralizing it, i.e., stripping it of its ethical character, and assisting its transition into one which is mechanical’.37 Gladstone’s public comments on the Maynooth grant throughout 1845 reflected the concerns expressed in private. He spoke at length on 11 April 1845 on the merits of the Ministry’s proposal. If we strip away his characteristic distinctions and parentheses, Gladstone essentially cited three reasons for his vote in favour of the grant. First, he supported the increased endowment, inter alia, as a measure of support for ‘the many millions of the [Irish Catholic] people it purports to favour and their great poverty’, and because of the ‘difficulty they experience for the most part in providing themselves with the barest necessities of life, still more than in furnishing support for their teachers of religion, and most of all for the teachers of those teachers’.38 He prayed that this measure would have the effect of ‘binding men together’.39 His second reason for supporting the grant was historical. Though he argued that Peel’s innovatory proposal rendered irrelevant Perceval’s antique definition of the grant as ‘a virtual portion of the legislative Union with Ireland’, he conceded that the ‘state of circumstances connected with the origin and history of the grant’ required careful analysis, as did the authoritative statements of past ministers. Gladstone’s third and most important argument emerged from his understanding of majoritarian democracy. He cited here ‘the popular principles of government’ with which statesmen had to contend, according to which ‘it is admitted that as the public funds are drawn from the labour of the whole community it is desirable that, except




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from strong overpowering considerations no class should be excluded from the claim to share in their distribution’.40 He later remarked in a similar vein that religious idealism, however legitimate in the abstract, had to yield to ‘the law of representation and equality of claims according to numbers and will’.41 In his peroration, Gladstone argued that it was absurd to oppose the grant on strict Anglican grounds because Parliament had been departing from that orthodoxy in various ways since the seventeenth century.42 The principled pass had been sold centuries before 1845. During July 1844, he demurred when Peel made this very point. Peel argued then that ‘as to the ... grant no question of principle remains for if violated at all principle is violated as much by the present grant as it could be by a further one’.43 Gladstone came around to this position by April 1845. And so his public rationale was rather more complex than some of his contemporary detractors and their scholarly legatees have suggested.44

III Gladstone resigned from Peel’s Cabinet in 1845 because, as Newman shrewdly noticed, ‘the public thought they had in his book a pledge that the Government would not take such a step with respect to Maynooth as is now before the country’.45 The word ‘thought’ is important here as it suggests that Gladstone’s books could reasonably be read to support many of the concessions Peel had come to insist on by 1845. This is a compelling insight, especially when one remembers that Gladstone was far less troubled by the merits of the new Irish endowment policy than he was by the upsurge in popular No-Popery. Though his resignation provoked more comment in 1845 than his analytical explanation for his actions,46 the mere fact of his leaving the Cabinet is not as important as his actual vote in favour of the grant during the spring of 1845.47 Indeed, as Newman famously put it in another context, his resignation was surely dust in the eye,48 a distraction from the markedly confident tone of his endorsement of the merits of the grant as a principled matter. From the perspective of Gladstone’s reading and reflections as explored below, which culminated in his 1841 book, it seems that those scholars who have stressed broad continuities in his understanding of church–state matters have the better of the argument, especially with regard to the Maynooth problem. As noted in Section II, during his lengthy contribution from the backbenches to the Maynooth debate, Gladstone cited three grounds for supporting a reconstituted, permanent grant. First, Ireland was a special




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arena where standard calculations rarely sufficed. As he explained to the House of Commons, ‘when we look back upon the conduct of England towards Ireland in former times, and especially upon the history of the last century, we cannot but feel that it imposes upon us the obligation to treat Irish questions such as this with an especial tenderness and consideration’.49 Second, there was some form of historical arrangement between Parliament and Maynooth College that necessitated respect, even if it did not amount to a binding compact.50 Last, he accepted that government was properly characterised as a contract designed for the benefit of the entire population which it governs and thus that Irish Catholics had some entitlement to tax monies. Though some of Gladstone’s angst-ridden diary entries might suggest otherwise, it is clear that none of these three arguments was in any way novel when he made them in 1845. To a striking degree, these arguments all appeared, in different forms, in the pages of The State in Its Relations with the Church (1841) and Church Principles Considered in Their Results (1840). Before we deal with the more abstract aspects of his Irish analysis, his position on concurrent endowment and his embryonic contractarianism in the early 1840s, it is as well to note that he addressed the Maynooth question squarely in the first edition of his book in 1838 and again in the significantly revised edition of this work in 1841. His initial treatment of this issue in 1838 was brusque, hostile and broadly in line with Palmerite High Church apologetic. In principle, any grant for a Catholic college violated article 19 of the Anglican creed and should be opposed.51 At the beginning of an truncated analysis of Maynooth in 1838, Gladstone noted suggestively that ‘unless [the state] is bound in conscience to maintain the national Church as God’s appointed vehicle of religious truth, it should adopt as its rule the numbers and the needs of the several classes of religionists; and in either respect the claim of the Roman Catholics is infinitely the strongest’.52 He went on to denounce the grant in nuce, arguing that ‘in principle it is wholly vicious, and will be a thorn in the side of the State of these countries so long as it is continued’.53 By the time of the publication of the 1841 edition, Gladstone had reversed himself.54 (Maynooth was one of only three issues on which he had changed his mind since 1838.55) He analysed the grant historically, concluding that ‘the grant to Maynooth College ... is to be regarded as virtually obligatory upon us in good faith, according to the spirit of the Irish Union’.56 This admission came fully a year before Matthew’s suggestion of July 1842 as a possible date for Gladstone’s personal acceptance of the grant as a principled matter.57 Citing past debates, Gladstone found that Perceval had ‘supported the




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grant as it stood because it was one of those which the Parliament of Ireland thought wise to preserve at the Union because he found it, in fact, given over to England as part of the Union’.58 As to whether these past authorities had established a right of prescription, Gladstone concluded, ‘I cannot but feel, after much reflection, that there is considerable weight in such a plea.’59 Here, we have the roots of the 1845 analysis in one respect. There is also ample evidence that Gladstone had thought of the state in terms of a contract between populace and Parliament prior to the arguments about ‘the popular principles of government’ that he advanced in 1845. Again, a careful analysis of the 1841 text suggests that even then he had begun to move away from the principled paternalism of Oxonian Aristotelianism.60 Here, he defined the ‘constituents of power in a body politic’ as ‘nobility, wealth, learning, genius, active energy, permanency and prescription, public authority, numbers, or the simple engine of the human will, and Christian virtue’. Drawing on Montesquieu’s analysis of l’esprit général in his classic work Esprit des Loix,61 Gladstone wrote, ‘It is idle, with relation to those principles of political freedom which prevail in modern society, to talk of the moral being of the State as a thing set apart, self-derived, independent or otherwise than as it is determined by the composition of these forces in a duly organised community.’ Theory had to yield to the force of circumstances, and ‘[a]mong these forces, law and the State are themselves an item, but they are no more. Equilibrium must be established by their general result. The preponderance of these forces must fix the form of the national religion’.62 The admission here that the pressure of mere political majorities was a legitimate part of a statesman’s calculations was to have profound implications for Gladstone’s later Irish forays. Baron de Tocqueville’s classic analysis of the American democratic experiment also shaped Gladstone’s analysis in 1841. Formally rejecting de Tocqueville’s argument from Démocratie en Amerique that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States facilitated the advancement of religious fervour among the population,63 he nonetheless did absorb something of the argument about popular opinion. In 1841 he wrote that ‘the physical force, which existing law has at its command, cannot permanently maintain that which is opposed to the profound, pervading, and permanent convictions of a nation’.64 Indeed, D. W. Bebbington dates Gladstone’s recognition that public opinion was ‘the grand check on government in Britain’ to as early as 1835.65 Some of Gladstone’s draft journalism from 1832 also suggests a sensitivity to




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flow of petitions through the House of Commons and a certain irritation that they were not all directed at his favoured issues.66 Indeed, his fascination with the figure of Canning and aspects of his Aristotelian reading at Oxford reinforced these vaguely popular sensitivities.67 The peculiarities of Ireland, conceived historically, were important in Gladstone’s 1845 rationale, as noted above. To this extent, it is not surprising to find that Ireland was a major concern in his early books. He took aim at O’Connell’s sneering sectarian slogans in Church Principles Considered in Their Results, the theological companion to his first book.68 He had no illusions about the nature and extent of Irish poverty. Gladstone lamented the failure of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland to effect whole-scale Protestant conversions during the sixteenth century. The inspiring examples of Bishop Bedell of Dromore and Hugh Boulter, respectively Archbishop of Armagh and Lord Justice of Ireland at the end of the seventeenth century,69 both of whom proselytised in the Irish language, offered poor enough compensation when considered against the backdrop of a stubbornly Catholic population, one Gladstone found to be in an increasingly ‘destitute and uninstructed state’.70 He also conceded without much fanfare that is was natural and reasonable for O’Connell to yearn for a national religion of his own, that is to say, a de facto established Catholic Church in Ireland.71 Gladstone’s principle of religious nationality applied across the board in this respect. Indeed, in the 1841 text he wrote candidly that, considered as an abstract matter, a system of multiple religious endowment made the best sense in polities that were not religiously homogeneous. ‘I am free to admit’, he wrote, ‘that, on any other than specifically Christian principles, the human understanding would probably incline towards a plurality of establishment’.72 This text, along with Church Principles, betrayed not inconsiderable admiration for the organisational prowess and institutional integrity of Catholicism since the Reformation. Noting how Rome had retained the witness of apostolic succession and the principle of Catholic consent, Gladstone wrote that ‘although she may have disregarded the one by Papal domination and have exaggerated and perverted the other into a doctrine of her own infallibility, yet the virtue of these truths is not wholly extinguished or expelled’.73 Reflecting his quasi-Tractarian temperament, with its lingering ambivalence about the Reformation schism and the adequacy of the sola scriptura ideal,74 he seems to have had more in common with Irish Catholics than any kind of English dissenter at this point. (Windscheffel reminds us in this regard that these powerful catholic yearnings were a central and lifelong part of Gladstone’s intellectual make-up.75) Given




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this, perhaps it is no surprise that he had a relatively poor relationship with the Irish Tories at the Dublin University Magazine.76 Several other aspects of the Irish analysis in the 1841 text appear again in Gladstone’s mind by the time of the 1845 debate. Throughout the 1830s, Gladstone feared that Catholic Ireland was in a potentially revolutionary state under O’Connell’s leadership. Though he denied it in his later memoirs,77 he certainly predicted the disintegration of the legislative union should the Irish Church fall to O’Connell throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s. His sensitivity to the character of poverty in the Irish countryside has already been emphasised in the context of 1845. This sensitivity goes back to his interest in the indictment of the Protestant ascendancy class by Gustave de Beaumont in his proto-democratic manifesto for Irish reforms, Ireland: Social, Political and Religious, a work which Gladstone read in 1840.78 Thomas Leland’s eighteenth-century history of Ireland, History of Ireland from the invasion of Henry II, with a preliminary discourse on the ancient state of that kingdom (1773),79 also figured in the 1838–41 analysis. Though Leland famously betrayed his Catholic sponsors by failing to deliver an adequate defence of the Catholic cause in his treatment of the 1641 rebellion,80 his secure position within Trinity College Dublin did not render him totally immune from Burke’s critique of the penal laws. His analysis of Anglo-Irish relations since Cromwell was not without its more sombre aspects, and he frequently emphasised the indignities that Irish Catholics had suffered after the dispossessions of the late seventeenth century. To this extent, he was a suggestive source to use. Indeed, Gladstone’s 1845 admonition about past misdeeds in Ireland sounded not unlike one of Leland’s incendiary sermons.81 Gladstone’s indebtedness to the theories of the Irish churchman William Patrick Palmer is well known.82 And yet he was no mere drone here. They differed flatly on the legitimacy of the concession of Catholic emancipation in 1829,83 on the merits of the Scottish Presbyterian Church84 and, of course, on the merits of the Maynooth grant itself.85 The year 1845 marked a major breach with Palmer’s ideas, but it is clear that from the early 1840s Gladstone’s own thinking was moving beyond standard High Church homiletic. After all, in his 1841 book he cited the scholarly work of one of Palmer’s bitterest enemies, the Catholic priest John Lingard, whose History of England was an important source in Gladstone’s assessment of the Elizabethan church. As a fierce critic of Cranmer,86 the Catholic credentials of the High Church Tories87 and first-generation Tractarianism generally, Lingard was an unusual source, and this citation is again indicative of the depth and range




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of Gladstone’s Irish reading and his relatively sedate assessment of Catholicism as a majority creed.88 In his ex post facto rationale for his resignation offered to Newman in April 1845, Gladstone modestly suggested that there was some kind of consistency in his basic analysis. ‘My language has always been, “Here is the genuine and proper theory of government as to religion; hold it as long as you can, and as far as you can.” Government must subsist; and if not as (in strictness) it ought, then as it may.’89 Sub-clauses and parenthesis aside, this statement is by no means an outlandish one, and it seems more in tune with the evidence offered above than do his more agitated letters, which portrayed 1845 as a year of epiphanies, stark reversals and sinking ships. Several scholars have noticed Gladstone’s ability to distinguish the ideal from the actual.90 As noted, Ramm rooted this capacity for discrimination in Aristotle’s ethical via media (his ‘happy mean’). Matthew 91 and Bebbington92 also stressed this pragmatic aspect to Gladstone’s Aristotelianism. Whether it was rooted in Bishop Butler’s probabilistic epistemology or Burke’s cautious savour faire, it is clear that Gladstone could distinguish means from ends and could settle for incremental steps towards his preconceived ideals. These insights suffused his 1845 argument against theological absolutism. Again, what is striking is the extent to which he had intellectualised this kind of pragmatism as early as the fourth edition of the first book. Here it is clear that he never expected the state to adopt a rigorous Anglican moral personality. As he well knew, the actual, historical deviations from this ideal were extensive indeed, embracing the loss of the Non-jurors from the Church of England after 1688, the subsequent establishment of a non-episcopal church in Scotland, the failure of the plantation policies in seventeenth-century Ireland, the concession of the regium donum to Irish Presbyterians and, of course, the concession of the Maynooth grant itself in the 1790s. Gladstone was not despondent, however, and wrote that ‘if then there be cases where the State has not yet a full moral life, but still tends and struggles towards its attainment, such a State has the promise of well-being’.93 Boyd Hilton recognised something like this when he suggested that for Gladstone after 1838 politics ceased to be ‘an instrument for implementing dogmatic truths, derived from religious authority’ and became instead ‘the main arena in which to trace the operational workings of divine providence’.94 There is more than a sense of this understanding at work in the 1841 text. And to this extent, it shows that his mind was open to other influences and stimuli than the standard Coleridgian ones.




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Gladstone’s treatment of Richard Hooker in 1838 and again in 1841 shows this capacity to appreciate complexity and a concomitant acceptance that an austere ecclesiastical polity was ‘the dream of another day’.95 Bluntly, he considered the attempts of successive English sovereigns to implement Hooker’s theory of church–state incorporation to have been a sanguinary disaster.96 In the 1838 edition of The State in Its Relations with the Church, Gladstone explicitly rejected Hooker’s contention that the church and the state are essentially the same thing. Hooker contended that English people composed one society that had two names, church and state, ‘rather than two societies accidentally co-extensive as to the persons they comprised’.97 In a revealing aspect of the 1838 analysis, Gladstone rejected the idea that the church incorporated the state when they formed a relationship. This idea of ‘incorporation’ he dismissed as ‘much too strong’. Even ‘union’, though the word is on many accounts convenient, may ‘convey too much if it be understood as making two into one’.98 This opposition to the theory that the church and the state formed a coherent, organic whole when allied became something of a mantra in the first edition of his book in 1838.99 In Church Principles in 1840 he confessed, ‘I do not look back either upon the tendency to persecution, which arising partly from the intimate relations of the Church as reformed with the temporal power, disfiguring the annals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without pain’, while sadly concluding his subsequent analysis of the century that followed 1688 with the admission ‘we sigh for the past’.100 In this light, it is clear that his understanding of how nationality related to religious loyalties was not as straightforward as some scholars have assumed.101 He knew that church and state made uneasy partners at various points in time and that each had the capacity to damage the other. Indeed, his most insightful reviewer, the Tractarian polemicist John Keble, recognised this aspect of Gladstone’s analysis when he reviewed the first edition of The State in Its Relations with the Church in 1839. Far from reading Gladstone’s book as a manifesto for an ecclesiastical polity in which the church essentially directed the course of the state, Keble faulted Gladstone for his excessive political nous and for his deference to the state’s prerogatives relative to the apostolic church.102 Keble slyly conflated Gladstone’s argument with Hooker’s, finding a basic contractarian analysis in both, but, as noted above, this was actually a travesty of Gladstone’s argument, which rejected Hooker directly. Keble argued that Gladstone was ‘not quite able to keep his language clear of a certain utilitarian tone, we mean not utilitarian in any low or offensive sense,




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but simply as denoting somewhat too much of regard to intelligible and visible results in our estimate of a system’.103 Keble felt obliged to lecture Gladstone on the optimal church–state relationship, such was the étatisme he saw at the heart of the analysis. Citing the image of the magistrate as ‘the nursing father’ of the church from the Book of Isaiah,104 Keble wrote that this ‘cannot be so pressed as to denote childish dependence and obedience, since in the very same prophecy ... the expression of humiliation, nay subjection to the Church, on the part of the potentates of the earth, are so very full and unequivocal’. He went on to lament the general tone of the book, along with its quasi-contractarian analysis of church–state relations, which ‘may perhaps have here and there communicated to his reasonings an unconscious tinge, we will not say of Erastianism, but of State as distinct from Church policy’.105 This charge of Erastianism, albeit an anaemic form of it, was a palpable hit. Gladstone confided to his diary that Keble’s review was ‘elevated and interesting’, a good day’s work from a mind blessed with ‘the gift of prophecy in its larger sense, so accurately does he interpret many hidden meanings that are in my mind rather than in my book’.106 And so Gladstone’s rejection of the argument that theology must in all circumstances trump statecraft in 1845 was in no sense new or epiphanic. More sedate reviewers than Macaulay107 had seen this coming fully six years previously. The Maynooth analysis in 1845 involved the rejection of the nursing parent idiom of first-generation Tractarianism as well as the antique yearnings of the Palmerites for the constitutional position before 1828.108 As Gladstone told the House of Commons in 1845, the state was obliged to factor in a variety of calculations other than the abstract goals associated with a national conscience. To do otherwise, he warned, is to confound together the principles on which we are free to act in our individual capacity and those upon which we may be required to act as members, and more especially as governors of a community. In our individual capacity we are supreme governors of ourselves: we have a will and a conscience given us ... . But in political society, the will and conscience of each individual cannot be supreme.109



But, again, this was nothing new for him. In 1838, he had argued that the state must have the final word in any argument with the church. ‘It is impossible in point of fact’, he wrote then, ‘that any other basis could be adopted than one which gives the state a veto over changes in the church.’ Indeed, he continued in this bluff Erastian vein to


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The Church allies herself with the state in consideration of advantages accorded to her, which are accorded in respect of her peculiar constitution as a church, and which would cease to be due if she violated that constitution: therefore the state must have the means of observing all her movements, judging what changes in violation, and interposing the veto, which means simply, ‘If you do so, you must no longer enjoy civil advantage.’ But the converse argument does not hold as arising from the alliance, that the church should have a veto on projected alterations in the state, because that which she renders to the state, the teaching of obedience, and the promotion of piety and virtue, she owes to it simply as the appointed government of the country, whatever changes its constitution may undergo.110 And in 1841, Gladstone maintained that national legislation was not the same as individual moral judgement. In that year, he wrote that in the act of legislating, the statesman ‘immediately finds that he impinges upon the subject of moral science. Thus his law and his subject matter are in relations of the closest proximity, although not identical, with those of the moral science’. While the statesman must do his best to legislate according to the dictates of his conscience, Gladstone noted that ‘he may be compelled in certain particulars to qualify that criterion by regard to those lower purposes, without the regular attainment of which he cannot proceed to such as are higher. So that law travels over much of the same ground as ethics, and guides its course nearly according to their dictates.’111 He reiterated this basic argument during a two-hour discussion with Stanley in March 1844, shortly after Peel introduced the Maynooth issue to Cabinet. His aide-memoire from this exchange reminded interested parties that ‘as to the abstract principle of a religious character in the State I viewed and always had viewed it as an ingredient of great value in its composition to which it was desirable to adhere as long as possible, but by no means as one for which the existence of a State ought to be perilled, because the lower ends of a State ought to be fulfilled even when its higher ones should have become impracticable’.112 In a subsequent paper, written in September of the following year, after the grant had passed the Commons, Gladstone reflected on the relationship between his publications and his arguments in 1845. Conceding that he had argued ‘we ought to defend that system of State religion,


explain why the church could not have a veto over the government of the day:


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in our case ...’, he was at pains to emphasise that he ‘never held that it was to be adhered to by the State irrespectively of the convictions of the people and their religious divisions’.113 This is a fair recapitulation of his argument as it appeared in the 1841 text. In fact, his draft notes for a reply to Macaulay’s sneering reductio ad absurdum from 1839 contained the interesting statement ‘[c]onsecration of power in general to God. True, though subject to limitation’. Here he also disputed Macaulay’s characterisation of his 1838 argument as holding that ‘the governing body ought to require conformity to the State religion, as an indispensable qualification for all civil office. And that it is a crime to do otherwise.’ Gladstone wrote in his notes, ‘This is pure assumption. I am not prepared to adopt either of these propositions, nor are they contained in, or deductive from, what I have written.’114 And he did not change his mind subsequently. Shortly after resigning from Cabinet in February 1845, he again rejected appeals to his Hookerian conscience from some of his wary admirers. He wrote that Dr Wordsworth ‘called on me to recommend that I should take my stand in Parliament on the Church and State theory of Hooker: contend that all men were still members of the National Church and wait for time when they should be so’. In his response, Gladstone repeated his critique of Hooker as developed between 1838 and 1841: ‘I told him I had long made up my mind not to pursue a political career governed by such a rule.’ The task of elevating the religious tone of the country lay now with individuals and the private conscience rather than with the ‘State and its Acts of Parliament’.115 The Hookerian argument left him about as nonplussed as Inglis’ earnest suggestion just after his speech that life would have been better for everybody if Peel had taken his advice in 1826 and sent 30,000 troops to Ireland under the Duke of Cumberland.116 When considered in the light of the above, Maynooth appears less a repudiation than an application of the basic argument in Gladstone’s books. Neither the Palmerites, first-generation Tractarians or the antiRomanist dissenters who temporarily gathered together under the rubric of the Anti-Maynooth Committee could be allowed a veto over policy. The above textual analysis suggests that in elaborating the abstract ideal of a confessional state in his first book, Gladstone had rather lucidly conceded its impossibility. The fourth edition clearly anticipated the necessity for basic compromises in the colonies, in Ireland and ultimately at home. The seeds of his vote in the spring of 1845 can be clearly seen in his published works of four years earlier. Like so much that would come after 1845, it was Gladstone’s basic English preoccupations that shaped




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his evolving Irish calculations. Far from occupying a discrete part of that Byzantine mind, his myriad Irish problems were assessed through a remarkably stout Anglican prism. Too often his Irish analysis has been presented as a series of epiphanies that followed from immersion in specifically Irish ideas or events. The Maynooth controversy suggests, on the contrary, that the key challenge is not to explain how Irish realities shaped his analysis, but rather to show how he interpreted these realities against the backdrop of his life’s abiding religious concerns. As such, we might conclude with the thought that there is no such thing as Gladstone’s Irish question per se, only Gladstone’s religious question and all that followed from this.

Notes I wish to acknowledge the support and encouragement that I have received from my supervisors, S.A. Skinner and R.F. Foster, and to thank the late John Burrow for friendship, inspiration and sundry kindnesses between 2006 and 2009. 1. On the third reading of the bill, on 21 May 1845, Peel found his party split 148–149 against his proposal. For a detailed chronology of events see G.I.T. Machin, ‘The Maynooth Grant, the Dissenters and Disestablishment, 1845– 1847’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), pp. 61–85. 2. On the split between No-Popery and voluntarism in the opposition ranks, see Gilbert A. Cahill, ‘The Protestant Association and the Anti-Maynooth Agitation of 1845’ The Catholic Historical Review, 43, 3 (Oct. 1957), pp. 273– 308. For details on this ‘loose alliance of Voluntary Dissenters, Anglican Evangelicals, Wesleyan Methodists, Free Church Scots and High Anglicans’ see Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–46 (Oxford, 2001), p. 375. 3. E.g. R. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (London, 2008), pp. 131–59; Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 17–18. 4. H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Introduction’ in M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. III, 1840–1847 (Oxford, 1974), p. xxxi. 5. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II, 1872–1898 (London, 1905), p. 89; used to good effect as well in Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 70. 6. Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. Matthew was careful to note, however, that Gladstone never repudiated the theory of his first book, but looked for ‘a less elevated synthesis’ after 1845 in fiscal questions. See Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–74 (Oxford, 1991), p. 73. 7. Boyd Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’ in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (eds.), High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (Oxford, 1983), p. 31. 8. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. II, Assaults (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 79–80. 9. R.T. Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1, 1809–1865 (London, 1982), p. 76.




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10. Perry Butler, Gladstone, Church, State and Tractarianism: A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–59 (Oxford, 1982), p. 95. 11. E.J. Feuchtwanger, Gladstone (London, 1989), p. 33. 12. Nockles did not consider the discussion of the grant in the 1841 revision, however. See Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 91. Machin did notice that the 1841 text had ‘significantly modified’ his argument that ‘a Government should endow only the truth’. See G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford, 1977), p. 173, nn. 158, 160. 13. Gladstone’s principled distance from Tractarianism is assessed in S.A. Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004), pp. 101–16; Butler, Gladstone, Church, State and Tractarianism, esp. pp. 164, 167; F.M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. 245, 399, 465–6. 14. E.g. P. Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 293–4, 350; id., ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in M. Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007), pp. 25–41; J. Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth Century Belfast (Dublin, 2008), p. 185; Biagini, British Democracy, pp. 15, 18. 15. Ruth Clayton, ‘W.E. Gladstone: An Annotation Key’, Notes and Queries, 246 (June 2001), p. 42. 16. Windscheffel [née Clayton], Reading Gladstone, pp. 138, 174. 17. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1996), p. 445. 18. Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvii (on Gladstone’s use of Locke’s Letters on Toleration in his book). 19. Boyd Hilton, ‘Perry Butler’s “Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism”‘, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1983), p. 297. In a subsequent analysis, however, he seemed to lean more towards the idea that, in several important respects, Gladstone’s later career was a reversal of course from the perspective of 1838. See Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, p. 32. 20. Eugenio Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), p. 15. 21. R.J. Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’ in Bruce L. Kinzer (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays in Honour of J.B. Conacher (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1985), p. 15. 22. Agatha Ramm, ‘Gladstone’s Religion’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 327–40, esp. p. 333. 23. Jonathan Conlin, ‘Gladstone and Christian Art, 1832–54’, Historical Journal, 46, 2 (2003), pp. 341–74. 24. Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add. MSS. 44728, fos. 166–9. Quoted in ibid., p. 356. (Henceforth GP, BL, Add. MSS.) 25. Ibid., p. 362. 26. Ibid., p. 366. 27. Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics’, p. 15. 28. On which generally see John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); Burrow, ‘The Sense of the Past’ in Laurence Lerner (ed.), The Victorians (London, 1978), p. 131; Burrow, ‘The Village Community: The Use of History in Late 19th Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and




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29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), p. 271; F.M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993). Gladstone actually predicted the disintegration of the Anti-Maynooth Committee on voluntarist grounds in his Commons speech on 11 Apr. 1845. See Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, col. 538. ‘What unity’, he asked, ‘what consistency ... can there be in an opposition thus made up of parties having their several positions at the very extremes of the poles of opinion?’ Dónal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests, and Politics: Sir Robert Peel’s Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1841–1846 (Oxford, 1982), p. 260; Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxi. D.C. Lathbury (ed.), Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. I (London, 1910), p. 68. Ibid. Ibid., p. 63. J. Brooke and M. Sorenson (eds.), The Prime Ministers Papers: W.E. Gladstone. Autobiographica, vol. II (4 vols., London, 1971–8), p. 270. For similarly egocentric arguments see ibid., p. 232, 13 Feb. 1844 (‘I had to a great extent pledged myself in the face of the public, meaning, by my book, against any such increase’); p. 245, 7 Mar. 1844 (‘whatever be the risks and threatenings of the times, we will not dishonour ourselves by the act’); p. 247, 7 Mar. 1844 (‘I am one whose courage has never been tried – I have no position ... the public may fairly regard me as a mere adventurer, if I should part company with character’); p. 266 (reminding the Prime Minister on 16 July 1844 that ‘my convictions as to the relation of my personal character to the question remained the same as they had been in the spring; that I could not be an author of such a measure, and that if I were I could not thereafter expect to be taken for an honest man’); p. 272 (during the critical Cabinet of 6 Dec. 1844, Gladstone told Peel that ‘I viewed the matter as one of personal pledge. ... And that I could not doubt that the Government having adopted the measure the best thing that could happen would be its being carried’). Speech of S. Blackburn, 14 Apr. 1845 in A.S. Thelwall (ed.), Proceedings of the Anti-Maynooth Conference (London, 1845), p. xlvii. Gladstone’s behaviour receives special treatment in this source and he is criticised by name more often than any other major politician with the exception of Peel. Gladstone to J.H. Newman, 19 Apr. 1845, in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 71. Gladstone to Henry Edward Manning, 19 Apr. 1846, ibid., p. 272. Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, col. 530 (11 Apr. 1845). Ibid. Ibid. Gladstone to Newman, 19 Apr. 1845 in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 73. Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, cols. 545–6 (11 Apr. 1845). See Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, vol. II, p. 268. E.R. Norman, for example, echoed Gladstone’s taunters at The Record in arguing that his only rationale for his vote in 1845 was ‘the naked fact, which he two or three times repeats that “it will be a very great boon” to the Irish Romanists’. See Norman, ‘The Maynooth Question of 1845’, Irish Historical Studies, 45 (1967), p. 427.




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45. J.H. Newman to W.E. Gladstone, 18 Apr. 1845, in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 70 (my emphasis). 46. R.T. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007), p. 50. 47. Gladstone probably had Peel’s thinking in 1829 in mind here, since Peel initially offered to resign from Wellington’s ministry so that he could support Catholic Relief from the backbenches, thus insuring that his presence in the Cabinet would not contaminate the legislative process. See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–46 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 386–7. 48. J.H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled ‘What Then Does Dr. Newman Mean?’ (London, 1864), part 2, ‘True mode of meeting Mr. Kingsley’. 49. Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, col. 531 (11 Apr. 1845). 50. Unlike others, however, Gladstone was not content to dispose of the question simply by recourse to past parliamentary precedent, because Peel’s plan significantly altered the details of the college’s administration and funding, creating in effect a new financial arrangement. Thus he rejected the idea of a controlling ‘compact’ between Maynooth College and the Parliament in 1845. See Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, col. 522 (11 Apr. 1845). 51. Article XIX, Articles of Religion of the Church of England: ‘As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.’ 52. W.E. Gladstone, The State in Its Relations with the Church, 1st ed. (London, 1838), p. 252. (The first edition is henceforth cited as SRC, and the two volumes of the fourth edition from 1841 are cited as SRC, vol. I or SRC, vol. II). 53. SRC, p. 252. 54. Dónal Kerr did not consider the 1841 text here. See Kerr, Peel, Priests, and Politics, p. 260. Jenkins’ more languid account noted this, however. See Jenkins, Gladstone, p. 69. 55. These were (i) a greatly expanded argument about the criteria for recognising ‘universal’ associations that necessitated religious guidance, i.e. the family and the state, in chapter 2 of volume I; (ii) extensive treatment of the history of toleration in English and Irish history where Gladstone both celebrated the demise of the Hookerian conflation of heresy with treason and reaffirmed his belief in a Christian oath requirement prior to seating MPs (chapters 7 and 8, SRC, vol. II); and (iii) a detailed examination of the ways in which his ideal of ‘national religion’ was stillborn in the British colonies such as those in the Caribbean, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India (chapters 9 and 10, SRC, vol. II). Noted in Deryk Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’ in Peter Marsh (ed.), The Conscience of the Victorian State (Sussex, 1979), pp. 102–3. 56. SRC, vol. II, p. 301. 57. Matthew, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxi. Matthew cited a diary discussion of the grant from 20 July 1842 that concluded with the words ‘reluctant, but convinced’. 58. SRC, vol. II, pp. 304–5. 59. Ibid. (my emphasis). 60. On which see D.W. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004), p. 24; David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism




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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

John-Paul McCarthy and English Romantic Thought (London, 1974), p. 63. Noting that it is ‘not very easy to describe’ what precisely characterised the Aristotelian cast of mind so prized in 1830s Oxford, Newsome nonetheless picked out as representative one of Gladstone’s answers to a parliamentary question in the 1830s. Asked where the Peelites were going to sit in the House, Gladstone replied precisely that ‘taking a seat is an external sign and pledge that ought to follow upon full conviction of the thing it is understood to betoken’. That somewhat precious answer, wrote Newsome, ‘was the reply of an Oxford man with a First in Greats’. As cited in SRC, vol. I, pp. 169–71. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 280. Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, p. 30. See e.g. his ‘Essay for Dublin Review (draft 1834)’ (no month cited), GP, BL, Add. MSS. 44681 fo. 12, where he argued that ‘one of the habits of the population is petitioning; and one of the great misfortunes under which we now labour is that those of the people who are best affected to the institutions of the country are least effectually represented in the Legislature either by their members or their petitions’. Suggestively explored in Roland Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Parliamentary Reform’ in D.W. Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2001), p. 73. It is interesting to note here that Aristotle was not completely opposed to democratic structures. Aristotle’s qualified endorsement of democracy in certain circumstances in Book IV of The Politics was famously explored in another context in Douglass Adair, The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer (Lexington, 2000). Here, Gladstone discussed O’Connell’s claim in the Commons that the English Reformation resulted in the collapse of social philanthropy and charity. O’Connell alleged that the building of churches had reduced dramatically since the sixteenth century, with adverse social results. Gladstone retorted by noting how Catholic countries had hardly done any better. See W.E. Gladstone, Church Principles Considered in Their Results (London, 1840), pp. 381–2. Invoked in SRC, p. 81. Ibid., p. 80. For the argument that ‘he never abandoned his establishment principles as the ideal for any nation’, see D.W. Bebbington, ‘Gladstone and the Nonconformists: A Religious Affinity in Politics’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History: Church Society and Politics, vol. XII (Oxford, 1975), p. 371. SRC, vol. I, p. 123. Noted in H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Gladstone, Vaticanism and the Question of the East’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Studies in Church History: Religious Motivation, Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, vol. XV (Oxford, 1978), p. 419. Church Principles, p. 332. On these historical anxieties in the Tractarian analysis, see generally D. MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London, 2009), pp. 838–42.


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75. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone, pp. 167, 186. 76. Joseph Spence, ‘The Philosophy of Irish Toryism, 1833–52: A Study of Reactions to Liberal Reformism in Ireland in the Generation between the First Reform Act and the Famine, with Especial Reference to Expressions of National Feeling among the Protestant Ascendancy’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1991), pp. 26–9. Peel was equally wary of Isaac Butt’s brand of Toryism. 77. Gladstone misquoted his book in his 1868 Chapter of Autobiography (London, 1868). He stated that during his defence of the Irish Church in 1838 ‘I did not say, “Maintain it lest you be driven to repeal the Union.”‘ In the 1838 first edition of his book, he did predict just this outcome. See SRC, p. 81. He repeated this in the 1841 revision, SRC, vol. II, p. 15. 78. Read on 4 Feb. 1840. See Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries, with Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence, vol. XIV, Index, p. 302. On de Beaumont’s critique of the Irish Protestant aristocracy, that ‘tiny and fantastically privileged minority’, see Tom Garvin and Andrea Hess, ‘Introduction: Tyranny in Ireland?’ in W.C. Taylor (ed. and trans.), Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland, Social, Religious and Political (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. v–xv. 79. Cited on four substantive occasions in the 1838 text. See SRC, pp. 203, 207, 209, 210. As well as listing the eccentric financial generosity of Charles II and William III, Gladstone used Leland’s analysis of the 1641 rebellion in Ireland to show how the Protestants distinguished between heresy and treason in their dealings with Irish Catholics and how the natives in turn failed to return the favour. 80. Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2002), pp. 148–9; Walter D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” History of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 13, 49, pp. 13–14; Colin Kidd, ‘Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland’, English Historical Review, 109 (Nov. 1994), p. 120 (on Leland’s failure to provide an Irish ‘philosophic history’ and his ‘solidly Protestant account of the rebellion of 1641’). 81. During October 1769, Leland harangued his solidly Protestant audience at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin by recalling for them ‘the errors and iniquities of our forefathers’, which ‘consisted in oppression, avarice, and cruelty; factious discontent and clamour and indifference and disregard for religion, heinous and crying offences, and such as are the declared object of God’s severest vengeance’. Cited in O’Halloran, Golden Ages, p. 148. Leland’s j’accuse went down badly. The Irish Parliament refused to print his sermon. 82. As outlined in Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, pp. 67–8. 83. R.H. Greenfield, ‘The Attitude of the Tractarians to the Roman Catholic Church, 1833–1850’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1956), p. 28. Palmer defined the 1829 concession as ‘a measure which scattered to the winds public principle, public morality, public confidence and dispersed a party which ... would have stemmed the torrent of revolution, and averted the awful crisis which was at hand’. 84. Gladstone explained his relaxed attitude towards Presbyterianism in a letter to Hope in June 1837. In this long letter Gladstone argued that the good works of the Scottish Church outweighed its theological errors. The correct




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85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

approach in the future lay ‘in working out the compact entered into by our forefathers without any extension of the terms, and permitting our Presbyterian fellow-labourer in the Legislature or the Government to exercise rateably their share of influence in favour of their own system of religion’. Quoted in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, pp. 35–7. On Palmer’s argument that the grant was a further assault on the established church on a par with 1833, see Brown, National Churches, p. 376. Rosemary O’Day, ‘John Lingard: Historians and Contemporary Politics, 1780–1850’ in Peter Philips (ed.), Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentary of John Lingard’s Death (London, 2004), p. 91; Sheridan Gilley, ‘John Lingard and the Catholic Revival’ in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Church History: Papers Read at the Fifteenth Summer Meeting and the Sixteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Studies in Church History 14) (Oxford, 1977), pp. 313–27. John Lingard, ‘Art. X: Protestantism of the Anglican Church’, The Dublin Review, 24 (May 1842), pp. 525–55. This polemic was aimed squarely at Palmer. On Lingard’s linking of Catholicism to the maintenance of English liberties and his emphasis on ‘the Catholicism of the Anglo-Saxon Church as the basis for English civilization and constitutional development’, see Jane Garnett, ‘Religious and Intellectual Life’ in Colin Matthew (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles: 1815–1901 (Short Oxford History of the British Isles) (Oxford, 2000), p. 223. Gladstone to J.H. Newman, in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 71. David Nicholls, ‘Gladstone, Newman and Pluralism’ in James D. Bastable (ed.), Newman and Gladstone Centenary Essays (Dublin, 1978), p. 31. H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 33. Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, p. 24. SRC, vol. I, p. 330. Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, pp. 29–30. SRC, vol. II, p. 243. Gladstone’s consistent concern to firmly distinguish the spiritual and the temporal realms is thoughtfully explored from the perspective of the Gorham judgment in M.D. Stephen, ‘Liberty, Church and State: Gladstone’s Relations with Manning and Acton, 1832–70’, Journal of Religious History, 1 (1960), p. 221. On Hooker’s theory that the state and church in England were ‘personally identical’ see R.W. Greaves, ‘The Working of the Alliance: A Comment on Warburton’ in G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966), p. 166; Alec Vidler, The Orb and the Cross: A Normative Study in the Relations of Church and State with reference to Gladstone’s Early Writings (London, 1945), p. 31. On Hooker’s ‘tranquillizing theory of parliament as the lay synod of the church’ under the Test Acts, see Skinner, Tractarians, p. 88. SRC, pp. 9–10. Shrewdly emphasised in Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics’, p. 18 (on how ‘Gladstone vigorously rejected the central theme of Book VIII of Hooker’s Laws, the idea that the church and the commonwealth need not be, and were not in England, two separate corporations’). See also here D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, English Historical Review, 117, 473 (Sept. 2002), pp. 807–8.




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98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

SRC, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 22, 117, 120, 121. Church Principles, pp. 445–52. Ramm’s argument that ‘Gladstone wrote the last serious book to claim that the English state was identical with the English church’ seems vulnerable in this light. See Ramm, ‘Gladstone’s Religion’, p. 328. The same might be said of Michael Bentley’s argument that by the early 1840s Gladstone had ‘joined the State to the Church in an historical symbiosis’. See Michael Bentley, ‘Victorian Historians and the Larger Hope’ in Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge), p. 141. In this light, Machin was arguably too rash in bluntly characterising Gladstone ‘as a Tractarian’ between 1838 and 1845. Machin, Politics, p. 173. John Keble, ‘Article V: Gladstone – The State in Its Relations with the Church’, The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review and Ecclesiastical Record, 26 (Apr. 1839), p. 360. Isa. 47: 23. Keble, ‘Article V: Gladstone’, p. 362. M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds.), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, vol. II (14 vols., Oxford, 1968–94), p. 631, entry for 8 Oct. 1839. On ‘the hidden meanings’ see Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 18. T.B. Macaulay, ‘Church and State’, Edinburgh Review, 69 (Apr.–July 1839), pp. 231–80. As this review has been treated ad nauseam in the secondary literature, it is not extensively used here. Gladstone remembered its tone more than its content in old age, simply calling it ‘slashing’ in 1895. W.E. Gladstone, ‘My First Book’ in Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, vol. I, p. 57. Gladstone’s position was, of course, complicated by the tensions between Palmerites and Puseyites during 1838–43, on which, especially the mutually suspicious relationship between Keble and Palmer, see S.A.. Skinner, ‘Newman, the Tractarians and the British Critic’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50, 4 (Oct. 1999), pp. 756–7; also Turner, John Henry Newman, p. 468. Hansard, series 3, vol. lxxix, col. 535 (11 Apr. 1845). SRC, p. 120 (my emphasis). SRC, vol. I, p. 87. See Gladstone’s notes from 4 Mar. 1844 in Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, p. 245. Notes from 18 Sept. 1845, ibid., p. 281. GP, BL, Add. MSS. 44681, f. 68. These notes have surprisingly not been widely discussed in the historiography. They are revealing on the vestigial pluralism in the first book. Notes from 3 May 1845 in Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, p. 277. Gladstone had told the Reverend Wordsworth on 15 March 1844 that he did not understand the Church to be synonymous with the establishment at that point, another example of his disinterest in the Hookerian model. See Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, pp. 60–1. Machin shrewdly remarked on the significance of this letter as well, but construed it as part




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of Gladstone’s allegedly Tractarian antipathy towards erastian establishments. See Machin, Politics, p. 173, n. 161. This did not bring him into line with first-generation Tractarianism, however, as shown in Skinner, Tractarians, pp. 101–16. 116. Perhaps lamenting the company his resignation had unwittingly attracted, Gladstone sniffed in response to this aperçu, ‘I did not think such counsel could have proceeded from such a quarter if the information had not been original’. Notes from 29 Apr. 1845 in Brooke and Sorenson, Autobiographica, p. 276.




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2 Alan Megahey

For almost a century – perhaps from the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 until Welsh disestablishment in 1919 – the question of the relationship between the state (and society) and the church (or churches) was a hot topic. Over a similar period after Welsh disestablishment, it was nothing of the sort. But towards the end of the twentieth century there was a change. It came about for a number of reasons: constitutional adjustments, especially reform of the House of Lords; the New Labour emphasis on ‘multiculturalism’; the apparently irresistible decline in church attendance; the widespread triumph of moral relativism; the growth and implications of Islamic fundamentalism; and the changing balance within the Anglican Communion worldwide. In 1998 Lord Williams told the House of Lords, in response to a question from Lord Waddington: ‘the Government have no plans to introduce legislation to disestablish the Church of England. We would not contemplate disestablishment unless the Church wished it, and it has not told us that it does.’1 Four years later, their lordships spent three hours on a church and state debate.2 In the early years of the twentyfirst century, it seemed possible that the area of debate which so exercised Gladstone during his half-century in the Commons might once again become a live issue.

Defending the confessing state


Gladstone, church and state

Gladstone was a schoolboy at Eton from 1821 to 1828. Forty years on, looking back at that period of his life, he remarked that it was a time when the ‘Church of England had been passing through a long period of deep and chronic religious lethargy’. He noted that at his own school ‘the actual teaching of Christianity was all but dead, though happily 41


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none of its forms had been surrendered’. He summed up the condition of the church and Christian mission and worship: ‘It is a retrospect full of gloom.’3 Those words were written on the eve of his accession to the premiership, and he was underscoring his belief ‘that the great and glaring change in my course of action with respect to the Established Church of Ireland is not the mere eccentricity, or even perversion, of an individual mind, but connects itself with silent changes, which are advancing in the very bed and basis of modern society’. It was those changes, which were already in train when he was at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and during his early years as a young member of Parliament, that had stimulated him to publish his book The State in Its Relations with the Church in 1838, and a further volume, Church Principles Considered in Their Results, in 1840. These books proclaimed the beliefs of a ‘stern and unbending Tory’, which hardly seemed appropriate for the man who in 1868 was set to become the Liberal Prime Minister, with a large majority in the House of Commons and a programme of reform which included the disestablishment of the Irish part of the United Church of England and Ireland. That a man’s opinions should develop and change during the course of a quarter of a century should not, however, come as a shock, then or now. John Henry Newman and Winston Churchill underwent equally radical developments during their careers. But in fact the ‘silent changes’ were already profound. ‘The union of Church and State,’ Stewart Brown notes, ‘which had appeared so strong in the mid-1820s, seemed to be breaking up throughout the three kingdoms by the early 1830s.’4 It was no longer possible, after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, to regard Parliament as an Anglican body or, after Catholic emancipation in 1829, as a Protestant body, even though in practical terms its membership was still overwhelmingly Anglican. In 1832, having left Oxford, Gladstone set out with his brother on a European tour. Viewing the battlefield of Waterloo, he felt that ‘this is indeed a spot where an Englishman’s heart should beat high with exultation’, though it also raised doubts about the future, for ‘what if the tide of our national destiny is turned, and if we are now about to go hand in hand with those alien principles, against which we once waged an implacable war? God forbid, and direct all for good.’5 He returned from the continent in July with those doubts in his mind, but also with the opportunity under the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle to stand for election as MP for Newark in the forthcoming election. It was from within the political establishment, rather than the ecclesiastical one, that he would fulfil his life’s mission to serve God to the best of his abilities.


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By the time Gladstone took his seat in the Commons the Great Reform Bill had become law, and further changes were taking place in church and state, just as changes had been taking place for some fifty years in the economy and in society. The Reform Act, which effected a fairly minor but highly significant reform in parliamentary representation, along with the more immediately significant Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, signalled a shift, or at least the beginnings of a shift, in the balance of economic and social power away from the aristocracy and towards the new centres of wealth in ‘cottonopolis’. And for the church in relation to the state, change continued. By the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833 a part of the established church – the United Church of England and Ireland – was stripped of two archbishoprics and ten bishoprics, and church commissioners were empowered to use the monies released by this and other clauses in the act. It provoked the delivery by John Keble of his Assize Sermon, on 14 July 1833. John Henry Newman famously wrote many years later: ‘I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833,’6 which took its name (or one of its names) from the Tracts for the Times, which began to appear in September. Gladstone was already moving from the traditional evangelicalism of his youth.7 He knew the Tractarian leaders and, as M.J. Lynch has written, ‘may have denied affinity with the Tractarians, but his preoccupations were the same as theirs’.8 Though charged with ‘Popery’ on occasions throughout his life, he was always to be firm in his defence of the Church of England. He had little sympathy, moreover, for the ‘ritualism’ which later became something of a defining characteristic of many high churchmen. Indeed in March 1867 he wrote to Bishop Wilberforce: ‘Yesterday I saw for the first time the service in a Ritualistic Church proper. There was much in it that I did not like – could not defend as good, perhaps could not claim toleration for.’9 Nonconformists in general would have been pleased to hear those words, and by 1867 Nonconformists were important to Gladstone. But that is to anticipate. The year that saw the whittling down of the Irish Church establishment also saw more dramatic church–state adjustments elsewhere. It ‘witnessed the final, formal disestablishment of Congregationalism in Massachusetts’,10 which at last realised the idea of complete separation of church and state in the United States, thirty-two years after the disendowment of the American Episcopal Church. Significant change also took place seven years later in British North America, when, by an act of the Westminster Parliament, the income from the Canadian clergy reserves – that is, land set aside to finance the stipends of Anglican


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Alan Megahey

clergy – was appropriated and the proceeds used to subsidise all the Christian churches, in a form of concurrent endowment. This settlement lasted until 1854, when Canada’s own legislature in effect disestablished the Anglican Church and closed down the concurrent endowment arrangement by distributing final sums to the affected churches.11 These Canadian precedents were mentioned when Gladstone made his first moves towards Irish disestablishment in the House of Commons in March 1869.12 Were church establishments no longer the way forward for church and state in the modern world? Was it right that the state had the power to strip the church of some of its revenues and use them for secular purposes? After his brief spell as a junior member of Peel’s short-lived administration at the end of 1834, Gladstone’s thoughts were turning to his plan to set out his view of the proper relationship between church and state. The need to articulate this view was made more necessary by further Whig legislation. The Tithe Commutation Act, the Marriage Act and the Registration Act, and plans to augment the state subsidy to Maynooth, the Roman Catholic seminary in Ireland, all put in question the integrity of the established church. Thomas Arnold had already published his thoughts in Principles of Church Reform (1833), which was a plea to save England ‘from the greatest possible evils, from evils far worse than any loss of territory, or decline of trade, from the sure moral and intellectual degradation which will accompany the unchristianising of the nation, that is, the destroying of its national religious Establishment’.13 But Arnold’s answer was a liberal and even latitudinarian one, suggesting that ‘good men ... should consent to unite themselves with other good men, without requiring them to subscribe to their own opinions, or to conform to their own ceremonies’. This was an approach that was, in Maurice Cowling’s words ‘seeping out’ of his son Matthew in the middle 1870s – ‘that a comprehensive Establishment could not only embrace Anglicans and Protestant Nonconformists but could also bring the working classes within the pale of the religious constitution by providing a class as well as a personal interest in pursuing righteousness through the regulation of conduct’.14 Gladstone’s response, unlike Thomas or Matthew Arnold’s, was rigorously and uncompromisingly Anglican. But there was not be the same continuity from the 1830s to the 1870s for him as there was for them. In his book The State in Its Relation with the Church, Gladstone maintained that ‘the governing body [of a state] should, in its capacity as such, profess and maintain a religion according to its conscience, both as being composed of individuals who have individual responsibilities to discharge and individual purpose to


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fulfil, and as being itself, collectively, the seat of a national personality ...’.15 Though Gladstone’s argument was, as Owen Chadwick notes, ‘heavy and convoluted in style’, it was ‘at least a strenuous attempt to claim ancient privilege for the united Church of England and Ireland on the sole ground of truth’.16 Even as it was being read by Macaulay (who savaged it) or Newman and Keble (who welcomed it), Gladstone ‘rapidly saw the need to scramble back to constitutional realities’, as Edward Norman puts it.17 That the leader of his party disapproved of his book was wounding for Gladstone, who admired Peel greatly and would come to appreciate him even more. In 1840 he was defending his leader: ‘There is a manifest and peculiar adaptation in Peel’s mind to the age in which he lives and to its exigencies and to the position he holds as a public man.’18 That defence rather neatly sums up the position which Gladstone himself now began to adopt, which made it possible for him to become a highly effective member of Peel’s administration in 1841. That Gladstone had connected himself to the ‘silent changes, which are advancing in the very bed and basis of modern society’ soon became obvious. In 1843 the government’s proposal to set up a national system of primary education under the control of the Church of England raised a storm of protest from Dissenters; Gladstone went along with Peel’s decision to abort the measure. In 1844 he spoke in support of the Dissenters’ Chapels Bill, to secure the Unitarians in the possession of the chapels they held, declaring – in a foretaste of the language and sentiments he would deploy regarding the Irish Church over two decades later – that ‘when the people of England should be made aware of the real nature of this question, as they would be by this night’s discussion, their Christian feelings would make them demand of this House to give effect to the principle of justice embodied in the Bill’.19 This provoked a response from Richard Lalor Sheil, the MP for Tipperary, fervent supporter of Daniel O’Connell and Vice-President of the Board of Trade in Wellington’s administration. Unable to ‘place a curb upon his love of sarcasm and badinage’20 he declared, again in an uncanny foretaste of later developments, ‘I am delighted to hear from such high authority that this Bill is perfectly reconcilable with the strictest and the sternest principles of State conscience. I cannot doubt that the right hon. Gentleman, the champion of free-trade, will ere long become the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought.’21 Just eight months later, Gladstone appeared to revert to his role as defender of the traditional church–state position; in February 1845 he resigned his Cabinet post over the proposal to enhance and entrench the state subsidy to Maynooth. But it was not quite a reversion: he voted




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for the proposal in Parliament. A year later he told his intimate from Christ Church days Archdeacon Henry Manning: ‘I have not arrived at any set form of opinion concerning the Irish church. The question that pursues me is this: Can social justice, which of course varies in its form and application according to the conditions of political society, warrant the permanent maintenance of the Irish church as it is?’22 What Gladstone did not know was that Manning was considering his own position in the church. He had been asked by Gladstone a year previously to answer Newman’s pronouncements (Newman had converted to Catholicism in October 1845), ‘only to discover that he found [them] unanswerable’.23 By the time they both turned their full attention to the Irish Church question, their respective roles would have changed: Gladstone would be the leader of the Liberal Party, and Manning the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. Indeed it is instructive to consider how these three Oxford men – Newman (born 1801), Manning (1808) and Gladstone (1809) – travelled by different routes far from the common evangelicalism of their respective origins.24 Other changes in church and state were taking place even as Gladstone, Newman and Manning tussled with their consciences. In 1843 the established church of Scotland suffered its great disruption when almost half its ministers and lay leaders seceded and formed the Free Church of Scotland. Then in 1844 the British Anti-State-Church Association was launched, changing its name in 1853 to the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State-Patronage and Control, or, more popularly, the Liberation Society. In 1850 it began a campaign for the introduction in the House of Commons of an Irish Church Disestablishment Bill.25 The Society – and Nonconformity in general – received a huge boost when the 1851 Religious Census, published in 1854, ‘bore witness to Nonconformist strength’ in England.26 The Bishop of London stoutly claimed that ‘the great majority of people of this country do still belong to the Established Church’.27 Nevertheless, on the census day (Sunday 30 March 1851) almost as many Nonconformists as Anglicans attended church. For some of the constituents of the Member for Oxford University, Gladstone’s position was becoming suspect, not sufficiently Protestant, or not sufficiently ‘stiff for the Church of England’ in the new landscape that seemed to be emerging. In the general election of 1852 one Oxford cleric was moved to write in defence of the sitting member:


46 Alan Megahey

The objections alleged against Mr Gladstone by those who are now endeavouring to prevent his re-election for the University of Oxford,


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are mainly these: 1. That he has departed, generally, from the principles which he held in 1847. 2. In particular, that he advocates the separation of the State from the Church. To which may be added, his votes on the admission of Jews to the Legislature, and on the Ecclesiastical Titles’ Assumption Bill; which, though not alleged to be a departure on his part from any implied pledge under which he was originally elected, are now said, by his opponents, to be at variance with the sentiments of the majority of his constituents.28 It was to be fifteen years before Gladstone did indeed advocate the ‘separation of the State from the Church’, albeit in Ireland. Meanwhile, the process of what another cleric, the polemicist and popular speaker George Denison, Archdeacon of Taunton, was to call ‘progressive dis-Establishment and dis-Endowment’ continued in the United Kingdom. People failed to realise, Denison claimed in 1883, that ‘they were being dis-Established and dis-Endowed many times, bit by bit, every year’.29 The dismantling of the confessing state, well under way by the mid-nineteenth century, was to continue for another century and more, though the term ‘dismantling’ suggests too purposeful and tidy a development; rather it was haphazard, driven by expediency and compromise. Gladstone gave his support to various changes which pleased non-Anglicans: the Burial Act (the first of many) in 1852; the opening up of Oxford (1854) and Cambridge (1856) to Dissenters; the admission of Jews to Parliament (1858); the abolition of church rates (1868). But this is not to say that these years saw, or that Gladstone desired, a great march towards secularism. Far from it. Nor had he ever been an Erastian: his book on church principles did not demonstrate a simplistic belief in state control of the church. So in these years, while voting for measures which could be called liberal, he castigated measures that he deemed to be Erastian. He opposed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, and the anti-Catholic agitation which preceded it when the Pope re-established an episcopal hierarchy in England. He was no supporter of papal temporal power, but nor did he support the interference of the state in the affairs of the church, even the Roman church. In the same vein, he was distressed by the Gorham case (1850), in which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council gave a ruling that an evangelical clergyman who did not believe in baptismal regeneration could not be prevented by his bishop or the church courts from taking up a parish appointment. Gladstone was appalled, and even a year later when presenting his views to Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, he quivered with rage as he protested that because of the Gorham Judgment,




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‘a foundation is laid for emptying of all their force the articles of the Creed one by one, as public opinion by successive stages shall admit and encourage it’.30 In the same mood he opposed, as contrary to scripture, the Marriage Act (1857), which made divorce easier. The act did indeed mark a significant divergence between civil and religious law, and Gladstone’s only consolation was having won for clergy the right to refuse to marry divorced persons on the grounds of conscience. In 1865 a further religious issue engaged him. As a treasurer of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, he became involved with the ‘Colenso affair’. John William Colenso, a Cambridge mathematician, had been Bishop of Natal since 1853. He had rapidly become something of a proponent of what would over a century later be called ‘inculturation’, that is, the adapting of the Gospel to local cultural and social norms, thereby enriching and baptising the local culture. Colenso became suspect for his tolerance of polygamy and of Zulu customs and folklore. In 1858 he was accused of heresy by the Dean of Pietermaritzburg, in whose cathedral the bishop had preached a series of sermons with a ‘Zwinglian’ interpretation of the Eucharist, a denial of the ‘real presence’ in the sacramental elements. The metropolitan, Robert Gray of Cape Town, declined to act, but was forced to do so when in 1861 Colenso published a book of lectures which appeared to question the orthodox view of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice for sin and to regard baptism merely as a proclamation of God’s love for all. Gray asked him to withdraw the book, but instead Colenso published a work on the Old Testament which applied the new and continental techniques of reinterpretation called ‘higher criticism’. Gray convened a church court, Colenso was indicted and excommunicated, and his diocese was taken over by the metropolitan. Colenso appealed to the Privy Council, and travelled to England. The Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-nine English and colonial bishops agreed to inhibit Colenso in their dioceses, and the Colonial Bishoprics Fund withdrew his stipend. Meanwhile, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decided in Colenso’s favour on the grounds that ‘though the Crown could create ecclesiastical persons, it could not give them jurisdiction in colonies which possessed their own legislatures. Gray could exercise no authority over Colenso. Almost by accident the Anglican Church in South Africa discovered that it was not established.’31 ‘The shock was a very rude one’, Gladstone confessed to Miss Burdett-Coutts; the Judicial Committee’s decision had forced him ‘to recognize the Church of Africa as what they have made it, a voluntary church’.32 On a more practical front he was also put out: the bishop went to court (Colenso v. Gladstone and others) and his stipend


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was restored.33 But, as in the Gorham case, Gladstone was principally concerned that the doctrines of the church were being undermined. As Richard Shannon points out: ‘This kind of doctrinal conservatism became increasingly for Gladstone a necessary psychological counterpoise to his ecclesiastical liberalism’, and that liberalism ‘now began to focus also on Ireland’.34

Uncoupling the Irish Church The piecemeal and pragmatic adjustments of the privileges of the Church of England as an establishment were to continue during the remainder of Gladstone’s political life. But their significance was far outweighed by the various ramifications of the Irish problem. As H.G.C. Matthew puts it, ‘Ireland was for Gladstone a preoccupation, not an interest, an embarrassment, not an intellectual attraction ... . His aim in his Irish policy was simply stated: “our purpose & duty is to endeavour to draw a line between the Fenians and the people of Ireland, to make the people of Ireland indisposed to cross it”.’35 But Fenianism was not the only issue. Gladstone had, characteristically, read and thought about Ireland for many years, though despite his widespread travels in Europe and the proximity of his country estate to Holyhead, he did not visit the country until 1877. While at school, in the year of his confirmation (1827) he was speaking up for the Catholics at a debate on the Elizabethan penal laws; they were held to be unjust by eight votes to six. A month later, he was reading ‘an excellent article’ on church property and tithes in the Church of Ireland.36 The events of the next fifteen years, as we have seen, induced Gladstone to shift his position on church and state, and many of those events – Catholic emancipation, Irish Church Temporalities, the Maynooth grant – of necessity led him to consider the position of the Church of Ireland. But his great work in government in the 1840s and 1850s was in the area of public finance. What brought him to the point where his first premiership was dominated by Ireland, not least the disestablishment of the church there? On 19 May 1863 Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, MP for Swansea, rose in the House of Commons ‘to move for a Select Committee to inquire how far the present distribution of endowments for religious purposes throughout Ireland may be so amended as most to conduce to the welfare of all classes of Her Majesty’s Irish subjects’.37 Dillwyn was from a Quaker family, but even though ‘the previous generation joined the Anglican Church in Wales ... Dillwyn’s liberal views appealed to what was in effect a “nation of Nonconformists” ’.38 In this and subsequent




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debates, he was anxious to point out that he was a faithful member of the established church, but he expressed surprise that the government had so long neglected ‘the question of surplus revenues’ which could be used for the greater good of the people of Ireland. James Whiteside, Member for Dublin University (and Irish Attorney General in the previous and future Conservative administrations), answered him with a humorous, even sarcastic, speech: Public opinion he has, Sir, at his back; for it is enough to fill the House with consternation to hear how excited the people of Ireland have lately been on this question. Why, after a diligent search made in the records of this House, I find that during the last year there was not a single Petition on the subject of this Church, its property, or position ... .39 William Connor Magee, Dean of Cork and Dean of the Chapel Royal in Dublin – who was to become Bishop of Peterborough in 1868 – was infuriated at the Conservative response. Magee may have had some personal knowledge of Whiteside, who had been in the late 1850s the member for Enniskillen, when Magee had been rector of the parish. He wrote to a friend, ‘I wish we could fall with some dignity, and not with Whiteside’s jokes, for our dying speech.’ Despite the lack of a groundswell of public opinion, which Whiteside had humorously alluded to, Magee characteristically feared the worst: ‘The Conservatives are shortsighted. They are throwing away a precious opportunity of reforming the Irish Church for the sake of a party triumph, and, like all shortsighted Conservatism, this reform resisted will end ere long in revolution accomplished.’40 Magee was right, but the blow did not yet fall. Gladstone, speaking for the government when the debate was briefly renewed nine days later, explained ‘that he did not presume to say whether or not there was a strong feeling in Ireland on the question, but only that there had been no general manifestation of a desire in the House for a debate on it’.41 He spoke the truth, and the debate flickered out a month later. A year later, however, Gladstone had evidently moved his position. In April 1864 he was present at a reception in London for Garibaldi, the Italian hero. John Bright records in his diary that during the reception he ‘had a long talk with Mr. Gladstone – among other topics upon Ireland and the Irish Church. He thought, when the Liberal Party is restored to life, that question would come up for settlement, and he should regard it as one of the great purposes of the Party, altho’ it would


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necessarily separate him from the University of Oxford.’42 Within a year, that separation moved closer to reality, and on precisely the issue Gladstone had predicted. In March 1865, Dillwyn tried again; he moved a resolution ‘[t]hat, in the opinion of this House, the present position of the Irish Church Establishment is unsatisfactory, and calls for the early attention of Her Majesty’s Government’. The debate was broadening out from the previous focus on ‘surplus revenues’. Dillwyn claimed that this was not the ‘thin end of the wedge’ as regards the Church of England, for ‘he did not bring forward his motion as an enemy of the English Church Establishment. He was a member of that Church.’43 It was a position towards which Gladstone himself was heading, though he took care (having been urged by Palmerston not to rock the boat) to speak circumspectly in the debate. Gathorne Hardy, who spoke before Gladstone, had defended the Irish Church. Gladstone agreed with him that ‘there is to be found no such amount of flagrant abuses as would of themselves justify a violent interference with its existence, or any licence of Parliamentary attack’.44 But, as he pointed out, the resolution had two parts: ‘I cannot refuse to admit the truth of the first’, that ‘the present position of the Irish Church Establishment is unsatisfactory’, but he declined to support the second. He averred that it would not be possible to address such a complex problem speedily and concluded that it ‘is not so much a question for present as for future consideration’. That separation from the University of Oxford which he had predicted to Bright came a few months later: at the general election, Gladstone, rejected by Oxford but elected for South Lancashire, was now ‘unmuzzled’. But the issue of the Irish Church was overshadowed for the next few years: the Liberal Party lost its leader, Palmerston, and it split over its proposed parliamentary reform bill. Derby and Disraeli successfully extended the franchise, and the minority Tory government limped on to allow for a general election to be fought on the basis of the new franchise. Sir John Gray, Liberal MP for Kilkenny city, tried on two occasions to resurrect a Dillwyn-style motion; the first (10 April 1866) was two days before the second reading, moved by Gladstone, of the (subsequently aborted) Liberal Representation of the People Bill. On the second occasion (7 May 1867) Gladstone gave the same response that he had to Dillwyn’s motion: ‘I question whether the time has come when a practical plan upon this subject can with advantage be submitted to Parliament.’ But he went on to predict that



the time is not far distant when the Parliament of England, which at present undoubtedly had its hands full of other most important


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Alan Megahey

business and engagements, would feel it its duty to look this question fairly and fully in the face; and I confess that I am sanguine enough to cherish a hope that, though not without difficulty, a satisfactory result will be arrived at, the consequences of which will be so happy and pleasant for us all that we shall wonder at the folly which has so long prevented it being brought about.45 Gladstone’s party leader, Earl Russell, now seized the initiative, and in June carried in the House of Lords a proposal ‘that by the Operation of a Royal Commission or otherwise full and accurate Information be procured as to the Nature and Amount of the Property and Revenues of the Established Church in Ireland, with a view to their more productive Management, and to their more equitable application for the Benefit of the Irish People’.46 After some discussion of the words ‘and to their more equitable application for the Benefit of the Irish People’, opposed by the Conservatives for fear of opening the door to disendowment and despoliation, the motion was carried with those words omitted, and the process began of setting up a Royal Commission, which would propose reforms of the Irish Church. It was to be overtaken by events. ‘The interval of just over three years between the death of Palmerston and the beginning of Gladstone’s first premiership’, as Roy Jenkins notes, ‘was a period of political confusion and paradox. It was also one in which Gladstone did not cover himself with glory.’47 Things had changed by the autumn of 1867. There were significant developments in Ireland itself. Fenianism had revived the ‘armed struggle’ approach. This had resulted in the suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland early in 1866, and there had been an inept failed insurrection in March 1867. But it took (as it would a century later) outbreaks of violence in mainland Britain to make the British public sit up and take note. A planned attack on Chester Castle in 1866 was virtually stillborn, but in September 1867 two Fenian prisoners were freed by an armed mob, a policeman was killed, and eventually three of the assailants were hanged (the ‘Manchester martyrs’ as they became known in Ireland). In December twelve people were killed in an attempt to spring two Fenian prisoners from Clerkenwell Gaol. Six days after that attempt, in a speech at Southport, Gladstone ‘first raised his standard’, as John Morley put it, ‘and proclaimed an Irish policy on Irish lines ... . The church, the land, the college [denominational education] should all be dealt with in turn.’48 This was, of course, precisely the agenda that had been propounded by the National Association of Ireland since its inception in 1864, and was seen by its promoter, Cardinal Cullen, as the antidote


52


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to both civil unrest and republicanism. Its aims were to be achieved in co-operation with the Liberal Party.49 From the beginning, the National Association cultivated the Liberation Society in Britain as an ally. So Gladstone could hope that his party, requiring a battle cry and a wide mobilisation of favourable opinion for victory at the next general election, could rely on support from English Dissent and from English and Irish Catholicism. It was a curious alliance. Russell’s resignation from the leadership of the party at Christmas left Gladstone at the helm, with a programme which seemed to have Irish Church reform at the top of its list of priorities. For the moment, however, during the long Christmas recess, Gladstone immersed himself in his Homeric studies. In February 1868 Disraeli replaced the ailing Derby as prime minister. ‘In regard to Ireland’, as his Victorian biographers were keen to point out, Disraeli ‘had advocated conciliation, but conciliation through the action of a powerful and vigorous executive, from his early days in Parliament’. They proceeded to show how Disraeli, particularly through his contacts with Cardinal Manning in England – and through him with Cardinal Cullen in Dublin – had been making serious attempts to come up with land and education proposals. His plans, which demonstrated his ‘spirit alike of detachment and sympathy’, might have solved the Irish question.50 But Disraeli had not been Prime Minister for four weeks when, as his biographers lamented, ‘the Roman Catholic authorities were diverted from adhesion to Disraeli’s programme by Gladstone’s superior bid’. On 16 March John Maguire, Member for Cork, got the debate he had been calling for since the previous November: ‘[t] hat this House will immediately resolve itself into a Committee, with the view of taking into consideration the condition and circumstances of Ireland’.51 Gladstone made his first intervention: ‘he deeply regretted that the Government had not announced a definite policy, feeling, as he did, that it was of immense importance that that House should lose no time in declaring itself clearly and distinctly in favour of the great principle of ecclesiastical equality’.52 The ‘not far distant’ which he had spoken of had evidently arrived when, a week later, Gladstone introduced three resolutions on the Irish church: 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 to 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




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public patronage, and to confine the operations of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of Ireland 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 would be graciously pleased to place at the disposal of Parliament, Her interest in the temporalities of the Archbishoprics, Bishoprics, and other Ecclesiastical Dignities and Benefices in Ireland, and in the custody thereof.53 William Connor Magee ‘went down to the House at 4.30, in time to hear Gladstone give his notice to a very full and very eager House. The cheers which greeted the first half of the first resolution were unanimous and significant. Equally significant was the comparative silence with which his own side received the last half – regarding vested interests. The Irish members looked some of them positively sulky at this. But, nevertheless, vested interests are safe and something more.’54 As was often the case, Magee was right. Seven months later he became Bishop of Peterborough, and, as the only Irishman on the English bench of bishops, played a conciliatory role in the negotiations which took place over Irish disestablishment, which now looked inevitable. Gladstone’s first resolution was passed by sixty-five votes on 30 April.55 The other two were passed without division on 7 May, along with resolutions that the Regium Donum and the Maynooth grant should cease when the Establishment ceased to exist and that a suspensory bill would meanwhile prevent the crown from creating fresh vested interests or filling offices until that time.56 The Lords rejected the suspensory bill on 29 June.57 The Times a few days later asked when the general election would be held, an election which ‘by general consent [is] predestined to determine what shall be the national policy towards the Irish Church and the Irish people’.58 The Royal Commission on the Irish Church was meanwhile winding up its business; the report was signed on 27 July and published in the autumn. While it provided reasonably accurate and up-to-date information on the state of the church, it was – like the Lords’ defeat of the suspensory bill – overtaken by events. The bill had ‘convinced the public that its author meant earnest and vigorous business, and the air was instantly alive with the thrill of battle’.59 On Saturday 18 July Gladstone declared himself ‘glad to receive a deputation of bona fides working men’ and ‘was glad to hear that his conduct on the Irish question was approved by the great mass of the working classes of the country’. He told them he was not discouraged by


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the recent Lords’ vote and that ‘disestablishment of the Irish church, accompanied by an improved land tenure, would conduce largely to the amelioration of the sister island’. On the next day a great march of some 700 to 800 people proceeded from Clerkenwell to Hyde Park, carrying green banners with white slogans declaring: ‘Down with the Irish Church’, ‘Away with the bench of bishops’, ‘Make the Lords amenable to the people’ and, rather curiously, ‘Down with the Ecclesiastical Encampment’. There they heard with approbation Gladstone’s message to the deputation on the previous day.60 The election campaign began in earnest in October. In a series of speeches in the north of England, Gladstone set out his programme. The first speech was at Warrington on 12 October, when, as The Times noted, ‘Mr Gladstone gave but a comparatively small part of his speech to the Irish Church.’61 He began with a reminder that ‘the establishment of the cheap press was not secured without a struggle, and that we who stand here upon this platform are the representatives in our humble sphere of those who procured for the people that inestimable benefit’, even though it was opposed by ‘the misguided action of the hereditary branch of the Legislature’. This was populist stuff and elicited cheers. After a swipe at the inadequacies of the recent reform of the franchise, much of the speech was a call for retrenchment and curbs on government expenditure. But the last section of Gladstone’s speech (just under a quarter of the whole) was introduced with the words ‘There is another question which cannot be overlooked, I mean the question of the Irish Church.’ This was greeted by ‘loud cheering’. The Liberal policy was laid out: that the Regium Donum (to the Presbyterians) and the Maynooth grant (to the Roman Catholic Church) – the ‘twin buttresses’ of the Irish Church Establishment – must go. Concurrent endowment was not the way forward. Gladstone did not intend to reform the Irish Church to make it more ‘acceptable’, nor, he suggested, did Disraeli, who in recent pronouncements ‘did not even acknowledge the portentous labours by which the Commissioners have contrived to produce a huge mass of figures in a great blue book’. The Liberal policy was clear: that by disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church, ‘the Church of Rome, and the Church of England, and the Church of the Presbyterians, and every other Church under the circumstances in which Ireland is placed should meet on a fair and level field’. Gladstone returned to Hawarden the next day to work on the proofs of his Chapter of Autobiography, another part of his Irish Church strategy, and a few weeks later decided to ask his publisher to delay advertising and publication until the election had taken place.62 By the time the book




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appeared it was evident that the Liberals had won and that Gladstone’s Irish policy had gained widespread support. Now people could read how and why Gladstone had shifted his position during the course of the previous thirty years: ‘At a time when the Established Church of Ireland is on her trial, it is not unfair that her assailants should be placed upon their trial too: most of all, if they have at one time been her sanguine defenders.’63 The reviewer in The Times expressed some ‘doubt whether it is a safe precedent for the leader of a great party to present himself voluntarily at the bar of public opinion and insist on being heard’, but he concluded that ‘if Mr Gladstone condescends to this, no intellectual man ought to deny himself the pleasure of listening to his eloquent and argumentative defence’.64 Meanwhile the Liberals had won the election convincingly, with 384 seats to the Tories’ 274, and with 1,355,000 votes overall to 883,500. Gladstone’s own upset (he had been defeated in South-West Lancashire, scene of his most bravura performances at the hustings, but took Greenwich) seemed to matter little. The party was united in a way that it had not been for some years. Disraeli announced his intention of resigning without waiting to face the new parliament. Gladstone was quick to form a government, and he earned an encomium from The Times: ‘Mr Gladstone’s despatch is probably unparalleled, and it testifies forcibly to the unity of the new Government.’65 That done, he set about drafting his Irish Church proposals, and by 18 December he had the bare bones of his bill.66 With remarkable speed thereafter the disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Church was accomplished: the bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 1 March 1869 and received the royal assent on 26 July. The Irish Church ceased to be established by law on 1 January 1871. The story of that period has been told extensively, and the bill (in its various forms) has been dissected and examined at length.67 But what does the whole process reveal about Gladstone and church–state relations? In September 1860 Sir John Acton wrote of Gladstone: ‘His excessive earnestness of conviction is the great secret of the persuasiveness of his eloquence; but that earnestness is founded on an incredible power of persuading himself’; his inability to see flaws in his own case, while ruthlessly identifying those in his opponents, creates ‘that fatal instability of purpose which is, rather than inconsistency of opinion, the bane of his career’.68 Yet this Liberal MP (for Carlow, 1859–65), who was a Catholic, came to appreciate Gladstone, and indeed much later told Mary Gladstone about his first significant conversation with her father, when he had learnt that he was ‘going to disestablish’: ‘I have always kept that day, March 31, 1864, as the date of getting the future policy


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of Liberalism quite clear before me.’69 When Pope Pius IX, on 29 June 1868 (the same day that the Lords voted down Gladstone’s suspensory bill), sent out a summons to the Twentieth Oecumenical Council (now called Vatican 1), the scene was set for further co-operation between Acton and Gladstone. Both were horrified by the talk of papal infallibility; both grieved over the subsequent excommunication of the great German theologian Ignaz von Döllinger, whom Gladstone had relished meeting, and who had taught the young Acton. When released from office, Gladstone travelled to Munich for long discussions with Döllinger and returned home to publish, in October 1874, The Vatican Decrees, by far his most popular and best-selling pamphlet. It pleased Anglicans high and low, it pleased Nonconformists, but it upset his erstwhile ally Manning, who was a thorough ultramontane. Gladstone was to take up his pen again in 1896 to attack Pope Pius’ successor, Leo XIII, whose encyclical Apostolicae Curae condemned Anglican Orders as invalid. Not even disgruntled Irish Anglicans could have much reason to believe that Gladstone had any intention of furthering the cause of ‘Romanism’ in Ireland or anywhere else. But they could, and did, argue that disestablishment and then home rule (if it happened) would have that as their unintended consequence. For all his affection for such men as Manning and Newman, Döllinger and Acton, Gladstone was not a person to allow sentiment to get in the way of the task in hand. This was strikingly evident in his handling of the negotiations on Irish disestablishment. As Mary Gladstone pointed out to Lord Rosebery in 1881, her father ‘was not exactly quick at understanding people’s insides’.70 His somewhat peremptory treatment of the Irish bishops can be understood in that light. He made little effort to bring Archbishop Trench of Dublin on board, even though they were contemporaries (although Trench was Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge) and Trench had been in at the beginnings of the Oxford Movement, for he was Hugh James Rose’s curate at Hadleigh in Essex, where the ‘Hadleigh Conference’ met a few weeks after Keble’s Assize Sermon to plot (as some would later mutter) changes in the church. Trench must have remembered, though he was but a junior at the discussions, that some there had wanted to go for disestablishment – to cut the church free. Now, as Gladstone wrote to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, ‘Trench seems to be a dreamer of dreams: and talks of negotiating at a time when all negotiation will have gone by.’71 Trench had also been curate to Wilberforce, who once described him as ‘my best male friend’; now the bishop had decided that since Irish disestablishment seemed inevitable, they must simply try to get the best possible terms for the




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Irish Church. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, agreed. Trench could not go along with that, nor could the Irish Primate, Beresford. ‘The Archbishop’, Gladstone wrote of him, ‘is right in saying that I “have shown a determination to press the measure without regard to” what he deems “the just rights of the Church”: & he may be quite assured that so far as depends upon us the determination will not be in the slightest degree relaxed by the impolitic opposition which he has unhappily decided upon offering.’72 It was not the Irish archbishops, therefore, who managed to tweak the details of Gladstone’s bill; Bishop Magee and his good friend J.C. MacDonnell (Dean of Cashel), Stopford (Archdeacon of Meath) and Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce were the key players in ensuring that the ‘disendowment’ aspect of the bill was not the ‘despoliation’ that many had feared.

The long aftermath There was disendowment, but there was no despoliation, and the Church of Ireland was left comfortably off, one might say. Nevertheless it is not surprising that when disestablishment became a fact – on 1 January 1871 – crowds gathered in Derry Cathedral to sing a hymn specially written by the bishop’s wife, the prolific hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander: Look down, Lord of Heaven, on our desolation! Fallen, fallen, fallen is now our Country’s crown, Dimly dawns the New Year on a churchless nation, Ammon and Amalek tread our borders down.73 Her husband, William – later to be Archbishop of Armagh – was a member of the House of Lords only during the session which saw disestablishment debated. When the bill was finally passed, he was approached by Dr Thirlwall, Bishop of St David’s, and one of the few bishops who had actively supported Gladstone. Thirwall had made what Alexander’s daughter called an ‘unnecessarily bitter speech in support of the Bill’, and he hoped the Bishop of Derry had not taken it personally. ‘Not at all’ was the answer, ‘but you have brought the disestablishment of the Church in Wales within measurable distance.’74 So it proved: as in Ireland, disestablishment ‘along with proposals for land tenure and education formed the staple of the Liberal programme in Wales’.75 The reasoning was very much the same: the established church in Wales was weaker in its membership than the Nonconformist churches there.


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By the time Welsh disestablishment came – delayed by the First World War – the political and social landscape had changed. Disestablishment of the Church of England effectively dropped out of the political debate, and out of Nonconformist discourse. The Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, reporting in 1916, laid the groundwork for greater internal self-government by the church, resulting in the creation of the Church Assembly in 1919.76 As Keith Robbins says, ‘There was some irony in the fact that it was a non-Anglican, non-Englishman, Lord Haldane, who considered that the outcome was that the Church of England had ceased to be “the assembly of the nation at large” and had become “but a fragment” ’, and that ‘in the long run, a current had been set moving which would lead to the Disestablishment of the Church’.77 The current has had a long run since then, but it has yet to lead to disestablishment. Indeed in general ‘the first half of the twentieth century witnessed no great haemorrhage of church membership in Britain’.78 As far as the Church of England was concerned, Edward Norman notes that ‘it had survived as a national Establishment of religion, and in the mid-century, indeed, and after years of numerical decline, it even experienced a modest boost from within educated opinion’.79 The ‘progressive dis-Establishment and dis-Endowment’ of the state church – which George Denison had described in 1883 – continued, largely with the support of the church, which itself acquired a further measure of ‘self-government’ with the creation of the General Synod in 1969.80 The liberalising measures in the 1960s and 1970s – reforms in the areas of capital punishment, abortion, divorce and homosexuality – received support from the church hierarchy. The historian of the Liberation Society suggested in 1969 that ‘Disestablishment of the Church of England in the twentieth century may mean a re-establishing of the major Reformed denominations of the nation into a new and stronger National Church’, an idea that was taken up by Ian Bradley at the end of the century in terms of ‘the desirability of a re-establishment which has an ecumenical dimension’.81 But by then it was not the survival of the establishment that was the big issue. What if the Christian faith itself was under threat? What if, as Gladstone had brooded in 1832, ‘the tide of our national destiny is turned, and if we are now about to go hand in hand with those alien principles, against which we once waged an implacable war?’82 Contemplating ‘the death of Christian Britain’ Callum Brown suggested in 2001 that ‘the culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium’.83 Gladstone, introducing his Irish disestablishment measure in March 1869, said, ‘I think the day has certainly come when an end is finally to




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be put to that union, not between the Church and religious association, but between the Establishment and the State, which was commenced under circumstances little auspicious, and has endured to be a source of unhappiness to Ireland, and of discredit and scandal to England.’84 Such sentiments could scarcely have been voiced by any subsequent Prime Minister in relation to the Church of England. Yet the church was increasingly, in the third millennium, facing its own internal problems: continued shrinking of congregations; shortage of money; shortage of vocations; declining numbers of church marriages, confirmations and baptisms; and disagreement over such issues as gay priests and female bishops. But during Gladstone’s lifetime, many had seen the established church as ‘embattled’ or ‘in decline’ for other, but similarly institutional and doctrinal, reasons. ‘Our wars [of policy] henceforth’, wrote Bishop Magee gloomily in 1871, ‘will be wars of passion. Besides, war and war taxes mean disestablishment of the English Church, abolition of the Lords, and socialistic attacks on property, all coming fast enough ... .’85 What Magee and Gladstone would not recognise in twenty-first- century Britain is the hostile social environment in which the Church of England operates, as do other Christian churches. The dogma of political correctness, the upsurge of militant atheism, the increasingly diverse population of England (in racial and religious terms) and the disappearance of any moral consensus in government or nation all seem to put the Church of England – and other churches – at odds with the ‘spirit of the age’, certainly as manifested in chattering-class circles. However, when Tony Blair was asked in the House of Commons whether the government would amend the law to allow members of the Royal Family to marry Catholics without forfeiting their place in the order of succession, and whether Catholics would be allowed to inherit the throne, he was circumspect; perhaps Alastair Campbell’s instruction of a few years previously (‘Never talk about God’86) had been taken to heart. In a written answer he replied that the government was heavily involved in a programme of legislation in the areas of health, education, crime and welfare. He also pointed out that ‘change to the law on succession would be a complex undertaking involving amendment or repeal of a number of items of related legislation, as well as requiring the consent of legislatures of member nations of the Commonwealth. It would raise other major constitutional issues. The Government have no plans to legislate in this area.’87 What remains to be seen is whether there is any public appetite for the argument put forward by some academics that ‘it is time to look again at the relationship between the state and established religion in the


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United Kingdom’.88 It is perhaps surprising that despite the huge social and economic and political changes in Britain that have rendered it utterly different from the country of even fifty years ago, this is a debate which has yet to take off. Two hundred years after Gladstone’s birth, it seems highly unlikely that any Prime Minister will be able to ignite the electorate on the issue of church and state as Gladstone did in the cause of Irish disestablishment in 1868.

Notes 1. Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 12 Mar. 1998, vol. 587, col. 301 (hereafter HL). 2. HL, 22 May 2002, vol. 635, cols. 769–816. 3. W.E. Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography (London, 1868), p. 49. 4. S.J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland 1801–46 (Oxford, 2001), p. 184. 5. Entry for 8 Feb. 1832 in M.R.D. Foot (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. I (Oxford, 1968), p. 416. 6. J.H. Newman, Apologia pro vita sua (London, 1902 edition), p. 35. 7. Gladstone had in 1832 ‘embarked to Ostend with his Evangelicalism substantially intact. He arrived back in London at the end of July in a much more indeterminate condition’; Richard Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007), p. 16. 8. M.J. Lynch, ‘Was Gladstone a Tractarian? W.E. Gladstone and the Oxford Movement 1833–1845’, Journal of Religious History, 8, 4 (Dec. 1975), p. 389. 9. H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI (Oxford, 1978), p. 505. 10. J.D. Sassi, A Republic of the Righteous: The Public Christianity of the Post Revolutionary New England Clergy (Oxford, 2001), p. 11. 11. E.R. Norman, The Conscience of the State in North America (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 48–74 (on the separation of church and state in the United States and Canada). 12. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1 Mar. 1869, vol. 194, col. 428 (hereafter HC). 13. Thomas Arnold, Principles of Church Reform (London, 1833), p. 84. 14. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. III, Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), p. 85. 15. W.E. Gladstone, The State in Its Relations with the Church (London, 1838), p. 26. 16. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 1 (London, 1966), p. 478. 17. E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), p. 104. 18. Quoted in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 33. 19. HC, 6 June 1844, vol. 75, col. 365. 20. As he had been endeavouring to do, according to his biographer, W. Torrens McCullough, Memoirs of the Right Honourable Richard Lalor Sheil, 2 vols. (London, 1855), vol. II, p. 89. 21. HC, 6 June 1844, vol. 75, col. 365.




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22. D.C. Lathbury, Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (London, 1910), vol. I, pp. 149–50. 23. David Newsome on Henry Edward Manning, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 24. Part of that story, focusing on the lives of Manning and the Wilberforces (Robert, Samuel and Henry), but with Gladstone and Newman playing large parts, is wonderfully told in Newsome, The Parting of Friends (London, 1966). 25. W.H. Mackintosh, Disestablishment and Liberation: The Movement for the Separation of the Anglican Church from State Control (London, 1972), p. 79 and passim. 26. K.D.M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), p. 77 and passim. 27. Ibid., p. 43. 28. H.A. Woodgate, Is Mr Gladstone Inconsistent with His Former Profession? A Question Respectfully Suggested to the Members of Convocation (Oxford, 1852), p. 5. 29. G.A. Denison, The Church and the World; the Law Divine; the World’s Law: Charge of the Archdeacon of Taunton (London, 1883), p. 20. 30. ‘Memorandum read to the Bishop of Oxford on January 22, and copy given to him on January 23 [1852]’ in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 88. 31. Peter Hinchliff, The Church in South Africa (London, 1968), p. 69 and passim. 32. Letter, 22 Apr. 1866, in Lathbury, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 145. 33. Entries for 30 Mar. and 20 June in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, n. 15, p. 363. 34. Foot, Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, p. 542. 35. H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. VII (Oxford, 1968), p. lii. 36. Entries for 16 June and 15 July 1827 in Foot, Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, p. 97. 37. HC, 19 May 1863, vol. 170, col. 1988. 38. Katie Gramich, ‘Introduction’ in Amy Dillwyn, The Rebecca Rioter (Dinas Powys, 2004), p. v. 39. HC, 19 May 1863, vol. 170, col. 2005. 40. W.C. Magee to J.C. MacDonnell, 24 May 1863, in J.C. MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, 2 vols. (London, 1896), vol. I, p. 89. 41. HC, 28 May 1863, vol. 170, col. 2076. 42. R.A.J. Walling, The Diaries of John Bright (New York, 1931), p. 276. 43. HC, 28 Mar. 1865, vol. 178, col. 384. 44. Ibid., col. 421. 45. HC, 7 May 1867, vol. 187, cols. 122, 130–1. 46. HL, 24 June 1867, vol. 188, col. 367. 47. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995), p. 260. 48. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (London, 1903), vol. II, p. 243. 49. E.R. Norman, The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859– 1873 (London, 1965), pp. 162–76. 50. W.R. Monypenny and G.E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, 2 vols. (London, new & revised edition, 1929), vol. II, p. 347.


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51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

HC, 16 Mar. 1868, vol. 190, col. 1688. Ibid., col. 1729. HC, 23 Mar. 1868, vol. 191, cols. 32–3. Letter to J.C. MacDonnell, 24 Mar. 1868, in MacDonnell, Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, vol. I, pp. 175–6. As it happens, Magee obtained entry to the gallery via a letter of introduction which he presented to the Speaker, John Evelyn Denison, ‘a very stately and courteous gentleman’ and brother of Archdeacon Denison of Taunton. HC, 30 Apr. 1868, vol. 191, col. 1675. HC, 7 May 1868, vol. 191, col. 1949. HL, 29 June 1868, vol. 193, col. 299. The Times, 3 July 1868. Morley, Gladstone, vol. II, p. 248. The Times, 20 July 1868. Ibid., 13 Oct. 1868; the speech itself had been printed without comment on the previous day. Entries for 13 and 26 Oct. 1868 in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, pp. 626, 631. Gladstone, Autobiography (London, 1868), p. 6. The Times, 23 Nov. 1868. Ibid., 8 Dec. 1868. Entries for 17 and 18 Dec. 1868 in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, pp. 649–50. See, inter alia, P.M.H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969); R.B. McDowell, The Church of Ireland 1869–1969 (London, 1975); Hugh Shearman, Privatising a Church: The Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of Ireland (Lurgan, 1995); D.H. Akenson, The Church of Ireland: Ecclesiastical Reform and Revolution, 1800–1885 (New Haven, CT, 1971). From The Rambler (Sept. 1860), quoted in Douglas Woodruff (ed.), Lord Acton, Essays on Church and State (London, 1952), p. 451. See M.D. Stephen, ‘Liberty, Church and State: Gladstone’s Relations with Manning and Acton’, Journal of Religious History, I, 4 (Dec. 1961), p. 224; it would appear from Gladstone’s diary that the meeting was actually three days later. Quoted in Leo McKinstry, Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil (London, 2005), p. 98. Gladstone to Wilberforce, 21 Jan. 1869, in Mathew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, vol. VII, p. 14. Gladstone to C.S.P. Fortescue (Irish Chief Secretary), 23 Jan. 1869, in ibid., p. 16. Eleanor Alexander, Primate Alexander (London, 1913), p. 183. Ibid., p. 169. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales, pp. 227–8. The Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State: Report, with Appendices (The Selborne Report) (London, 1916). Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900– 2000 (Oxford, 2008), p. 186. C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001), p. 165.




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79. Edward Norman, ‘Religion at the Crossroads: Religion and Morals since 1945’ in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (ed.), England 1945–2000 (London, 2001), p. 223. 80. The Selborne Report was followed up fifty years later by the creation of a commission headed by the Reverend Professor Owen Chadwick, which produced Church and State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission (London, 1970); after five years’ work it recommended (inter alia) further ‘self government’, which had in effect already come about by the Synodical Government Measure of 1969. 81. Ian Bradley, God Save the Queen: The Spiritual Dimension of Monarchy (London, 2002), p. 176. 82. Entry for 8 Feb. 1832 in Foot, Gladstone Diaries, vol. I, p. 416. 83. Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 198. 84. HC, 1 Mar. 1869, vol. 194, col. 464. 85. Magee to J.C. MacDonnell, 6 Feb. 1871, in MacDonnell, Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, vol. 1, p. 264. 86. See John Burton and Eileen McCabe, We Don’t Do God (London, 2009), p. 63 and passim. 87. HC, 13 Dec. 1999, vol. 341, col. 57. 88. R.M. Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain (London, 2009), p. 1.


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Anti-Gladstonianism and the pre-1886 Liberal secession Timothy Moore

When he released the Hawarden Kite in December 1885, Herbert Gladstone was fully aware of the divisions within the Liberal Party over Irish home rule. He could not have anticipated, however, quite how large-scale the rebellion against his father would be in the early hours of 9 June 1886, when more than ninety Liberal MPs helped the Conservatives vote down the first Irish Home Rule measure (Government of Ireland Bill).1 The legislation itself was, of course, the most immediate reason for the Liberal Unionist split with William Gladstone, although some have argued that such a secession was inevitable for various reasons, and that the home rule disagreement was simply a pretext, albeit a needlessly premature one, that allowed many Liberal MPs (especially those Whigs on the Liberal right) to walk out of a party in which they no longer felt at home. At the other end of the party’s spectrum, Radical Unionist Joseph Chamberlain was seen to have had an insatiable desire to replace Gladstone as Liberal leader; he is therefore said to have attempted to exploit the home rule division to inflict a mortal political wound upon Gladstone in hopes of forcing him into retirement – despite the fact that Chamberlain and many of his followers agreed with most of the provisions of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. These well-known socio-ideological factors and high political leadership manoeuvrings have obscured an underlying rift in the Liberal Party that was not related to ideology, class or ambition. Remaining in the high politics tradition of late nineteenth-century political historiography, we can observe that this rift was of a very personal nature, and it was decades in the making. It is this largely unexplored dimension of the Liberal secession that by 1886 led many of the anti-home rule Liberals who harboured a deep-seated personal dislike of William Ewart Gladstone to break away from the Liberal Party.


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This chapter charts the development of this brand of anti-Gladstonianism in the years leading up to the Liberal split; it explains why many of Gladstone’s colleagues – in particular the future leaders of the Liberal Unionist Party – came to view him as vain, arrogant, spiteful and even untrustworthy, and it demonstrates that Gladstone himself struggled at times to conceal his animosity towards some of the secessionist Liberals – an enmity that was apparent long before the division of 9 June 1886. In a sense, it corroborates the Cooke and Vincent thesis of high political intrigue, although here the politics of personality and of personal relationships informed the machinations at the top of the Liberal Party in a way that the two trail-blazing historians of this era failed to acknowledge fully.

Gladstone and Hartington: a precarious alliance Many in the Whig tradition viewed Gladstone, even as early as the 1850s, as unprincipled and opportunistic. The Earl of Clarendon wrote in 1860 that Gladstone was ‘an audacious innovator with an insatiable desire for popularity [who will make] a far more sincere republican than Bright, for his ungratified personal vanity makes him wish to subvert the institutions and classes that stand in the way of his ambition’.2 Emily Eden, daughter of the First Baron of Auckland, complained of Gladstone’s ‘parvenu air’, which reminded her of Peel, as well as his ‘Jesuitical character’.3 Spencer Compton Cavendish – Lord Hartington – was a leading member of this Whig establishment. He entered the House of Commons for the two-member constituency of North Lancashire in 1857, at the age of twenty-five. By that time Gladstone had been an MP for as long as Hartington had been alive and had already served in the Cabinet for nearly fifteen years (he was then Chancellor of the Exchequer). Any examination of the relationship between the two men must take into account this considerable gap in age and political experience. A.B. Cooke and J.R. Vincent’s observation that the Grand Old Man (GOM) found Hartington ‘rather young’ is a breathtaking understatement.4 Gladstone in fact admitted after his retirement from frontline politics that he had always considered Hartington too young and untested to succeed him at the head of the party – having viewed Hartington’s stint as the Liberal leader in the House of Commons from 1875 to 1880 as a caretaker period of ‘meaningless opposition’ during which Lord Granville, Liberal Leader in the Lords, was the de facto Prime Minister-inwaiting.5 It was Granville, Gladstone believed, and eventually Rosebery,


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who should take the party’s helm in the post-GOM era, not the young ‘Harty Tarty’ (a term that came to be used as a patronising nickname for Hartington, especially in the Gladstone–Granville correspondence after 1880). This old hand versus novice sentiment would always lie at the core of Gladstone–Hartington relations, and out of it would grow an antagonistic association – not a friendship – characterised by bitterness and mistrust. Demotions and wounded pride Following Gladstone’s endorsement of electoral reform and disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, Whig anxiety was particularly strong when, in February 1866, Hartington was offered his first Cabinet post, as Secretary of State for War. The GOM would become Prime Minister for the first time two years later, and one of his first acts was to demote Hartington to Postmaster General, an unexpected slap in the face to a young MP who had earned the respect of the House of Commons by his highly successful tenure at the War Office, where he was an efficient manager and an even better spokesman for his department in the House of Commons.6 Hartington confessed to his father, the Seventh Duke of Devonshire, that the move by Gladstone was a considerable blow.7 In commenting on other possible posts for himself that were being suggested to Gladstone by Whig members of the Cabinet, Hartington let slip to his father the extent of his disappointment, as well as his thwarted ambition: I found that Granville did not much expect that I should accept the Lord Lieutenancy ... [and Gladstone] admitted there were a good many reasons against it. He said something of the Home Office, but evidently thought that Bruce[8] would be a better man for it, if I did not insist on my claims ... I have accepted the Postmastership ... [but] I am not quite pleased about it and don’t feel sure I have done right.9 This was the first of many occasions on which the old man would treat his younger colleague shabbily. In light of Gladstone’s handling of Chamberlain twelve years later (bringing the Radical agitator into the Cabinet after he had been sitting for less than four years in the Commons),10 it is clear that Gladstone did not take seriously Hartington’s promise as a future Liberal heavyweight.11 Hartington grudgingly agreed to serve as Postmaster, and (as in the War Office) went on for a very successful two years, until December 1870, when Gladstone blindsided him yet again by insisting that he


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go to Dublin Castle as Chief Secretary of the Irish Office. Hartington, who was caught completely off-guard by the announcement, protested that he was ill suited to the entertaining duties of the post, as he was unmarried, and that such a move would be tantamount to political and social exile (in addition to separating him from his friends and family, the new assignment would remove him for most of the year from the London clubs that facilitated the kind of social networking that was essential for aspiring young politicians). Having despised London high society his entire career,12 Gladstone was wholly unsympathetic, and he summoned Hartington to Hawarden for discussions. Gladstone detailed the meeting to Granville, commenting in a patronising tone that ‘Hartington behaved well’ in accepting the offer.13 Hartington’s account of the encounter was rather more candid: he wrote to his father on New Year’s Eve 1870, ‘I suppose you won’t have been much surprised to hear that I was bullied into accepting after I had gone to Hawarden ... [W]hen I got there he explained that my refusal would put the Government in a great difficulty.’14 Gladstone insisted that there were no alternatives to Dublin. Hartington would spend the next three years loyally defending the Prime Minister’s Irish policy, much of which conflicted with his own instincts and better judgement. This unwavering support apparently mattered very little to Gladstone, who on 12 August 1873 wrote to Hartington (with no prior consultation) that there would be a new Irish Chief Secretary moving to Dublin and that Hartington must pack his bags at once and return to the Post Office.15 This was a completely inexplicable move, and Hartington sent a terse reply that betrayed his astonishment and wounded pride: ‘My office ... is at your disposal whenever it may be convenient to you. But I am not at all disposed to go back to the Post Office. I liked the office well enough when I was there, but I should not care to return to it after holding a much more important and interesting office.’16 Lord Spencer, Hartington’s Lord Lieutenant in Dublin, who was also being recalled by Gladstone, confessed to his boss that ‘you have been very shabbily treated about this for Mr G had no right to assume that you wished to leave Ireland ... our going is probably a convenience to the Government, and that is perhaps not flattering to our vanity’.17 When Hartington complained angrily that he was ‘not much pleased by the manner in which it has been done’, Gladstone was determined to put the young MP in his place:


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Gladstone eventually relented, telling Granville on 18 September that ‘Hartington is welcome to remain where he is if he likes ... I think I have been as civil to him as I honestly can be’.19 The episode would leave Gladstone in full agreement with Granville’s assessment of Hartington as behaving at times like a ‘spoilt child’.20 But Hartington was indeed ‘sore’, and this mistreatment at the hands of the GOM would lead him to mistrust the Prime Minster during their remaining decade together on the Liberal front bench. Gladstone undermines Hartington’s leadership It was perhaps at this time that Gladstone began to develop the idea that he had a divine gift in respect of sensing the public’s mood on critical issues of the day; this would lead to a dictatorial style based in part on his religious beliefs.21 Noting Gladstone’s increasingly unpredictable behaviour in the lead-up to the 1874 election, Lord Kimberley wrote that Gladstone could not govern without heroic measures such as franchise reform and that he was not suited to leading the Liberals, as he was prone to go off unexpectedly in his own direction without regard to the effect of his actions on the already-fractious party.22 Lord Selborne wrote contemporaneously that Gladstone’s mind was ‘too one-sided and vehement ... [and lacked] accuracy, equability, and the sense of proportion and breadth’.23 Gladstone surprised his colleagues by calling an election at the height of winter in January 1874 over proposed fiscal legislation, including the abolition of the income tax. The Liberals went down to a heavy defeat, and in the wake of the shocking poll Gladstone quickly grew impatient with life as leader of the opposition. In fact, he rarely attended Commons sittings during 1874, effectively leaving the party leaderless (although he did not formally surrender the reins). In this power vacuum, Hartington emerged as the leading candidate to succeed Gladstone as Liberal leader in the House of Commons. In addition to his considerable name recognition, Hartington relied on his years of service as a highly effective and respected senior minister to fend off other candidates for the leadership, including the Radical William Forster. When Gladstone finally stood down officially in January 1875, Hartington was elected unanimously to replace him in the House of Commons (although, tellingly, he did not have the GOM’s endorsement).


enough to understand I should go’ or at his choice to say ‘my place was not vacant and you had no right to think or speak of it to anyone’ ... Hartington has many good and fine qualities besides his birth: but I am tempted to say he sells them rather dear.18


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Timothy Moore

For the next five years Hartington would establish himself as the big beast of the party, but he discovered that his predecessor, even in ‘retirement’, would find ways to continue the pattern of harassment and humiliation that was the hallmark of Gladstone–Hartington relations during the 1868 parliament. By the autumn of 1876, Gladstone had re-emerged from the backbenches with the publication of ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Questions of the East’, in which he attacked the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire in subduing the Bulgarian rebellion of that year. Gladstone’s raucous contributions during the episode caused Hartington considerable embarrassment, as the new leader realised that the issue lay along an ideological fault-line in his party, with many moderate and right-wing Liberals supporting the ‘Palmerstonian policy’ of stopping the Russians encroaching on Ottoman territory, and the left wing of the party following Gladstone’s seemingly proRussian lead. Along with many in the Cabinet, Hartington was exasperated and even ‘disgusted’ by Gladstone’s participation in Radical MP A.J. Mundella’s National Conference on the Eastern Question, which was being convened even as Turkey and Russia were beginning formal discussions in Constantinople.24 Hartington feared rightly that Gladstone’s ‘violent’ mindset on the issue25 was risking the break-up of the Liberal Party.26 In a brazenly direct challenge to Hartington’s authority as leader, the GOM introduced his ‘Five Resolutions’ in April 1877, intending to force reforms on the Turkish regime. Hartington’s irritation was made clear to Granville on 25 May, when he wrote that upon the Eastern Question Mr G. has taken the lead ... and is looked upon by a large portion of the party as their leader. Whether if you, I, or others were out of the way, he could unite the party on the subject, is not the question. While we remain responsible for the management of the party in Parliament, Mr G. cannot expect that we should entirely subordinate our opinions and judgements to his.27 Hartington took a firm line against Gladstone’s proposals – and with the full support of the shadow Cabinet (to use an anachronism), he applied a great deal of pressure on Liberal backbenchers to oppose the measure. When Gladstone was forced into a very public climb-down, it was the old man’s turn to feel humiliation, especially after the decision of senior Liberals to oppose him was deliberately leaked to the press.28 Gladstone was furious with Hartington, and he wrote to Granville on 19 May to complain about ‘lukewarm aristocrats’ who blocked progressive


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legislation. The Liberal Party, the GOM believed, required an ‘electoral re-alignment’.29 Hartington refused to be Gladstone’s puppet, and as the former leader grew more unpredictable after his ‘exploding conscience’ reaction to the Bulgarian suppression, Hartington and many Whigs began to subscribe to the Tory line on Gladstone; they too had grown to resent his ‘vanity, lack of earthiness, dilatoriness, spiritual arrogance, and weak-kneed internationalism’.30 Hartington’s skilful management of the party31 had won respect on both sides of the House of Commons, and he appeared all the more responsible and statesmanlike in light of his predecessor’s erratic and destabilising interventions.32 Gladstone supporter A.J. Mundella lamented in May 1877 that many Liberal MPs – even those on the Radical side – were ‘raging’ against Gladstone.33 Henry Lucy, the journalist and astute parliamentary observer, noted the contrast between Hartington’s growing stature and influence and the GOM’s decline in the House of Commons: ‘[There is] a strong personal animosity towards Gladstone existent in this House ... [and it is] by no means confined to the Conservative benches.’34 Gladstone, Lucy contended, had inspired the contempt of his colleagues by his ‘restlessness, uncertainty, self-contradiction, and general recklessness of conduct’. Uniquely suited to make these types of observation, Lucy predicted that Liberal MPs would reject any attempt by Gladstone to return to the leadership by a vote of three to one.35 Historians have missed the significance of this strong anti-Gladstone Liberal sentiment in respect of the 1880 general election, as it would certainly have played a major role in the GOM’s decision to bypass the parliamentary party altogether; he would appeal instead to ‘the people’ in a campaign that many Liberals considered to be ‘demagogic and distasteful’.36 Gladstone denies Hartington his crown Gladstone’s behaviour in 1876 left little doubt in Hartington’s mind that the former Prime Minister was plotting a political comeback. It must have brought some measure of relief to Hartington, therefore, when Gladstone (without consulting the leadership) chose the Conservative seat of Midlothian (Edinburgh) to make his appeal to the masses. Although Hartington realised that it would be difficult for him to remain leader if Gladstone were to take the seat from the Tories and return to Parliament with a popular mandate, he had every reason to believe that the Liberals would capture a majority but Gladstone would lose in Scotland. He was, in other words, hoping against hope that Gladstone’s grandstanding in the marginal seat would backfire.




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In the meantime, Hartington was placed in an uncomfortable and humiliating position by his former leader, as Gladstone campaigned as if he had already regained the leadership. It took a concerted effort by Granville, Forster and others to convince Hartington to remain as party leader until the election was over.37 Although Hartington complained that Gladstone’s independent electioneering was making a mockery of his own position as nominal leader, Granville and Forster persuaded him that a leadership crisis at that point would destroy the Liberals’ electoral prospects.38 The voters of Midlothian elected Gladstone with a healthy majority, and the GOM’s campaign rhetoric had renewed and re-energised his popular following in all corners of Great Britain. Even in the face of this resounding Liberal triumph nationally (which was, of course, attributed almost entirely to Gladstone), Hartington sounded out his colleagues about the possibility of the former Prime Minister taking a subservient role in the Cabinet.39 As early as October 1879, Hartington was consulting Granville about the likelihood of the GOM returning to the Treasury as Chancellor.40 Granville advised Hartington that they should at least be seen to offer the former leader a prominent role in the Cabinet, thereby pre-empting any claim by Gladstone that he had been fobbed off. Hartington’s private secretary, Reginald Brett, assured his chief that the gossip in the House of Commons confirmed that most members thought that Gladstone could never return as leader as long as Hartington was ‘staunch’.41 Gladstone meanwhile was making it clear via press leaks that any offer of a subordinate office would be an insult – a sentiment that Hartington alone among the incoming administration seemed able to appreciate. The Queen’s views on the matter were well established. She wrote to her secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, on 3 April 1880 that the Queen cannot deny she (Liberal as she has ever been, but never Radical or democratic) thinks ... [Gladstone’s possible return to power] a great calamity for the country and the peace of Europe ... she would sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a dictator.42


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Hartington wrote to his father on 13 April that, although Gladstone was consumed with ambition to be Prime Minster once again, he would never admit it publicly. With the Queen’s undoubted support for him, Hartington assured his father that a Cavendish premiership


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was ‘hopeful’. However, he later complained bitterly to Brett that ‘[Gladstone] will take no place except the first – quite decided as to that ... [He pretends that] he does not wish to come back, but evidently does. I don’t think this is a pleasant prospect for us. Burn this.’43 The awkwardness of the situation for both Hartington and Gladstone was underscored by a chance encounter between the two men in mid-April, in which neither mentioned the ‘leadership crisis’, opting instead to comment on the weather.44 As the scale of the Liberal victory became clear (and clearer too Gladstone’s determination to return to Downing Street), Hartington realised that he could not accept a premiership offer from the Queen, especially after an icy face-to-face meeting with Gladstone in which the GOM threatened to disrupt the government from the backbenches if he were not offered the keys to 10 Downing Street.45 Not surprisingly, Gladstone’s threat of derailing a Hartington premiership was received with stony-faced silence by the outgoing leader, who wrote to Granville that he regretted Gladstone’s intransigence. He nonetheless resolved to convince the Queen to send for the GOM – a task made much easier by Hartington’s assurances to Her Majesty that Gladstone could not serve long as Prime Minister because of his poor health.46 Hartington confided to the Queen that he felt he had been treated unfairly by Gladstone and that the latter’s health would ensure that the leadership would return to its rightful holder(s) sooner rather than later.47 The Queen noted the complete absence of affection for Gladstone by Hartington. Little could she have known that Gladstone had become Hartington’s bête noire, as the GOM had cost him the premiership – the prize that he (by that time) desperately wanted, and one that he and many of his colleagues considered to be naturally his. Gladstone’s lack of gratitude for Hartington’s sacrifice was remarkably petty; when thanking Granville and Hartington for surrendering their positions atop the party ‘for the sake of the country’, Gladstone deliberately dropped his voice at the mention of ‘Hartington’ (he noted smugly that some in the crowd ‘did not catch the word’).48 The extraordinary nature of this episode cannot be overstated – this was the first and only time in British history that the leader of a political party failed to become Prime Minister after winning a Commons majority in a general election.



An embittered end Gladstone’s frequent talk of retirement would frustrate Hartington throughout the 1880 parliament, and the former’s Irish policy during this time would be taken by Hartington as evidence of the Prime


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Minister’s complete withdrawal from reality (he accused Gladstone of living in a dream world in 1885 as the Prime Minister moved to accommodate Irish Nationalist demands). Gladstone would, in turn, view Hartington increasingly as a deeply ignorant man who was spectacularly unsuited to dealing with issues of national importance.49 In a precursor of sorts to the Hawarden Kite, Gladstone attacked Hartington and his Whig following via Herbert Gladstone’s article in the Fortnightly Review (October 1885), in which the Whigs were described as ‘disconsolate and irritable’ over Irish affairs – an attitude which ‘increased perplexity by a total want of initiative’.50 Sensing that Hartington was attempting to establish himself as a ‘cautious home ruler’ for the purpose of forming a Liberal government following the imminent collapse of a Gladstone administration, the GOM warned his Whig colleague that, should he be forced into retirement, he would not remain silent on the backbenches over the Irish Question – a thinly veiled threat to sabotage a Hartington premiership (a tactic that had been used to great effect by the GOM five years previously).51 Realising that a compromise was impossible, Hartington complained to Lord Derby that the self-absorbed Gladstone would consider no one’s solutions but his own.52 Hartington and his colleagues resented Gladstone’s patronising view that they needed to be ‘taught’ about the Irish problem in order to understand it fully, and it is possible that Gladstone’s open courting of Parnell was seen by Hartington as dishonouring the memory of his dead brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish, who was murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in May 1882 by Irish extremists.53 In January 1885, Hartington complained privately to the MP Drummond Wolff, member of the socalled Tory ginger group, The Fourth Party, that Gladstone was ‘a man without any sense of responsibility and a man of damnable ideas’.54 In January 1886, Hartington told Granville that Gladstone had treated his party in an unprecedentedly dishonourable way.55 When it finally occurred six months later, the split of 1886 would seem rather anticlimatic when viewed against the backdrop of two decades of bad blood between Hartington and Gladstone. The post-secession years would see the animosity between the two men grow even stronger. After Gladstone claimed in 1892 that Hartington had tried and failed to form a government in 1880, Hartington (by that time the Eighth Duke of Devonshire) leaked accounts to The Times that exposed Gladstone as a liar.56 Shortly before the division on the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893, Hartington broadsided Gladstone publicly, releasing decades of pent-up bitterness in a speech at Edinburgh: ‘The statesman who is proposing this new, this unprecedented, this


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revolutionary change in our constitution is not what his followers hail him, a victorious chief. He is a defeated and discredited statesman.’57

Gladstone’s cool relations with Hartington over the years might have been expected, given the dissimilarities in their social backgrounds and political outlooks. It is somewhat surprising, however, to find that the GOM’s relationship with the other future leader of the Liberal Unionists, Chamberlain, was decidedly colder and more embittered. As with Hartington–Gladstone relations, scholars have failed to understand fully the extent of the pre-1886 animosity between Chamberlain and Gladstone. And, as with Hartington–Gladstone relations, an analysis of the GOM’s dealings with Chamberlain must begin with an appreciation of the considerable gap in age and political experience between the two men. When the thirty-nine-year-old Chamberlain entered the House of Commons in a June 1876 by-election, Gladstone was in his forty-third year as an MP – and, at the age of sixty-six, the former Prime Minister was a contemporary of Chamberlain’s father. Although Chamberlain (unlike Hartington) came to Parliament with some experience in politics (having served for two-and-a-half years as Mayor of Birmingham) and had established himself as a successful business owner, Gladstone would harbour a dislike for Chamberlain from the very beginning of the latter’s parliamentary career, viewing him as a novice and an upstart. Chamberlain arrived in Westminster as a confident Radical leader with strongly held views on the future of the Liberal Party and the country. His experience as a large business owner and a grassroots political organiser, as well as his highly successful tenure as Mayor of Britain’s third-largest city, gave Chamberlain an air of ambition and self-confidence that Hartington had lacked when he became an MP. Hartington had also lacked another of Chamberlain’s political strengths: a gift for public speaking. This talent was made even more impressive by a sharp mind that could process new information quickly, turning even the most potentially crippling of parliamentary interventions into a winning point for his own side. As Peter Marsh has noted, ‘the awkward plodder of the Edgbaston Debating Society was outstripping the best Oxford and Cambridge could produce’.58 Chamberlain, with his impressive talents and his large popular following in the Radical community, would pose a greater threat to Gladstone’s grip on the Liberal leadership than any other politician. Chamberlain


Gladstone and Chamberlain: ‘when differences disclose baseness’


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brought with him an agenda in 1876, storming into the House of Commons vowing to remake the Liberal Party on a new, Radical basis. But, unlike most young Liberals from the party’s left wing, Chamberlain did not subscribe to the ‘demigod’ view of Gladstone; he viewed the former Prime Minister with neither affection nor deference. Gladstone was well aware of Chamberlain’s less-than-golden view of him before the latter had entered Parliament. Shortly before the 1874 general election, Chamberlain wrote a prominent article in the Fortnightly Review in which he argued that Gladstone’s leadership of the party was ‘hypocritical’ and ‘unprincipled’, as the Prime Minister stumbled into an extraordinary January dissolution without a coherent legislative programme or the enthusiastic support of the Liberal base. This was an unwelcome and damaging intervention that Gladstone would not soon forget.59 But Chamberlain understood that Gladstone’s waning career (as it was then thought to be) could be turned into an advantage for a developing Radical programme. He commented to Charles Dilke in October 1876 that Gladstone could be a useful springboard for their new, more ambitious Radical agenda: ‘if [Gladstone] were to come back for a few years (he can’t continue in public life for much longer) he would probably do much for us, and pave the way for much more.’60 Gladstone, however, had his own Radical following, and he resented the rookie MP’s audacity in ignoring the parliamentary pecking order. Gladstone scuppers Chamberlain’s programme A mutual antipathy between Gladstone and Chamberlain would develop following Gladstone’s emergence from retirement in 1876 over the Bulgarian Horrors episode. Chamberlain’s planned domestic reforms – free schools, church disestablishment, electoral reform – would be undercut by the Liberal preoccupation with foreign policy that resulted from the GOM’s sensational pamphlet. Chamberlain, already viewed by Gladstone as an ‘insincere careerist’,61 began to see the GOM as a tired and ineffectual has-been, especially after the latter’s humiliating climb-down over his Five Resolutions (see above). At this time, he privately switched his allegiance to Hartington in respect of the party leadership (describing the Whig leader as ‘able, honourable and straightforward’),62 while claiming to Jesse Collings, his parliamentary lieutenant, that the GOM was ‘erratic and cannot be relied on with absolute confidence’.63 These events can be seen as the beginnings of a partnership between Hartington and Chamberlain – established nearly a decade before they would jointly lead the most politically significant splinter party in British history, although no one could have foretold


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this development in 1877, despite the very clear effort of Whigs and Radicals to forge a working relationship in opposition.64 Chamberlain’s National Liberal Federation worked tirelessly in the closing years of the 1874–80 parliament for a Radical Liberal victory at the general election, which they expected could come as early as 1877. When Disraeli finally went to the polls in March 1880, Chamberlain rallied the Liberals in Birmingham and the West Midlands to a victory over the Tories that was remarkable in its scale. The Liberals captured an overwhelming majority of the region’s seats, and the National Liberal Federation demonstrated that ‘caucus politics’ could produce electoral advantages for the Liberals. Gladstone, however, dismissed Chamberlain’s approach as ‘sectionalism’,65 opting instead to appeal to the entire country on a ‘great question’ platform, whether it be the Eastern Question in 1880 or the Irish Question six years later. It is impossible to estimate which strategy was more effective in 1880, but it is clear that both were hugely successful for the party – resulting in the return of a surprisingly large Liberal majority that was, as the Conservative Lord Cranbrook put it, ‘like thunder from a clear sky’. But the competing electioneering philosophies of Gladstone and Chamberlain would bring the two men into direct personal conflict for the first time, as Chamberlain complained that the GOM had hijacked the credit for a victory that his National Liberal Federation had made possible, while Gladstone’s view of Chamberlain as an attention-seeking trouble-maker crystallised. Deterioration of Gladstone–Chamberlain relations in government Although Chamberlain was returned to the House of Commons with an even greater Radical following and had established himself as the de facto leader of the Radical Liberals, he had been an MP for less than four years – and Gladstone was inclined to keep him on the backbenches. Chamberlain was determined, however, to capitalise on his contribution to the Liberal victory, and he made no secret of his desire to start his own left-wing party if Gladstone did not reward him with a Cabinet post.66 Scandalised by Chamberlain’s blackmail manoeuvre, Gladstone was nonetheless convinced by John Bright and William Harcourt to appease Chamberlain by appointing him President of the Board of Trade.67 But Gladstone despised Chamberlain for bullying his way into a government to which he was not fully committed, for the Prime Minster knew that his new Cabinet colleague from Birmingham viewed the government (as indeed he viewed Gladstone) purely as a stopgap measure.




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Gladstone anticipated the difficulties Chamberlain would cause him during the coming years as the GOM struggled to keep the party’s focus on foreign policy, while Chamberlain waged a defiant battle for domestic reforms that culminated in his Unauthorised Programme of 1885. The 1880–5 correspondence between the two men is riddled with terse letters that betray a very cool and businesslike relationship superficially, but also an underlying sense of mistrust and antipathy. Less than seven months into his new Cabinet position, Chamberlain infuriated Gladstone by threatening to resign over the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland.68 Although the letter in which Chamberlain made the resignation threat was lengthy and heartfelt, Gladstone could manage only a short paragraph in reply that revealed his irritation towards his younger colleague: ‘I have received your letter and I have read it, I need hardly say, with great anxiety ... I hope that we shall come to some decision, but take at least a day to consider the matter ... .’69 In April 1881, another disagreement over Irish legislation occasioned an attack on Gladstone by Chamberlain: ‘The first draft of the [Land] Bill as explained to the Cabinet by Mr Gladstone contained provisions for fair rents and free sale but not for fixity of tenure. The futility of this arrangement was explained to [Gladstone] but he was obstinate and said he would resign sooner than accept a change.’70 Chamberlain’s view of Gladstone as an impulsive dictator (thought by historians to have developed much later) was confirmed during this episode, and he noted that at the next Cabinet meeting, just two days later, Gladstone abruptly changed his position and introduced a revised proposal – ‘without a word of explanation’.71 Gladstone struggled to muzzle Chamberlain over the coming years as the Birmingham MP made speeches attacking the House of Lords and advocating franchise reform as well as church disestablishment. In a marvellously condescending letter to Chamberlain on 5 February 1885, Gladstone lectured ‘young Joe’ as follows: Every Liberal Government since before and after the time of Lord Aberdeen has had one or more Radical members in it who have sat as representative men. But these gentlemen, Molesworth, Gibson, Bright, Stansfield [sic], have not found it necessary to sustain their character as ministers, as a general rule ... by drawing on the future and opening up questions not in immediate reach with a view to sustaining faith out of doors in the integrity of their principles.72


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The fact that Gladstone felt he could afford to be so deliberately offensive towards Chamberlain in this letter is a clear indication that the


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relationship between the two men had disintegrated beyond repair – a full sixteen months before their final split in 1886.

As the Liberal government began to collapse in May 1885, Chamberlain’s abhorrence of Gladstone became all-consuming. In January 1885 Chamberlain claimed in speeches at Birmingham that the GOM’s retirement ‘may be necessary’ to deal effectively with the Irish Question, and he referred to Hartington and Harcourt as being the Liberal stalwarts with the authority and parliamentary support to bring about such a ‘change’.73 Cooke and Vincent have speculated that this open discussion of his demise caused Gladstone’s outbreak of insomnia/nervous tension in early 1885 – a time when Hartington was agreeable to him ‘except behind his back’.74 By October Chamberlain was considering throwing all his political weight into an effort to destroy Gladstone’s leadership of the party. Writing to Harcourt, he proposed running a Radical candidate in every constituency, claiming that ‘if we [Radicals] go into direct opposition [to Gladstone] we might smash him’.75 T. W. Reid, a Liberal journalist and editor of the Leeds Mercury, preoccupied himself with these couplike machinations by Chamberlain, and it is clear that his view of a scheming Chamberlain as Gladstone’s mortal enemy was shared by his friend Herbert Gladstone (and by the GOM himself), as Herbert flew the Hawarden Kite shortly after receiving a warning from Reid that Chamberlain was engaged in a subversive campaign to oust Gladstone as leader in late 1885.76 When the Liberals returned to office in February 1886, Gladstone (hoping to rid himself finally of a troublesome and distrusted colleague) offered Chamberlain the Presidency of the Local Government Board – a sideways move that was intended to be an insult to the Radical leader, who had five years of Cabinet experience. Gladstone was stunned by what he viewed as Chamberlain’s shameless opportunism (as opposed to Hartington’s ‘dignified’ refusal of office) when the latter accepted the offer even though it was clear that he would oppose the central plank of the GOM’s election platform: Irish home rule. Chamberlain was forced to overlook this very public slight by Gladstone, but when the GOM gratuitously added to his indignity by attempting to cut the salary of Jesse Collings (who was to serve as Chamberlain’s parliamentary secretary at the Local Government Board), Chamberlain complained bitterly, not least because Collings, a relatively poor man, needed the income, revealing the extent of his anger to Harcourt: ‘Damn! Damn!! Damn!!! ... Is it possible to act an


Chamberlain’s open rebellion


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ungracious part in a more ungracious way than Mr Gladstone has done?’77

Chamberlain’s resignation over the government’s Irish land purchase proposals in March 1886 was greeted by Gladstone with an undisguised sense of glee; he confessed to Rosebery that nothing had given him as much satisfaction in politics as had Chamberlain’s departure from the government.78 In an act of pettiness reminiscent of his mock note of thanks to Hartington for surrendering the leadership in 1880, Gladstone used the occasion of Chamberlain’s resignation statement to embarrass his colleague before the House of Commons; as Chamberlain reached the height of emotion in the ‘speech of his life’, Gladstone used a procedural point to disrupt the statement, claiming that Gladstone did not have permission from the Queen to mention pending land purchase legislation. Chamberlain’s fury is apparent in his subsequent correspondence with the GOM, especially following his discovery that the Queen had never in fact attempted to place any restrictions on the content of his statement.79 Released from any need to maintain a tactful public silence over their mutual loathing, the two men would acrimoniously attack each other in the years following the Liberal break-up. Only months after offering Chamberlain a Cabinet post, Gladstone remarked that the Birmingham Radical was ‘a most dangerous man, restless, ambitious, unscrupulous’.80 Echoing the sentiments of his father, Herbert Gladstone wrote to his mother that an intellectually honest Chamberlain would have no choice but to support the Home Rule Bill, but that his ‘vanity’ and ‘obstinacy’ would prevent him from doing so.81 A month after the Home Rule division, Chamberlain rejoined that ‘as long as [Gladstone] is rampaging about there is no hope for the Liberal Party. He has developed a malignity lately which would do credit to an Invincible or a Thug,[82] & is evidently absolutely careless of the future of his Party or his Country providing that he can crush his recent colleagues and supporters.’83 It is no wonder that Gladstone commented in July 1886 that ‘what vexes me is when differences disclose baseness, which sometimes happens’.84 Chamberlain could have written much the same.


Gladstone bids good riddance to Chamberlain

Gladstone as founder of the Liberal Unionist Party This very public falling-out between the two men after 1886 is well documented. What is less known is the fact that they practically despised


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each other from the very beginning of their political association. Similarly, there has been little coverage of Gladstone’s difficult relationship with Hartington from 1868. In both cases, Gladstone’s inability to deal with his younger colleagues in a collegial way undermined the strength of the Liberal governments over which he presided. Of course, there were important policy disagreements among the three Liberal heavyweights, as well as competing leadership ambitions, and scholars have detailed these aspects of the Liberal meltdown at length. But the extent to which the underlying personal animosity among the trio shaped their political relationships has escaped serious comment. While it is arguable whether Gladstone could ever have sustained a close working relationship with Chamberlain (such was the level of animosity and competition between them), it is doubtless true that his treatment of Hartington needlessly placed the two men at odds from the beginning of Gladstone’s first premiership. Hence Gladstone created the only unifying factor – a genuine and intense dislike of himself – between the Whig and Radical leaders during the decade before the introduction of home rule, leading to a Hartington– Chamberlain partnership that would foreshadow the rise of the Liberal Unionist Party.

Notes 1. Discounting Chamberlain and his followers (who were largely sympathetic to at least some form of home rule for Ireland), contemporary estimates put the number of hardcore anti-home rule Liberals in the House of Commons at less than half the actual number of Liberal MPs (93) who helped to vote the measure down. See Peter Fraser, ‘The Liberal Unionist Alliance: Chamberlain, Hartington, and the Conservatives, 1886–1904’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962), p. 58. 2. Donald Southgate, The Passing of the Whigs, 1832–1886 (London, 1962), p. 299. 3. Ibid. Although anti-Gladstone quotes from the Whig community abound, especially after Gladstone’s first tenure as chancellor in 1855, Hartington took particular care to express himself in a very tactful and measured way – both in his public statements and in private correspondence. A ‘deeply civilised man’, he rarely ventured beyond carefully considered statements regarding political disagreements with his colleagues, a practice which makes his strongly worded personal condemnations of Gladstone stand out all the more. By May 1885, at the height of his disillusionment with the GOM, Hartington wrote, ‘I hate my party and I hate my colleagues and the sooner I have done with them the better I shall be pleased.’ 4. A.B. Cooke and J.R. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974), p. 56.




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5. Patrick Jackson, The Last of the Whigs (London, 1994), p. 122. Jackson’s excellent political biography of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire comments on Gladstone’s mistreatment of Hartington over the years, but it fails to reveal the underlying animosity between the two men that developed as a result of that mistreatment. 6. Hartington had indeed lost his North Lancashire seat at the general election of 1868, but he quickly re-entered the House of Commons for the Welsh constituency of Radnor after the local candidate stood down. On the basis of his decade of service in the House, his sterling performance as Secretary of State for War, and his brief time as an ex-MP between elections, Hartington’s election defeat did not justify Gladstone stripping him of his seniority and ejecting him from the Cabinet. 7. Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 40. 8. Henry Austin Bruce, First Baron Aberdare (1815–95). 9. Hartington to the Duke of Devonshire, 7–8 Dec. 1868, Devonshire Papers, Chatsworth, Derbyshire (hereafter Chats.) 340.388 and 390. Far from being the aloof, politically ineffectual aristocrat who was happier in the hunting fields or at the races than in Westminster, Hartington was from the beginning a quietly ambitious parliamentary operator, and Gladstone’s trampling of these ambitions was a slight that Hartington and his friends would neither forgive nor forget. 10. This treatment stemmed from cold political calculation rather than any personal or ideological affinity, as explained later. 11. Colin Matthew’s characterisation of the ‘grey conventionality of Hartington – moderately competent, politically respectable, but sterile’ is an apt description of Gladstone’s dismissive view of Hartington in these early years. See H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), p. 106. 12. T.A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party (Oxford, 1988), p. 29. 13. Quoted in Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 44. 14. Hartington to the Duke of Devonshire, 31 Dec. 1868, Chats. 340.450. 15. Hartington had mentioned to Gladstone in March 1873 that he wished to leave Dublin Castle, but this comment was clearly meant to be understood in the context of a Cabinet reshuffle following the next general election. 16. Bernard Holland, Life of the Duke of Devonshire (London, 1911), vol. I, p. 123. 17. Spencer to Hartington, 17 Aug. 1873, Chats. 354.232. Quoted in Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 50. 18. Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville (Oxford, 1962), vol. I, p. 872. 19. Ibid., p. 898. 20. Ibid., p. 900. 21. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 28. 22. Ibid., p. 30. 23. Ibid. 24. Hartington to Granville, 26 Nov. 1876. Quoted in Holland, Life of the Duke of Devonshire, vol. I, pp. 183–4. 25. Hartington to Harcourt, Jan. 1879, Harcourt Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, AI 78 (91). 26. Far from serving as a focal point of Liberal unity (as he is often portrayed in the pre-home rule era), Gladstone was already becoming a lighting rod for


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27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

party disunity, and Hartington would be forced to draw upon all his abilities as an unflappable and strategic parliamentarian to prevent the party from splintering in opposition. Hartington to Granville, 25 May 1877. Quoted in Holland, Life of the Duke of Devonshire, vol. I, pp. 198–200. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 61. Sir Charles Dilke thought that the surprising opposition to Gladstone’s resolutions by many Radical MPs, including Joseph Cowen and E.A. Leatham, was due to a ‘personal hatred of Gladstone’. See Dilke’s memoir, quoted in S.L. Gwynn and G.M. Tuckwell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke (London, 1917), vol. I, pp. 221, 223–4. Gladstone to Granville, 19 May 1877, in Ramm, Gladstone and Lord Granville, vol. I, p. 40. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 63. Some historians have argued that ‘Hartington succeeded in reuniting a fractious party in a way that Gladstone could never have done’. T.A. Jenkins, ‘Hartington, Chamberlain and the Unionist Alliance’, Parliamentary History, 11, pt. 1 (1992), p. 109. Hartington wrote in Oct. 1878 that the GOM was becoming more ‘excitable and active’, thereby making impossible the already difficult task of leading the Liberals in opposition. In early 1879, he complained that the GOM had become ‘violent’ over the Eastern Question – so much so that Hartington was tempted ‘to become a jingo again’. Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 92. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 69. Entry for 13 Aug. 1877 in Henry Lucy, Diary of Two Parliaments (London and New York, 1855–86), vol. I, pp. 315–16. Ibid. J.L. Hammond and M.R.D. Foot, Gladstone and Liberalism (London, 1967), p. 105. Hartington wrote to Granville in early December 1879, urging that they should take a tougher line with Gladstone if the latter insisted on campaigning as if he were the real party leader: ‘It seems to me that it is only fair to the Queen, to the country, to the party, and to myself, that [Gladstone’s status as the de facto leader] should be acknowledged at once.’ If Gladstone were to refuse such an acknowledgement, Hartington would ‘be prepared to insist on my resignation ... and to point out that ... if he refuses to resume the nominal position which he now occupies virtually, the responsibility of the leaving the party without leadership does not rest with me’. Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 103. Granville to Hartington, 3 Dec. 1879, Chats. 340.856. The fact that Hartington did not consult Gladstone directly during this critical episode was a reflection of the great distance between the two men – a distance that was more personal than political. Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 102. Brett to Hartington, Dec. 1879, Chats. 340.858. G.E. Buckle (ed.), Letters of Queen Victoria, Second Series (London, 1930–2), vol. III, p. 73. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 135. J.L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain (London, 1935), vol. I, p. 295. Jackson, Last of the Whigs, p. 117.




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Timothy Moore

46. Buckle (ed.), Letters, Second Series, vol. III, p. 82. 47. Ibid. Hartington’s extensive correspondence with the Queen during this time reveals that he often acted as an intermediary between the GOM and Her Majesty. Having had a famously cool and difficult relationship with the Queen through his entire career (although he longed for her respect), Gladstone must have resented Hartington’s close ties with the head of state. 48. Ramm, Gladstone and Lord Granville, vol. II, pp. 553–5. 49. Gladstone thought Hartington ‘densely ignorant as to any history beyond his experience’. See F.E. Hamer (ed.), The Personal Papers of Lord Rendel, containing his unpublished conversations with Mr. Gladstone (1888 to 1898) and other famous statesmen; selections from letters and papers reflecting the thought and manners of the period; and intimate pictures of parliament, politics, and society (London, 1931), p. 86. 50. Southgate, Passing of the Whigs, p. 385. 51. Gladstone to Hartington, 11 Sept. 1885. Quoted in Holland, Life of the Duke of Devonshire, vol. II, pp. 86–8. 52. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 270. 53. Hartington wrote shortly after his brother’s murder that the Irish Nationalists were an enemy of the Liberal Party. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 190. 54. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 186. 55. Southgate, Passing of the Whigs, p. 401. For further treatment of Gladstone’s self-righteous and high-handed approach to Irish affairs, see Paul Bew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in M. Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007). In the lecture from which this contribution is drawn, Bew recalls Henry Labouchere’s assertion that he did not object to Gladstone’s claim of having a card up his sleeve for every occasion; rather it was the latter’s claim that God placed the card there in the first place that irritated Labouchere and so many other of Gladstone’s contemporaries. <www.rte.ie/ radio1/speakingillofthedead> (accessed 21 March 2010). 56. Hartington to Russell, Feb. 1892, Chats. 340.2444. 57. The Times, 15 Apr. 1893. 58. Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, CT, 1994), p. 308. 59. Peter Fraser, Joseph Chamberlain: Radicalism and Empire, 1868–1914 (London, 1966), p. 20. 60. D.A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972), p. 76. 61. Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1968), p. 349. 62. Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol. I, p. 272. 63. Jenkins, Whiggery, p. 91. 64. Angus Hawkins, British Party Politics, 1852–1886 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 220. 65. Hamer, Liberal Politics, p. 59. Gladstone thought this tactic obstructed the will of the majority. 66. Chamberlain to Collings, 27 Apr. 1880, Joseph Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham, 5/16/93. 67. Richard Jay, Joseph Chamberlain: A Political Study (Oxford, 1981), p. 45. 68. See Joseph Chamberlain and C.H.D. Howard (ed.), A Political Memoir, 1880–92 (London, 1953), p. 10.


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69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol. I, p. 329. Chamberlain, Political Memoir, p. 15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 114. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 25. Ibid., p. 29. Hamer, Liberal Politics, p. 101. Ibid., p. 114. Marsh, Chamberlain, p. 351. Ibid., p. 348. Chamberlain, Political Memoir, p. 207. Marsh, Chamberlain, p. 255. Fraser, Joseph Chamberlain, p. 81. These were notorious terrorist groups of the time – one in Ireland, the other in India. 83. Chamberlain to Henry James, 14 July 1886. Quoted in Marsh, Chamberlain, p. 255. 84. Fraser, Joseph Chamberlain, p. 81.




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British Liberals and the Irish Home Rule crisis: the dynamics of division Graham Goodlad

High and low politics and the Home Rule crisis In the three decades since the publication of A. B. Cooke and John Vincent’s The Governing Passion, the British dimension of the Home Rule crisis of 1885–6 has attracted considerable attention from historians. Although there can be little doubt of the book’s importance, or of its grounding in extensive archival research, few scholars have accorded an unqualified welcome to its underlying premise. The Governing Passion depicted Gladstone’s espousal of Home Rule, and other politicians’ responses to his actions, as functions of a self-interested competition for power and place in a rarefied high political environment. The Irish question, according to Cooke and Vincent, was relevant to politicians only insofar as it affected relationships within a tightly enclosed Westminster arena: it was, in short, ‘the temporary and particular name given in the 1880s to a continuous and permanent existential problem which party managers inflict upon themselves’.1 The assault on the thesis of The Governing Passion came from a number of directions. In the mid-1980s the diverse research of several scholars, including one of the present volume’s editors, added depth to our understanding of the Irish question. Home Rule appeared not as an abstract label, of passing utility in the metropolitan power game, but as a considered response to a complex of political, religious, economic and social issues.2 Meanwhile Terry Jenkins’ use of a memorandum by Gladstone, dated 14 November 1885, cast doubt on the suggestion that Home Rule was merely a short-term tactical expedient, decided upon only after the Liberal leader had taken office in February 1886.3


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In 1988, W. C. Lubenow published a detailed analysis of parliamentary voting patterns that redirected attention to the importance of ideology in determining Liberal MPs’ responses to Home Rule.4 Lubenow took this perspective further, a few years later, in a discussion of the difficulties that Liberals faced in dealing with the concept of nationalism.5 Although Westminster remained the centre of action, the picture which emerged from the work of these historians was more complex than the one painted by Cooke and Vincent. In a separate development, a number of historians began to examine more closely the links between high and low politics. The late Colin Matthew’s essay on ‘Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics’ demonstrated how public speaking, transmitted to an enlarged electorate through the medium of an active daily press, enabled politicians to address and influence a national constituency.6 Franchise extension in 1867 and 1884 compelled political leaders to consider the importance of extraparliamentary organisation and of presenting their message to a wider audience. Although it was dismissed in The Governing Passion as marginal to the concerns of practitioners of high politics,7 there is evidence that Westminster ambitions were being pursued in part through the cultivation of opinion at the local level. An example of this is provided by Michael Hurst’s study of Joseph Chamberlain’s West Midlands political base, in which he demonstrated his subject’s concern to preserve his radical credentials while distancing himself from Gladstone’s Home Rule scheme. Hurst stressed the care that Chamberlain took, in addressing the Birmingham Liberal ‘Two Thousand’ on 21 April 1886, to criticise the details of the Bill, rather than presenting outright opposition to the principle of Irish self-government.8 The publication of the final volumes of the Gladstone Diaries, together with the approach of the centenary of Gladstone’s death in 1898, focused attention on the Grand Old Man’s actions and motivations. Max Weber’s notion of the ‘charismatic leader’ was applied to Gladstone by Christopher Harvie in an important essay on popular political culture, and the concept was further developed by Eugenio Biagini.9 More recently, the latter has shown how the Home Rule issue helped to create a politics of moral conscience, which influenced the nature of Liberalism down to the early twentieth century.10 From the work of these scholars has come a sense of Gladstone as a political leader of a novel and distinctive kind, whose persona enabled him to bridge the traditional world of parliamentary politics and the world of provincial Liberalism and nonconformity, with particular success in the peripheral communities of the Celtic fringe. The dangers, as well as the positive potential of


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this type of leadership, formed a key theme of Jonathan Parry’s study of The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Parry depicted a Gladstone whose preference for moralistic crusading appealed to the emotions of popular radicalism, while alienating representatives of the party’s Whig Liberal tradition. The latter, according to Parry, was grounded in the concept of national and imperial integration under a responsible, rational, executive-minded elite. It was wholly at odds with the populist, evangelical political style of Gladstonian Liberalism.11 This chapter builds upon the insights of these and other historians by examining more closely the interconnections between high and low politics in the Home Rule episode of 1885–6. It illuminates the ways in which the rank and file of the Liberal Party responded to Gladstone’s declaration of support for Home Rule and to the ensuing political crisis. It makes use of a range of sources, including memoirs and biographies, manuscript collections and the sizeable pamphlet literature generated by the issue. Considerable use is made also of the national and local press and of the newspapers produced by the main nonconformist denominations. Clearly, for reasons of space, it is not possible to offer more than a snapshot of Liberal opinion at the grassroots level, with the emphasis on reactions in England and Wales. The chapter looks at the preoccupations of some of those who constituted the party’s popular base, and it explores their responses to the first Home Rule Bill. How did the bulk of the party membership come to accept a policy proposal which was privately described by Herbert Gladstone in December 1885 as ‘comparatively new ... to most Liberals, and repugnant and even odious to a large number’?12 Is there evidence of a wholehearted popular Liberal commitment to the Irish cause? How did the Home Rule issue relate to rank-and-file Liberals’ views on party loyalty and on other policy matters? To these questions the following sections offer some tentative answers.

Religion, law and the issue of trust At the parliamentary level there is some evidence that, during the Gladstone government of 1880–5, relations between the Liberals and Irish Nationalists were improving. Alan O’Day has gone so far as to describe the Nationalist movement as ‘an adjunct to Liberalism’ at Westminster, with a ‘natural ideological disposition’ to work with the Liberals.13 He has argued that the Parnellite party’s opportunistic decision to back the Conservatives between June 1885 and January 1886 did not fundamentally disrupt this relationship. O’Day has also


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expressed doubt whether Nationalist support for the Conservatives in the November 1885 general election had a serious impact on Liberal fortunes at the polls. He considers that the Irish vote may have been decisive in only about half a dozen seats.14 In the provinces, however, indications of a parallel sense of goodwill towards the nationalist cause before 1886 are less easy to find. Parnellite obstruction of English legislative business in the Commons in 1880–5 had already given Irish nationalism a negative image. Although its practical effect remains a matter of dispute,15 the violence of Parnell’s election manifesto, in which he vehemently denounced the record of the second Gladstone government, made a deep impression on rank-andfile Liberals. A number of Liberal newspapers, including some which were to support Gladstone’s Home Rule proposals the following year, were stung by the ingratitude displayed by the Nationalists towards a government that had tried to assist Ireland. The Bristol Mercury, for example, declared that ‘the deadly ferocity which betrays itself in every sentence of this precious manifesto ought to be a warning to Englishmen of every sect and party that they have nothing in common with Mr Parnell and his following’.16 The depth of ill-feeling was reflected in a letter to a constituent from the radical MP for Durham North West, L. A. Atherley-Jones, written after the Liberals had returned to office at the end of January 1886. ‘This I hope’, he wrote, ‘that the tenure of power by the Liberal party be not prematurely terminated by any precipitate attempt at Home Rule. We Liberals are more or less seething with rage at Irish hostility during the recent election.’17 The fact that Home Rule had not been fully debated at a British general election made it more difficult for Gladstone to secure acceptance for his proposals when he eventually brought them forward. The main themes of the 1885 general election in Britain were Church disestablishment, local government reform and the provision of smallholdings and allotments for agricultural labourers. John Morley, one of the few truly enthusiastic Liberal Home Rulers as Chief Secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s 1886 ministry, recalled that ‘there was nothing like general concentration on the Irish prospect ... the main body of the British electors were thinking mainly of promised agrarian boons, fair trade, the church in danger, or some other of their own domestic affairs’.18 Lord Ebrington, who surveyed some three hundred addresses and speeches delivered by Liberal MPs during the election campaign, found that approximately one-third contained no reference to the Irish question, and only fourteen seemed in favour of legislative independence for Ireland.19 As Alan O’Day has argued, many politicians (both Liberal




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and Conservative) were prepared to contemplate some form of devolution for Ireland, but relatively few were considering the creation of a full-scale Dublin parliament at this stage.20 One of the main reasons for the lack of enthusiasm felt by many rankand-file Liberals for Home Rule was the persistence of anti-Catholicism in many sections of late Victorian society. Joseph Cowen, radical MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, used a seventeenth-century image to convey this feeling during a press interview in December 1885. Although he acknowledged that the Irish Nationalists and English Liberals had common ground on many legislative matters, he felt that ‘you can’t get a Catholic Celt to have community of feeling with the modern representative of the English Roundheads’. Cowen believed that the preferred policy of most Liberals would be ‘a modified Cromwellianism’, although if the party leadership formulated a scheme of Home Rule, ‘they would support Mr Gladstone’s projects, and party loyalty is so strong that they would vote for it’.21 Concern for the welfare of their fellow Protestants in the north of Ireland, under the rule of a Dublin parliament, does seem to have influenced a large number of nonconformists. The Nonconformist and Independent considered that ‘there is no doubt that amongst a large number, perhaps the majority of the wavering Liberals, this point is the key of the whole question’.22 Liberal Unionist publicity material made great play of the alleged danger to Ulster Protestant interests. In Bristol, activists spread the claim that C. H. Spurgeon, the well-known (and normally apolitical) Baptist preacher, had accused Gladstone of madness.23 The Reverend William Arthur, a former president of the Wesleyan Methodist conference, lent his prestige to the Unionist cause by penning a widely distributed pamphlet, ‘Shall the Loyal Be Deserted and the Disloyal Set over Them?’24 Catholicism was still widely regarded as an alien religion characterised by hostility towards progress and liberty and reinforced by the illegitimate power of priests over their allegedly superstitious followers. Even among Liberals who ultimately decided to support Home Rule, reservations were frequently expressed regarding the influence of clericalism in Ireland. The Baptist, a leading nonconformist publication, urged that any Home Rule scheme must include guarantees that ‘no room is left for the insidious working of Roman Catholicism in a national Government ... wherever that religion reigns, not only will civilisation continue to be blighted, but the consciences of any opposing minority will be simply extinguished’.25 The Nonconformist and Independent, which ultimately threw its weight behind the Gladstonian side, gave expression to the concern that a Dublin parliament would officially


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recognise and endow the Catholic Church and its schools. To many dissenters, such a development was linked to broader anxieties about state support for religious establishments, whether Catholic or Anglican. Thus in April 1886 it noted that clause nineteen of the Bill seemed to afford a loophole for endowment of an established Catholic Church, in contradiction of clause four, which prohibited the Irish parliament from making laws regarding religious establishments. ‘Is it possible’, asked the editorial, ‘that this course has been taken to justify the State Church principle which is in practical operation in England and Scotland, or to satisfy the prejudices of State Church members of the Cabinet?’26 The journal was not fully reassured until Gladstone made an explicit statement to Liberal MPs that endowment was completely ruled out.27 Closely linked to the religious dimension of Home Rule was a pervasive mistrust of Irish nationalism for its association with violence and disregard for social order and property. Memories of agrarian outrages, carried out in the name of the Land League, and of the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park in May 1882 were imprinted on the public consciousness. Such crimes led many commentators to question the fitness of the Irish people’s representatives for self-government. For example, in a letter which was later reprinted in a Liberal Unionist Association leaflet, the Reverend Jesse Ashworth, a well-known retired Primitive Methodist preacher, asked, Who will affirm that the history of Ireland for the past six years has proved her to be competent for national government? ... What, we ask, are the laws which Irish Roman Catholics choose to break – are they the laws enforced against them by the hated Saxon? In answer, they are the laws of Jehovah Himself; laws against murder, injustice and crime – laws on which alone can be built the prosperity of any country.28 The Liberal press of the period contains numerous references to law and order. During the 1885 general election the Leeds Mercury, which was later to support Home Rule, described the Nationalists as ‘the party of anarchy in Ireland – the men whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent women and children, slaughtered for the purpose of establishing the desperate code of the Land League’.29 In analysing the electoral rout of Home Rule the following July, the Leeds Mercury argued that ‘Mr Parnell was pursued by the shadow of the deeds committed by those who claimed to be his comrades, and the Home Rule cause was defeated far more by the sombre and hateful memories of Maamtrasna




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and the Phoenix Park, than by the arguments of Lord Hartington or the intrigues of Mr Chamberlain’.30 Anxieties surrounding the concession of Home Rule are explicable only in the context of a deeply rooted belief in the sanctity of law. R. W. Dale, an influential Birmingham Congregationalist minister and close collaborator of Joseph Chamberlain, described law as man’s imperfect attempt ‘to apply the thought of God to the circumstances and relations of human life’ and thus ‘when the “unwritten law” of the Land League attempted to supersede the law of Parliament and of the Crown, the executive government ... was bound to suppress a rival and a revolutionary authority’.31 It was widely assumed that the parliamentary face of Irish nationalism was a front for the dark forces of terrorism, backed by financial support from the Irish community in the United States. The Primitive Methodist declared in November 1885 that ‘no measure that he [i.e. Parnell] would frame ... would meet the views of the violent extremists upon whom he is so largely dependent for his present position and power’.32 One of the reasons for the widespread unpopularity of Gladstone’s Land Purchase proposals, with which the Home Rule Bill was initially linked, was a reluctance to use British taxpayers’ money to reward Irish tenant farmers who had broken the law. The radical Northampton Mercury, for example, warned that ‘it would be a most serious precedent, and fraught with evil, if disloyalty and outrage are to be rewarded at the cost of loyal and peaceable subjects’.33 Gladstonians differed from Liberal Unionists in their greater readiness to discern potential for good in the Irish people. Advocates of Home Rule argued that attempts to govern Ireland without the active participation of its population were not only unjust but also demonstrably unworkable. Self-government was the only alternative to a barren policy of coercion, which had failed to quench the spirit of nationalism. The Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review argued, for example, that ‘the Irish are like other people; treat them unjustly, and they will be discontented, and disposed to rebel; treat them equitably, and repose a fair degree of trust in them, and they will be orderly and loyal’.34 Albert Rutson, the Gladstonian candidate in Leeds North in 1886, declared that he had overcome his initial reservations about Home Rule and had reached the conclusion that ‘we found in Ireland a moral disease which required a moral and far-reaching remedy ... Greater responsibility and greater power it was hoped would develop in the Parnellites and others a higher character and a better tone.’35 To many radical Liberals, Home Rule was the only way to reconcile the Irish sense of nationality with partnership in the United Kingdom. Typical of this line of argument


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was the so-called manifesto to ‘the sons of toil and artisans of England’, published by two Lib–Lab MPs, Joseph Arch and Joseph Leicester, in June 1886. This document dismissed Liberal Unionist and Conservative claims that Home Rule was a slippery slope to the break-up of the United Kingdom. On the contrary, it would produce ‘a true union – a union of hearts between the English and Irish people, as against the union of anarchy, distrust, and hate maintained by bayonets and coercion for the last 86 years’.36 Nonetheless, even among the most devoted of Gladstonian loyalists, reservations about Home Rule can frequently be detected. Joseph Arch himself, in the course of an election speech in which he emphasised the need to trust Ireland, went out of his way to reassure his Norfolk audience that the Dublin parliament would not be given control of ‘a single policeman or soldier’. According to the press report, his statement that this would last ‘as long as we liked to withhold the police and military from them’ was greeted with ‘loud cheers’.37 The Daily News, the only London morning newspaper to remain loyal to Gladstone in 1886, declared its readiness to ‘hope and trust that Irish human nature is so much like other human nature, that the right and privilege of self-government will make Irishmen more contented, more prosperous and more neighbourly than they have been at any former period of our history’.38 Yet one of its reasons for preferring a single Irish parliament to a number of small, local administrative bodies was that the latter could be used to further anti-English designs and would be less easy to monitor and control.39 Similarly, writing with reference to land purchase, the Leeds Mercury argued that to believe that the Irish Nationalists would repudiate their obligations to the British Treasury implied a ‘very low estimate of Irish character’. It went on to say that, if the Land Purchase Bill were to be withdrawn, the Irish legislature must be deprived of the power to deal with the land question: ‘we cannot, in short, surrender the landlords to the tender mercies of the Land League’.40 The Irish moonlighter cast a long shadow in English politics.

Principle and detail in Gladstonian policy The issue of trust was raised by the controversy surrounding one of the key features of the Home Rule Bill, the twenty-fourth clause, which proposed the exclusion of Irish MPs from the United Kingdom parliament. The clause provoked a sustained debate at a high political level. To some Liberals the removal of the Parnellite MPs, who had a record of blocking English parliamentary business, was a welcome development.




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Their exclusion would enable Westminster to focus more effectively on its own legislative tasks and would make life easier for MPs. As one backbencher later recalled, he had welcomed the Bill’s ‘comfortable assurance that we were to get rid of the voluble Irish patriots who had worried and obstructed us at every turn, talking out the Bills that they could not block, arranging for a division every night at the dinner hour of seven-thirty, keeping up a gloomy social isolation, and using terms of the most virulent and insulting abuse against all who ventured to oppose them’.41 To a number of Liberal Unionists, among whom Joseph Chamberlain was the most prominent, the clause was central to their opposition to the Home Rule project. They argued that exclusion of the Irish would break a crucial link between Britain and Ireland, bringing the break-up of the United Kingdom nearer. Moreover, the fact that one-fifteenth of the charges of the UK budget would be met by Ireland contravened a long-standing Liberal principle, that taxation without representation was tantamount to tyranny. How far did such abstract constitutional considerations impinge on the thought processes of rank-and-file Liberals? A reading of the press in the spring and summer of 1886 reveals that the issue of exclusion versus continued representation provoked lively discussion within the ranks of the Liberal Party. Its significance was widely grasped. A group of Nottingham nonconformist ministers, for example, petitioned Gladstone to retain representation, arguing that ‘the Bill casts out Irishmen from the just and equal rights of citizenship which they now possess’, reducing Ireland to a subject dependency.42 On the other hand, the Pall Mall Gazette’s travelling correspondent found many Liberal supporters in Newcastle-upon-Tyne who viewed the prospect of the Nationalists’ departure ‘with satisfaction, if not with gladness, because the obstructive tactics of the Irish members in the last Parliament wearied and disgusted them, and they perceive that, with the Irishmen gone, their own grievances will have chance of remedy at last’.43 The issue clearly aroused strong feelings, although few rank-and-file Gladstonians were prepared to cling dogmatically to their support for representation regardless of more immediate political pressures. To most party activists, as the battle lines hardened in the run-up to the Bill’s second reading, support for the principle of Home Rule was the priority. The following formula, devised by the Stratford-on-Avon Liberal ‘Two Hundred’, is a good example:


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The resolution went on to express the hope that Gladstone would provide ‘such satisfactory assurances as will enable all earnest Liberals to vote for it’.44 The Pall Mall Gazette’s roving correspondent found considerable support for Irish representation when he talked to party supporters in northern and Midlands cities, but his remarks are usually qualified in various ways. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he considered that a majority of Liberals were in favour of inclusion, ‘if it can be managed’; in other words, it would not be pressed if the Prime Minister decided that it was either impossible or inexpedient.45 In Manchester a pro-inclusion amendment to a resolution passed at a meeting of the United Liberal Councils received only about twenty votes. According to the reporter, this was to be explained in part by the fact that there was ‘a most anxious desire to avoid the acceptance of an amendment which would give political enemies a handle for saying that the Liberal Association had declared against the Bill’.46 The most important voices in the Gladstonian press stressed the need for all true Liberals to unite around the principle of Home Rule, regardless of their opinions on the details of the measure. Editorial writers were prepared to abandon their own preferences in the interests of party loyalty. The Leeds Mercury, for example, argued the issue of Irish representation backwards and forwards between December 1885 and May 1886. At one point it argued that total exclusion was unacceptable since it would ‘reduce Ireland to a position of degradation’, would be unjust to Ulster and would impair the unity of the empire.47 Once the Chamberlainites had begun to organise formal opposition to the Bill at Westminster, however, it launched a stinging attack on those who were using the representation issue to portray themselves as Home Rulers while seeking to defeat the Bill.48 After Gladstone had pledged, at a meeting of Liberal MPs on 27 May, that the second reading would be purely on the principle of Home Rule, the Leeds Mercury declared that radicals who voted against it would proclaim themselves opponents of self-rule for Ireland.49 The Manchester Guardian was a consistent supporter of retention, declaring in April 1886 that total exclusion made the Home Rule Bill ‘a scheme essentially for the repeal of the Legislative Union’.50 The tone of editorials changed as Liberal Unionist opposition


Irish members from the Imperial Parliament and the composition of the Irish legislative assembly, is of opinion that the principle of Home Rule contained in the Bill offers the means of a solution of the Irish problem.


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took shape; a week later it stated that ‘the only alternatives presented to us are either to accept the proposals of the Government with modifications, or to give up all hope of agreement’.51 From 11 May, when Gladstone offered the device of an Anglo-Irish commission to confer on matters of joint concern, the Manchester Guardian became, according to its editor’s biographer, the most powerful press supporter of the Bill.52 As the general election loomed, the paper was content to have the issue of retention decided at a later date, after the basic question of Home Rule had been settled.53

Class, privilege and the cause of reform Some years ago D. A. Hamer argued that, in the wake of the crisis of 1886, considerations of party management led Gladstone purposely to subordinate non-Irish reform issues to the overriding cause of Home Rule. He showed how the Liberal leader depicted the Irish question as an ‘obstruction’ to legislative progress on a range of matters dear to the hearts of party loyalists. In this way, Hamer argued, Gladstone imposed a degree of order on Liberal politics, ensuring that his own policy priorities took centre stage for the remainder of his career.54 A few years later Michael Barker portrayed Gladstone as moving politically leftwards in order to sustain the cohesion of a Liberal Party more dependent, after the 1886 schism, upon its radical wing. In Gladstone’s rhetoric, parallels between the oppression of Irish nationality and the disadvantages experienced by British labour formed a recurring theme.55 The Home Rule cause was recommended to the British democracy on the grounds that its success would make it possible to secure redress for other grievances. On the Liberal and Radical Unionist side, the mirror image of this argument was the claim that Gladstone’s Irish crusade represented an unwelcome and damaging distraction from the tackling of more urgent reforms closer to home. This approach was typified by Joseph Chamberlain’s statement that Gladstone’s Land Purchase Bill would require ‘a vast sum, the expenditure of which in other directions might transform the face of the country and bring comfort and happiness to millions of the labouring poor’.56 An examination of rank-and-file Liberal reaction suggests that leading figures, on both sides of the divide, had good grounds for using arguments which had little direct connection with the Irish situation. It is likely that many backbenchers and activists agreed with the sentiment expressed privately by Francis Channing, the radical MP for Northamptonshire East, in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Chamberlain


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not to vote against the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. Channing insisted that ‘whatever happens I shall stand by what I think is the right even if the premature solution – the Dublin parliament. But Ireland is nothing compared with the issue – progress or reaction for England.’57 Similarly Samuel Smith, MP for Flintshire, wrote in his memoirs of his decision to support Home Rule: ‘it gradually became clear to me that I should go with the main body. I had been a Liberal all my life. I was deeply interested in Temperance and Social Reform, and looked for that to the Liberal party.’ Although he was broadly in favour of conciliation in Ireland, it was ‘one of those cases which sometimes occur in life when one has a choice of difficulties. All one can do is to take the course which seems to offer least difficulty.’58 In seeking to connect with the electorate, many Gladstonian Liberal speakers and writers took their cue from their leader’s manifesto, in which he presented the issue as a clash between ‘the spirit and power of class’ and ‘the upright sense of the nation’.59 They reflected a radicalism rooted in popular nonconformity, which saw Home Rule as the latest phase in a continuous struggle against the privileged, landed establishment, not only in Ireland but in other parts of the United Kingdom. In the words of ‘Alofus’, who reported for the Primitive Methodist on the denomination’s Derby conference in June 1886, underlying this political struggle there is a conflict of great principles – of the principle of prescriptive authority and popular control ... It is well that the struggle should begin on this Irish question. On this subject the evils of the rule of the Thanes are most flagrant, and the people of Britain feel that it is time that the conflict was ended.60 Class issues surfaced in the advice given by the Gladstonian Tyneside Echo on the eve of the general election in Newcastle: ‘the two Sirs will vote with Lord Salisbury; the two Misters will vote with Mr Gladstone. Liberal electors will shut their eyes to all save that one essential point.’61 In Grimsby, Lincolnshire, the Liberal Unionist Edward Heneage, who had resigned as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in opposition to Gladstone’s proposals, faced a hostile resolution passed by the town’s Liberal ‘Three Hundred’. In the debate one of Heneage’s opponents alleged that he would vote with his class, not with the people, on such issues as disestablishment, while another declared that he was out of touch with the views of local working-class people.62 Gladstonian appeals for support frequently depicted the passage of the Home Rule Bill as a precedent for the success of their own favourite




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causes. J. Carvell Williams MP told a meeting of the Protestant dissenting deputies early in June 1886 that although ‘he felt it would be a great pity if Parliament was prematurely dissolved’, he was ‘convinced that the men most disposed to do justice to Ireland who were returned to Parliament would do justice to the Nonconformists of this country’.63 Addressing the Durham miners after his electoral defeat, a defiant Joseph Arch declared that there was no class that wishes to stave off legislation and keep the welfare of the masses of the people in the background more than the church parsons and the landlords did ... The Tories and their friends knew very well that when the Home Rule Bill for Ireland was passed there would be some Home Rule proposals for England. The reforms which he claimed would follow the ultimate success of the Irish crusade drew on long-standing antagonistic feelings towards the dominance of Church and land: Home Rule for England, Scotland and Wales; the creation of elective county boards; the popular appointment of magistrates and management of charities.64 Parallels with the Irish situation exercised a particularly strong influence on radical Liberalism in Wales. Kenneth Morgan has argued persuasively that Wales and Ireland had a similar remoteness from the seat of government in London.65 Another area of common ground was that in both countries, feelings of nationalism were stimulated by the dominance of a landed elite, separated by politics and religion from the peasantry over whom they held sway.66 Tom Ellis, a leading young nationalist, who was soon to be elected MP for Merioneth, wrote to a friend that the interests of Irishmen, Welshmen and Highland crofters were ‘almost identical. All three have a similar past, the immediate need of each is the riddance of landlordism, and they need ample opportunity to develop their own genius and powers.’67 A similar sense of identity with the Irish nationalist cause was expressed in the editorials of the Cambrian News, which dismissed Chamberlain’s attempts to raise the spectre of militant Catholicism in April 1886: ‘the Nonconformists of Wales are oppressed and excluded from all positions of power, honour and emolument by a minority, just as the Catholics of Ireland have been oppressed and excluded’.68 The duty of Liberals, insisted another editorial, was ‘clearly to support Mr Gladstone and to secure as speedily as possible Home Rule for Ireland and for other parts of the United Kingdom. Wales at any rate ought to speak out ... if for no other reason than that freedom to Ireland means freedom for herself also.’69


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It seems that Gladstone’s espousal of the Irish cause stimulated the emergence of a more militant and class-conscious nationalist spirit in Wales. Soon after the 1886 general election, the Daily News commented on the circulation of handbills which announced, ‘Today we are dominated by a Parliament which sits in London and makes laws, not for the good of the Welsh people, but to enrich great landlords, bankers, landholders, and all who live in idleness. The Welsh Home Rulers want the right to make their own laws, free education, the abolition of landlordism, and the Established Church.’70 The strength of traditional loyalties was the determining factor for the bulk of Welsh Liberals in the crisis of 1886. This theme was emphasised by the Reverend J. V. Morgan in a study published on the eve of the First World War. He argued that social, political and religious divisions were much more clear-cut in Wales than in England. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a man’s religion is a test of his politics, and there is no body of Welsh opinion that is ready to change its votes through personal attachment to a candidate, or by conviction through the arguments brought forward by the other side. The two sides – Liberal and Conservative – are as well defined as hostile armies engaged in military operations. As a result ‘Liberal-Unionism has never gripped the Welsh mind’.71 This did not mean that Liberal and Radical Unionists were prepared to allow their opponents to claim a monopoly of popular sympathies. The Chamberlainites in particular were keen to relate their arguments to the domestic political concerns of their audience. Jesse Collings, a close associate of Chamberlain and a long-standing campaigner for smallholdings and allotments, repeatedly contrasted the Gladstone government’s meanness towards English rural workers with its planned generosity towards the Irish. His address to the agricultural labourers, published in The Times on 18 June 1886, was intended as a response to the manifesto of Joseph Arch and Joseph Leicester, which had appeared four days earlier. In a further statement, as polling began in the county constituencies, Collings assured the labourers that he was attached to them ‘by living ties of affectionate interest. I am at home in your cottages. I know your wants, can sympathise with you in your troubles, and utter your thoughts and feelings in your own language.’72 The agricultural workers’ historian F. E. Green considered that disappointment at the Gladstone government’s barren legislative record played a part in the defeat of Joseph Arch in Norfolk North West. In prioritising Home




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Rule Arch forgot his pledge to ‘stick to his last’, the task of securing improvements in working-class life, and was induced by Westminster politicians to pursue ‘will-o’-the-wisp reforms’.73 A recurring theme of the Radical Unionists was that Ireland did not deserve exceptional consideration but rather should receive equal treatment with the other parts of the United Kingdom, as part of a general scheme of decentralisation. In the words of Chamberlain’s manifesto, ‘the national aspirations of Ireland are not stronger nor more entitled to sympathy than those of the other nationalities which form integral parts of the United Kingdom’.74 In this way the Chamberlainites aimed to preserve their popular credentials and to distance themselves from the more negative opposition offered to Home Rule by Whig Liberal Unionists. Another line of attack was to portray Home Rule as a recipe for economic disaster which would damage the livelihoods of British workers. This was one of the points made by a Liberal Unionist Association pamphlet entitled ‘Is Home Rule a Class Question?’ Its purpose was to rebut the Gladstonian claim that Liberal Unionism was purely an elite movement. After referring to the threat of persecution allegedly faced by Irish Protestants, and to the tax burden entailed in the Land Purchase Bill, the pamphlet painted a picture of economic crisis in Ireland: ‘The workingmen of England will suffer, because the unemployed and impoverished Irish labourers will crowd into England in still greater numbers than at present, and by competition lower the rate of wages.’75 This claim was heard by the presiding officer at a county election, who talked to a group of farm labourers after the close of polling: ‘they accepted Mr Chamberlain’s argument that if the Irish Bill should pass in its present form the effect would be that an immense amount of Irish labour would be driven into the English market’. He concluded that this was ‘the consideration that has most generally weighed with the agricultural voter and induced him in so many cases to vote against the Ministerialist candidate’.76

The pull of party loyalty Home Rule as an issue seems to have had little intrinsic appeal for the vast majority of Liberals. Why then did so many give their support to it in 1886, often in contradiction of their earlier feelings on the subject? One of the keys to this phenomenon is the undoubted power of established party loyalties, a theme which was discussed some years ago by P. C. Griffiths in an important article on the power of the Liberal Party machine. He estimated that no more than 10 per cent of party activists


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actually opposed the Liberal leadership.77 The fate of Liberal MPs who defied the official line underlines the way in which party discipline had developed by this stage. Of the ninety-three Liberals who voted against the second reading of the Home Rule Bill on 8 June, only twenty-four enjoyed the luxury of an unopposed return at the general election. Dissentient MPs came under strong pressure to modify their opposition to the government or face a rival Liberal candidate at the next election. There seems to have been little central direction of the process; the initiative was usually taken by party loyalists at constituency level. Twenty-one Liberal Unionists decided not to contest their old seats, three of these engaging in unsuccessful fights elsewhere.78 Others, including Sir Henry Havelock-Allan in Durham South-East, C. R. M. Talbot in Glamorganshire Mid and Francis Taylor in Norfolk South, were re-adopted by their local Liberal councils after recanting their earlier views on the Bill. The process at work here was described by Sir Lyon Playfair, MP for Leeds South, in publicly confessing his earlier doubts about Home Rule. ‘Since then,’ he declared in June 1886, ‘it had been said that he had grown in his ideas upon Home Rule. No doubt he had. A Liberal plant had a very vigorous and quick growth – especially when in contact with such a robust constituency as South Leeds.’79 Other MPs who had voted against the government found that their constituency parties were less forgiving. Francis Taylor’s neighbour in Norfolk Mid division, R. T. Gurdon, was rejected by fifty-two votes to twenty-seven, despite his statement that he was now prepared to support Irish self-government ‘under well-considered conditions’.80 The defeat of Home Rule, both in the Commons and at the polls, demonstrated the capacity of a determined Liberal Unionist minority, working in collaboration with the official Conservative opposition, to change the course of events. Nonetheless, an examination of the events of 1886 at the constituency level betrays the insecurity of the Liberal Unionist rebels at this stage. The notion of a centre party was an uncertain concept, given the strength of traditional party allegiances. Many people, on both sides of the Home Rule divide, expected that the Liberal schism would be a temporary phenomenon. This was reflected in the way in which many Liberal Unionists approached the question of organisation. The Northern Counties Liberal Unionist Association was formed at Darlington in August 1886, in response to a communication from Lord Hartington. All the speakers at the meeting referred to the weakness of their organisation at the recent general election, and several expressed serious doubts about the future. Philip Wood suggested that Liberal reunion was a real possibility: ‘they had no right to relinquish




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all hope that they would next time be found all fighting shoulder to shoulder as a united Liberal party’. Alderman Lucas of Gateshead, who proposed the motion for the formation of the new body, ‘said that if at the next election they were fighting side by side with the Gladstonians, then there would be no need for an association; but it was best to be prepared and as far as they could see they were not likely to be found side by side’. William Gray, on the other hand, ‘could not help feeling that the Gladstonian Liberal party – particularly in the South East Division of Durham and in Hartlepool – were stronger than the Unionist party, and did not think that it would be policy to separate from them and take a totally independent course’.81 Liberal Unionism had more substance in Birmingham and the West Midlands, where Joseph Chamberlain’s personal influence was an important factor in establishing an alternative to Gladstonian Liberalism. Michael Hurst has shown how a combination of circumstances favoured the growth of Chamberlainite Radical Unionism. Within the Birmingham Liberal caucus a group headed by J. T. Bunce, editor of the Birmingham Daily Post, and the Congregationalist minister R. W. Dale exercised considerable influence. This was buttressed by the support of the widely respected veteran Birmingham MP John Bright and the disorientation of the local Gladstonians. In five of the city’s seven seats, Liberal Unionists enjoyed an uncontested return, and antiHome Rule candidates triumphed in the other two, Birmingham East and Bordesley.82 Even here, however, less than two years before the Gladstonians won control of the Birmingham Liberal Party in March 1888, Liberal Unionism was far from securely established. Local sympathy for Chamberlain’s position on Irish representation at Westminster was balanced by a stronger emotion, concern for party unity. R. W. Dale, who played a pivotal role in the crisis, argued the case for a continued Irish presence in a letter to Gladstone but was prepared to defer the question when this was rejected. His position in the general election was that all seven Liberal candidates in the city should be supported regardless of their views on the Irish question.83 This was also the view of the Birmingham Daily Post. Although the paper initially expressed support for Chamberlain’s stand on the representation issue, as the crucial division approached it criticised him for refusing to compromise. It announced that ‘we think it would have been wiser for the country, for Ireland and for the Liberal party to have accepted and strengthened Mr Gladstone’s concessions [announced at the meeting of Liberal MPs on 27 May], and to have permitted the second reading of the bill to pass


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as strictly limited affirmation of its principle’.84 During the election it declared that the priority was to avoid the return of a Conservative government. The Post did not give up its advocacy of Liberal Party reunification until June 1887.85 Elsewhere there was even less regard for Chamberlain’s carefully qualified attitude towards Home Rule. After the Bradford by-election in April 1886, George Shaw-Lefevre wrote to Herbert Gladstone that although he had some reservations about details of the Prime Minister’s proposals, ‘I have no intention whatever of imitating Chamberlain in a “conditional opposition” on the main principle.’ In the course of the election campaign he ‘found no topic better received at Bradford than a denunciation of those who are endeavouring to squeeze amendments in the direction of their own fads as the price of their support of the second reading of the Bill’.86 The feeling among many activists was that an honest difference of opinion on policy details was acceptable, but that this should not be pushed to the point of an open rift. Still less should Liberals consider making common cause with their natural opponents. The influential Congregationalist minister J. Guinness Rogers called repeatedly for compromise on the Irish representation issue, writing in the Nonconformist and Independent in May 1886: For myself, I hold the union of the Liberal party to be so far more important than any settlement of the point which divides the two sections, that I would give my hearty support to the second reading. Not the less do I deprecate any determination to disregard the remonstrances of those who are staggered by some of the provisions in the Bill, but would easily be conciliated.87 In his memoirs Rogers wrote of the ‘disappointed hope’, if not ‘betrayed trust’, felt by those who saw Chamberlain working with Whigs and Conservatives against Gladstone: for Liberals this was ‘a domestic quarrel with which strangers, and still more enemies, had no right to intermeddle’.88 Similarly Dr Henry Crosskey, a Birmingham Unitarian minister who admired Chamberlain’s radical record,89 held aloof from politics after 1886 since, as he put it, ‘all my sympathies being with “Liberals” on ninety-nine questions out of a hundred, it was impossible for me to support the intimate alliance of the newly formed “Liberal Unionist Association” with the Tories, and I am still “out in the cold” ’.90 Others, particularly in the Liberal press, took a less charitable view of dissent from the orthodox Gladstonian line. The Bristol Mercury




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headed its editorial on the day after the Chamberlainite MPs decided to vote against the second reading of the Home Rule Bill ‘Traitors in the Camp’.91 The Tyneside Echo regarded the details of the Bill as comparatively unimportant. Writing in the wake of Chamberlain’s resignation from the government, it stated: ‘The fact is that the people are utterly weary of the Irish trouble, and they believe that the Liberal chief is the only man capable of putting an end to it ... The national pulse would beat at the usual rate if half a dozen of Mr Gladstone’s colleagues were to desert him.’92 This comment supplies a further clue to the reasons so many rankand-file Liberals supported Home Rule in 1886. Instinctive loyalty to the party was reinforced by the special regard that was felt for Gladstone as an individual. In part this was based on gratitude for his long record as a reformer. Memories of the party leader’s earlier achievements carried particular weight with working-class and nonconformist Liberals. G. M. Ball, for example, a spokesman for the agricultural labourers of north Essex and a frequent contributor to the English Labourers’ Chronicle, considered that ‘the Irish Bills introduced by Mr Gladstone appear to have confounded many people ... when doctors disagree it is difficult for common people to decide. I have, however, strong confidence in the wisdom, goodness and statesmanship of Mr Gladstone, and that he will do the best he can for all parties.’93 As the general election approached, the same journal published a number of appeals from regional representatives of the rural workforce, of which the following, from Sawston in Cambridgeshire, is typical: ‘Be true to your old friend W. E. Gladstone, and to all who support him. He gave you the power to vote and made you free men, he gave you the ballot and it is secret that none know how you vote unless you tell them.’94 The intensity of the debate seemed to consolidate Gladstone’s core support. The Congregationalist, for example, declared that ‘the virulent attacks on Mr Gladstone have ... made us realise more clearly than ever that the battle which is being waged around him is the battle for every principle we love and every cause in whose triumph we are interested’.95 Heroic imagery came naturally, even to nonconformist journals which expressed reservations about Home Rule. The Baptist, for example, wrote of Gladstone that ‘for many a year he has challenged the cause of civil and religious liberty while, Ajax-like, he has stood to defy all comers daring to attack the ramparts of the people’s rights’.96 Loyalty to Gladstone was based not only upon trust in his judgement and experience but also upon appreciation of his ethical approach to


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politics. Rank-and-file Liberals, especially those who were committed members of the nonconformist churches, responded positively to his ability to invest Home Rule with the character of a moral crusade. The most enthusiastic were the Primitive Methodists, whose conference presented Gladstone with a formal address of support in June 1886. Their journal attributed Gladstone’s popularity to the fact that ‘the great body of people believe in him as a sincerely good man, who ... is endeavouring to serve his country and his age’. ‘Great as the many services are which he has rendered to his country,’ it continued, ‘they are not to be compared to the service he has rendered in introducing a higher moral and religious spirit into politics.’97 As an opponent of Home Rule, John Bright was no doubt exaggerating when he wrote to a Birmingham constituent that ‘if Mr Gladstone’s great authority were withdrawn from these bills, I doubt if twenty persons outside the Irish party would support them’.98 Nonetheless, it is clear that, in the fast-developing crisis of 1886, most rank-and-file Liberals had to adjust themselves, often against their own instincts, to the priorities of an imposing individual. As a party agent at Saffron Walden, Essex, wrote to Gladstone shortly before the division on the second reading, ‘we cannot arouse any enthusiasm, and enthusiasm with us is life.’ Volunteer workers felt ‘grievous disappointment that with scores of measures in which we are all interested, we should be again thrown into the confusion of an election ... We are ready to work, and are willing. But we cannot think it right.’99 Once battle was joined, for most Liberals the Home Rule issue took second place to issues of party identity and fidelity to the Grand Old Man. The specific merits or otherwise of Gladstone’s proposals were subsumed under a broader moral campaign for liberty and progress. Many found difficulty in envisaging an environment in which there could be any other dividing line than the historic one of Liberal and Tory. They expected the division of the Liberal Party to be a temporary one. Only with hindsight did they realise that their political world had undergone a profound transformation.

Notes 1. A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974), p. 18. 2. A. J. Warren, ‘Gladstone, Land and Social Reconstruction in Ireland, 1881–7’, Parliamentary History, II (1983), pp. 153–90; A. O’Day, Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode, 1884–87 (Dublin, 1986); J. Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986).




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3. T. A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 244–8, 277–8. 4. W. C. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 253–72. 5. W. C. Lubenow, ‘The Liberals and the National Question: Irish Home Rule, Nationalism and the Relationship to Nineteenth Century Liberalism’ in J. A. Phillips (ed.), Computing Parliamentary History: George III to Victoria (Edinburgh, 1994). 6. C. Matthew, ‘Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics’ in P. J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (Hambledon, 1998), pp. 213–34. 7. Cooke and Vincent, The Governing Passion, pp. 20–1. 8. M. C. Hurst, Joseph Chamberlain and West Midland Politics, 1886–1895 (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 15) (Oxford, 1962), p. 19. This meeting is not mentioned in The Governing Passion. 9. C. Harvie, ‘Gladstonianism, the Provinces, and Popular Political Culture, 1860–1906’ in R. Bellamy (ed.), Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth Century Political Thought and Practice (London, 1990), pp. 160–1; E. Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), p. 61. 10. E. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), chapters 1, 2 and 5. See also G. K. Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-Government 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001), chapters 1 and 2 11. J. P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993), p. 297. 12. H. J. Gladstone to Lady Frederick Cavendish (copy), 31 Dec. 1885, British Library, London, Supplementary Gladstone MSS., Add. MSS. 56445, fo. 145. 13. O’Day, Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode, p. 230. 14. A. O’Day, Irish Home Rule 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998), p. 106. 15. Herbert Gladstone estimated that the Liberals lost twenty seats as a result of Parnell’s advice to Irish voters in Britain to support the Conservatives if no Irish Nationalist was running. Michael Kinnear, in The British Voter: An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (London, 1968), p. 13, considered that the Irish vote caused the loss of at least five, and possibly seven, more seats. 16. Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, Western Counties, Monmouthshire and South Wales Advertiser, 23 Nov. 1885. 17. L. A. Atherley-Jones, Looking Back: Reminiscences of a Political Career (London, 1925), p. 37. 18. J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. III (London, 1903), p. 232. 19. Lord Ebrington, ‘Liberal Election Addresses’, Nineteenth Century, XIX (Apr. 1886), p. 617. 20. O’Day, Irish Home Rule 1867–1921, pp. 105–6. 21. Manchester Guardian, 17 Dec. 1885. 22. Nonconformist and Independent, VII (1 July 1886), p. 627. 23. P. S. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A Preacher’s Progress (New York and London, 1982), pp. 356–8. 24. T. B. Stephenson, William Arthur: A Brief Biography (London, 1907), pp. 103–4. 25. Baptist, XXVII (4 June 1886), p. 361.


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26. Nonconformist and Independent, VII (22 Apr. 1886), pp. 388–9. 27. Ibid., VII (3 June 1886), p. 541. 28. Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review and Christian Ambassador, VIII (27 May 1886), pp. 326–7. 29. Leeds Mercury, 23 Nov. 1885. 30. Ibid., 21 July 1886. 31. A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R.W. Dale of Birmingham (London, 1898), pp. 448–9. 32. Primitive Methodist, VII (19 Nov. 1885), p. 761. 33. Northampton Mercury, 23 Jan. 1886. For further discussion of this issue see G. D. Goodlad, ‘The Liberal Party and Gladstone’s Land Purchase Bill of 1886’, Historical Journal, 32, 3 (1989), pp. 637–8. 34. Primitive Methodist, VIII (July 1886), p. 572. 35. Leeds Mercury, 15 May 1886. 36. The Times, 14 June 1886. 37. English Labourers’ Chronicle, 26 June 1886. 38. Daily News, 15 Apr. 1886. 39. Ibid., 4 and 11 Jan. 1886. A similar point is made in the editorial of the Manchester Guardian, 29 Mar. 1886. 40. Leeds Mercury, 19 Apr. 1886. 41. Sir Robert Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament: Reminiscences of a Varied Life (London, 1911), p. 310. 42. Nonconformist and Independent, VII (27 May 1886), p. 511. 43. Pall Mall Gazette, 28 Apr. 1886. 44. English Labourers’ Chronicle, 15 May 1886. 45. Pall Mall Gazette, 28 Apr. 1886. 46. Ibid., 10 May 1886. 47. Leeds Mercury, 12 Apr. 1886. 48. Ibid., 13 May 1886. 49. Ibid., 31 May 1886. 50. Manchester Guardian, 9 Apr. 1886. 51. Ibid., 15 Apr. 1886. 52. J. L. Hammond, C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian (London, 1934), p. 67. 53. Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1886. 54. D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972), pp. 126–35. 55. M. Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain 1885–94 (Hassocks, 1975), pp. 89–92. 56. The Times, 12 June 1886. 57. F. A. Channing to Joseph Chamberlain, 1 June 1886, Birmingham University Library, Chamberlain MSS., JC8/5/3/42. 58. S. Smith, My Life-Work (London, 1902), p. 231. 59. The Times, 3 May 1886. 60. Primitive Methodist, VIII (17 June 1886), p. 395. 61. Tyneside Echo, 24 June 1886. The candidates in Newcastle-upon-Tyne were Sir William Armstrong (Liberal Unionist), Sir Matthew White Ridley (Conservative), John Morley and James Craig (Gladstonian Liberals). 62. Grimsby News, 18 June 1886. 63. Baptist, XXVII (4 June 1886), pp. 361–2. 64. Manchester Guardian, 3 Aug. 1886.




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65. Letter to the author. 66. K. O. Morgan, ‘Liberals, Nationalists and Mr Gladstone’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1960), p. 44. 67. T. E. Ellis to D. R. Daniel, 17 Feb. 1886. Quoted in N. Masterman, The Forerunner: The Dilemmas of Tom Ellis, 1859–1899 (Swansea, 1972), pp. 74–5. 68. Cambrian News, Merionethshire Standard and Welsh Farmers’ Gazette, 30 Apr. 1886. 69. Ibid., 7 May 1886. 70. Daily News, 31 July 1886. 71. Rev. J. V. Morgan, The Philosophy of Welsh History (London, 1914), pp. 154–5. 72. The Times, 13 July 1886. 73. F. E. Green, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, 1870–1920 (London, 1920), p. 88. 74. The Times, 12 June 1886. 75. Liberal Unionist Association leaflets, ‘Irish Question, no. 28: Is Home Rule a Class Question?’ (London, 1886). 76. Pall Mall Gazette, 15 July 1886. 77. P. C. Griffiths, ‘The Caucus and the Liberal Party in 1886’, History, LXI (1976), p. 192. 78. The Times, 19 July 1886. 79. Leeds Mercury, 19 June 1886. 80. Norfolk News, 26 June 1886. 81. Tyneside Echo, 4 Aug. 1886. 82. Hurst, Joseph Chamberlain and West Midland Politics, pp. 24–7, 31–4 83. Dale, Life of R.W. Dale, pp. 452, 455–8. 84. Birmingham Daily Post, 1 June 1886. 85. H. R. G. Whates, The Birmingham Post, 1857–1957: A Centenary Retrospect (Birmingham, 1957), p. 122. 86. G. J. Shaw-Lefevre to Herbert Gladstone, 28 Apr. 1886, London, British Library, Viscount Gladstone MSS., 46052/86. 87. J. G. Rogers, ‘Liberal Dissensions’, Nonconformist and Independent, VII (27 May 1886), p. 508. 88. J. G. Rogers, An Autobiography (London, 1903), pp. 259–60. 89. After Chamberlain’s resignation from Gladstone’s Cabinet, Crosskey wrote to express his ‘warm appreciation – and more than appreciation – of your sacrifice of such splendid opportunities of carrying out long cherished purposes as the Cabinet gives to conscientious convictions’. H. W. Crosskey to Joseph Chamberlain, 22 Apr. 1886, Birmingham University Library, Chamberlain MSS., JC8/5/3/14. 90. R. A. Armstrong, Henry William Crosskey: His Life and Work (Birmingham, 1895), p. 262. 91. Bristol Mercury, 1 June 1886. 92. Tyneside Echo, 29 Mar. 1886. 93. English Labourers’ Chronicle, 1 May 1886. 94. Ibid., 19 June 1886. 95. Congregationalist, XV (May 1886), p. 383. 96. Baptist, XXVII (21 May 1886), p. 323. 97. Primitive Methodist, VIII (3 June 1886), p. 353. This theme is discussed more fully in G. D. Goodlad, ‘Gladstone and His Rivals: Popular Liberal


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Perceptions of the Party Leadership in the Political Crisis of 1885–1886’ in E. Biagini and A. Reid (eds.), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 178–83. 98. John Bright to Grosvenor Lee, 31 May 1886. Quoted in H. J. Leech (ed.), The Public Letters of the Rt Hon John Bright, 2nd ed. (London, 1895), p. 128. 99. G. F. Liney to W. E. Gladstone, 4 June 1886, St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, Clwyd, Glynne-Gladstone MSS., General Correspondence of W. E. Gladstone, Box 53. In the event the Gladstonian Liberal member, H. C. Gardner, defeated his Conservative opponent in Saffron Walden by 740 votes. Gardner’s majority at the 1885 general election had been 1,749. Figures taken from J. R. Vincent and M. Stenton (eds.), McCalmont’s Parliamentary Pollbook: British Election Results, 1832–1918, 8th ed. (Brighton, 1971), part II, p. 84.




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‘A deplorable narrative’: Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien and the ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 1880–90 Ian Sheehy

Writing to the Unionist academic A. V. Dicey in November 1886, Gladstone, in an oft-quoted letter, revealed how he felt the time had arrived for promulgating what he called the ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule: ‘Now we must go forward with it, we cannot afford to dispense with any of our resources.’ As these comments suggest, the Liberals, having suffered a resounding defeat at the 1886 election, were apparently not in a position to be selective. All the potential weapons in the Home Rule armoury had to be employed if they were to launch a recovery, and these included ‘history’, even if Gladstone was conscious of the risks such an approach involved in the sense of stirring old animosities and of the fact he was still getting to grips with the subject (he was ‘far from having mastered it’, he told Dicey). Accordingly, the Liberal leader had ‘touched’ only briefly on the topic during the House of Commons debates on Home Rule, though, in the combative atmosphere of the subsequent election campaign, he had advanced the historical case in more strident, detailed terms.1 Nevertheless, these remained rather limited opening salvos given the vastness of the subject, and, as a result, the full historical argument had yet to be unfolded. ‘The people do not know the case’, Gladstone had admitted to James Bryce, the Liberal MP and writer, shortly after the election. This was a problem that, together with Bryce and other Home Rule intellectuals, the Liberal chief sought to rectify with his usual energy and determination over the next six years, conducting what Richard Shannon has described as the ‘most sublime example in constitutional democracy of a history lesson applied to politics’.2


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In adopting this approach Gladstone was taking a well-trodden path, as the employment of history for political purposes was a long-established practice in Irish nationalism, at both the popular and elite levels, although it was one which, ironically, his Irish ally at that time, Charles Stewart Parnell, did not really share.3 But what shape did the Gladstonian Irish history lesson take? Inevitably, there were a number of different strands. At first, his main concern was to highlight what he considered the past wrongs suffered by Ireland at the hands of England, incorporating this theme into many of his 1886 election speeches. Wide-ranging material for such a view was hardly lacking in nationalist historiography at that time, but Gladstone was content to focus on the more recent examples of English turpitude. In particular he drew attention to how the Union was carried in 1800, the infamy of which was without historical parallel in his opinion because of the manifest ‘fraud, bribery and intimidation’ which had secured its passage. In the House of Commons he confined himself to a brief aside regarding the ‘dreadful story of the Union’, but, as indicated above, on the campaign platform he gave full vent to his convictions, averring at Liverpool on 28 June that there ‘was no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man than the making of the Union’.4 Moreover, according to Gladstone, English misdeeds had not ended there, for, under the Union, Ireland had not been dealt with in either a just or an effective manner, a fact he also impressed upon his audience at Liverpool and elsewhere. This approach entailed the re-evaluation of earlier Irish nationalist politicians, most notably Daniel O’Connell, who, having been opposed by the youthful Gladstone, was now lauded in an article of 1888 for his attempt to restore the ‘public life of his country’.5 By delineating this shameful historical story, Gladstone hoped people would see the rationale behind Home Rule, namely that Ireland had legitimate claims against England and that the latter should make reparation for the past. Instead of being an ‘unnatural’ tampering with the constitution, Home Rule would become an act of wisdom and justice. As H. C. G. Matthew has written, the Home Rule policy was in part a ‘recognition of an historical and therefore an empirically demonstrable grievance’ rather than an ‘abstract argument about a perfectible constitution’. Furthermore, England would also gain from such an attempt to right the wrongs of the past because of the restorative effect it would have on the country’s international reputation, for, in Gladstone’s view, the mistreatment of Ireland was the one black mark on an otherwise noble national history (he spoke of ‘deep stains that ... deface and deform the character of an illustrious nation’). Thus, both countries


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would benefit from the ‘blessed oblivion of the past’ that Home Rule would provide.6 With its stress on the justice due to Ireland and its cleansing of England’s sins, the historical argument for Home Rule clearly positioned the new policy within the established Liberal framework of ‘moral politics’ (as opposed to the emerging ‘social politics’ associated with Chamberlain, which Gladstone, Bryce and others disliked because of its appeal to class, or ‘sectional’, interests).7 The classic formula of ‘virtuous passion’ – rationalist instruction combined with religious–moral feeling – was to be followed once more, having proved so successful for Gladstone during the Eastern Agitation of the late 1870s. Indeed, with the Unionist adoption of coercion in 1887 this Actonian and Christian emphasis on justice and morality was only strengthened, particularly given events such as the Mitchelstown ‘massacre’ and the fact that such an emphasis exposed the apparent hollowness of Liberal Unionists’ claims that they were the ‘true’ liberals. It was part of what E. F. Biagini has called the ‘politics of humanitarianism’ in which Radical Liberalism sought to ‘politicise compassion for electoral gain’.8 However, it would be a mistake to see the historical grievances theme as the only plank in Gladstone’s argument. Already by 1887 he had started to elaborate his other main approach, which centred on the fruitful precedents supplied by the Irish past. Here, like so many of his nationalist contemporaries, he had in mind ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, the semi-independent Irish Parliament of the late eighteenth century, and how it provided evidence of the beneficial effects that could be expected to flow from a Home Rule government. These included how Irish autonomy could be successfully combined with Imperial loyalty and how the spirit of nationality fostered by a native parliament could conquer religious and class divisions. Again, it was a subject to which Gladstone made only passing reference during the House of Commons struggle of 1886, before subsequently developing it in greater detail, most notably in his 1887 essay ‘Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century’, which he contributed to the Handbook of Home Rule edited by Bryce.9 Gladstone’s vigorous promotion of the historical argument for Home Rule has provoked mixed reactions from historians, both then and since. Most famously, it was denounced by W. E. H. Lecky, the Irish Liberal Unionist and leading Irish historian of the late Victorian era, who was the acknowledged authority on ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ and the Union. He objected to all the elements of Gladstone’s historical argument, repeatedly asserting after 1886 how no meaningful comparisons could be drawn between the ‘propertied, Protestant and loyal’ parliament


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which Grattan had led and a Home Rule parliament that would be dominated by Fenians and Land Leaguers and would actively pursue its twin aims of separation and expropriation. The idea, therefore, that creating the latter body would constitute a just recompense for the historical grievance of corruptly abolishing the former assembly was ‘absurd’ in Lecky’s distinguished eyes.10 The irony here, of course, is that it was from Lecky that Gladstone had derived much of his historical case for Home Rule, particularly Lecky’s earlier works, which had treated eighteenthcentury Ireland in a more nationalist vein. Gladstone’s belief in both the socio-political benefits of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ and the injustice of the Union stemmed in large measure from his study of Lecky (‘a great crime’ was how Lecky had described the Union in 1871).11 Echoes of Lecky’s reservations regarding Gladstone’s historical argument can be found in more modern historiography, both British and Irish. R. T. Shannon, for example, has drawn attention to the weaknesses in Gladstone’s approach, remarking upon the ‘intellectual recklessness’ inherent in his method of applying Irish history to Irish politics and stating how his reading in Irish history at the time of the Home Rule crisis was not only selective (that is, predominantly nationalist) but also of recent origin, giving Gladstone the ‘zeal of the convert’. It was a case, too, says Shannon, of bolting historical considerations on afterwards to ‘confer moral and intellectual credentials’ on the Home Rule policy.12 James Loughlin, in an earlier study, also highlights some of the limitations of Gladstone’s historical argument, focusing on his concern with the eighteenth century and noting both his dependence on Lecky and, as Lecky did, how Gladstone’s use of that era was flawed because of the inherent differences between Irish nationalism then and its 1880s counterpart, most notably the latter’s anti-landlordism. At the same time, R. F. Foster has shown how Gladstone’s forays into Irish history in some ways reflected an established pattern in British politics of ‘nodding familiarity’ with the subject rather than exhaustive knowledge.13 Other scholars, however, have viewed Gladstone’s use of history during the Home Rule struggle in a more positive light, seeing it as one of his strengths. Colin Matthew and E. F. Biagini, for instance, have placed Gladstone’s recognition of the need to do justice to the peculiar Irish historical experience within a wider framework of historical motives for Home Rule that also embraced both European (especially liberal) and colonial history (most notably Canadian devolution). Indeed, Biagini and others, including Robert T. Harrison, have noted, albeit from opposing perspectives, how history was an influence on Gladstone’s decision-making in other, non-Irish, areas at that time, such as Egypt.14




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To Matthew and Biagini, Gladstone’s sensitivity to different historical forces and traditions was an integral part of the Home Rule proposal rather than a hasty post-policy development; it not only gave Home Rule firm intellectual underpinnings once it had been formulated but also helped bring the policy into being in the first place. This historical sensitivity was something Gladstone had already demonstrated in his Irish legislation, his Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 both being in part an acknowledgement of cultural differences in the area of tenant rights. Five years later, it was an approach, says Matthew (and others, including Richard A. Cosgrove), which gave Gladstone effective leverage against Unionist opponents such as Dicey, who, being more concerned with the abstract constitutional implications of Home Rule, tried to sidestep the historical argument, as Gladstone himself pointed out in his letter of November 1886.15 Both Matthew and Biagini also draw attention to how Gladstone’s recourse to historical knowledge and precedents reflected the enduring intellectual influence of Edmund Burke and Bishop Joseph Butler, two eighteenth-century thinkers whom the Liberal leader first read as a young man. Home Rule, says Biagini, was a policy that ‘gradually unfolded in the typically empirical-historicist way Gladstone had derived from Bishop Butler and Edmund Burke’. Burke was particularly important as he supplied not only general principles regarding the necessity for constitutions to evolve gradually in accordance with historical forces and experiences but also, in his writings on the American struggle for independence, furnished clear guidance on how to deal with colonial unrest through the judicious concession of a measure of self-government. Butler, on the other hand, taught Gladstone a way of solving problems through the use of analogies, an approach seen above with regard to Grattan’s Parliament and one which offered some measure of confidence about policy outcomes.16 Rooting Gladstone’s Irish historical argument in these long-held intellectual principles presents a picture somewhat at odds with Shannon’s depiction of the ‘recklessness’ and novelty that were involved in constructing and pursuing such a case in 1885–6. Instead, it suggests it was a natural, well-grounded choice for Gladstone to turn to the Irish past when developing and defending his Home Rule policy; it was a logical outgrowth of a long-standing concern with history rather than a questionable new intellectual departure.17 It is towards the latter half of this debate on the validity of Gladstone’s use of history that this chapter leans. Although Gladstone’s link with R. Barry O’Brien can be seen as evidence of some of the shortcomings of his historical argument (most obviously, as Shannon contends, that he


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relied too much on nationalist interpretations), by tracing his connection with the London-Irish journalist and historian a more comprehensive picture emerges of the Liberal leader’s historical case for Home Rule. It is a picture which shows that it was stronger and more wide-ranging than is often supposed, thereby echoing those who view Gladstone’s use of history in a more positive light. First, and most important, through the link with O’Brien, it will be seen that Gladstone’s historical argument was not necessarily confined either to Lecky’s works or to eighteenthcentury Irish history, as Loughlin tends to suggest. Instead, as a result of O’Brien’s influence, Gladstone was able to draw almost as much on the nineteenth century, and particularly the failures of Parliament, as on the eighteenth century when developing his historical argument. Second, the role of O’Brien makes clear how natural it was for Gladstone to make use of history in 1886, for it reinforces how his concern with the Irish past was something that preceded the Home Rule crisis rather than simply a consequence of it, as Shannon implies. A sense, therefore, of how this historical appreciation may have played its part in the formulation of the Home Rule policy will emerge too, as will the role O’Brien arguably had in generating Gladstone’s concept of Home Rule as a necessary measure of historical justice to Ireland. Finally, O’Brien not only supplied Gladstone with historical material for his own use but also strengthened the Liberal leader’s historical case by figuring prominently in the Home Rule literary campaign directed by James Bryce from 1886. Indeed, even before then, as will be seen, Gladstone had employed O’Brien to help set the Home Rule agenda, including a historical understanding of it. All this, in turn, raises a number of other points. It shows, for instance, that the approach here follows recent trends in British historiography whereby the earlier ‘high politics’ model – in which politicians jockey for position according to the dictates of self-interest – has been replaced by a new emphasis on the significance of ideology in determining the actions of politicians and in binding different groups together. The new view has been considered especially relevant with regard to the Home Rule debate of the 1880s, and it has necessarily entailed a renewed examination of those who propagated such ideology, such as journalists and writers.18 A similar conviction that these figures, and the ideas they circulated, mattered obviously underpins this essay. There is also an important reappraisal involved for students of Irish history in particular, namely that the common perception of Barry O’Brien’s political identity is inaccurate. Owing to his seminal 1898 biography of Parnell, O’Brien is usually depicted as an ardent, unalloyed supporter




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of ‘the chief’, yet, as his involvement in the Bryce project will show, he was in fact for much of his career a close associate of leading Liberals and a well-known figure within Liberal London circles; thus, his political identity was more complex and composite than is normally realised, embracing Liberalism as well as nationalism. This means that the influence of O’Brien’s work on Gladstone and his notable assistance to the Home Rule literary campaign have not received the recognition they deserve. This chapter, then, will begin with an examination of O’Brien’s historical writings of the early 1880s and the impact they had on Gladstone, before exploring how the latter put them – and O’Brien – to use from 1885 onwards. It will thereby elucidate O’Brien’s role in the first phase of the Home Rule crisis, along with his subsequent contribution to Gladstone’s historical argument and the Liberals’ Home Rule literary offensive.

Early writings and their impact on Gladstone, 1880–5 In a sense, Barry O’Brien’s connection with Gladstone began in 1869 rather than the 1880s, for it was in that year that the young nationalist, having recently moved to London from Ireland, first witnessed the oratorical power of the Liberal leader. The occasion was a Commons debate on Gladstone’s Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, and O’Brien was forcibly impressed by the devastating manner in which Gladstone vanquished his Tory opponent: ‘Gladstone began in words, and with voice and gesture, which I shall never forget. [Gathorne] Hardy had said hard things of Ireland, and I wished to see this Tory enemy annihilated, but I never dreamt that the work of destruction would be so rapid and so complete. In six sentences, Hardy was laid low.’19 The encounter was a crucial one in O’Brien’s political development, for, along with John Bright, who had long championed the cause of Irish church and land reform, Gladstone appeared to demonstrate that night how Liberalism could act as an effective vehicle for nationalist aspirations, so that the physical-force approach of Fenianism, which the youthful O’Brien had supported and which had recently asserted itself in the failed rising of 1867, was unnecessary. Instead, constitutional, parliamentary methods now seemed to offer the best hope of nationalist success. It is a story recounted by his obituarist Michael MacDonagh, who wrote in 1918 of how O’Brien had been a devotee of Fenianism while a student at the Catholic University in Dublin in the late 1860s, but how, after arriving in London, he was exposed to the ‘generous sympathies’ of Gladstone and Bright, an experience which ‘softened his sentiments towards


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England and led him to the belief that the grievances of Ireland could be remedied by constitutional agitation’.20 Thus, under the influence of the two great Liberals, O’Brien decided to work within the recognised parameters of British political life, thereby supplying an individual example of exactly the kind of process that Gladstone wished his church and land reforms to effect on a much wider scale in Ireland. Henceforth, O’Brien would exhibit the liberal concern with rationality and exposition, seeking to advance the nationalist cause by argument and force of logic. The preface to his 1890 work, The Home Ruler’s Manual, illustrates perfectly the liberal rationalist mode that he adopted: ‘The object of this little book is to place some facts ... before English readers ... in a spirit of fair play ... let us at least observe the golden rule: inquire and tolerate.’21 The basis of O’Brien’s new approach would be history, a well-established practice in Irish nationalist culture, as noted above. The British public would be his target audience and history his conversion tool, as O’Brien believed British opinion to be woefully lacking in Irish historical knowledge. As a law student and barrister in London in the 1870s, he therefore occupied much of his time with the study of Irish history, for he practised only briefly after being called to the Bar in 1875. The fruits of his labour were first seen in 1880–1, when the Irish Land War gave him the opportunity to employ his new knowledge on behalf of the Irish tenants. He produced two works: The Irish Land Question and English Public Opinion (first published in January 1880 and then reissued with a supplement in 1881) and The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, 1829–69 (published in November 1880). After 1882 and the formation of the National League, Parnell swung the Irish nationalist movement in a more constitutional direction, emphasising Home Rule at the expense of the land agitation, and O’Brien’s writings followed suit. Between 1883 and 1885 O’Brien published the two-volume Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, which sought to legitimise the demand for Home Rule rather than seek further land reform. This was followed in 1886–7 by various periodical articles arguing the case for Irish selfgovernment from a historical perspective, most of which were collected in the 1887 volume Irish Wrongs and English Remedies. O’Brien’s first work, The Irish Land Question, was a historical overview of the Irish landlord system designed to illustrate the iniquities of that system and consequently the need for its replacement by a peasant proprietary. Accordingly, he focuses on such matters as the system’s origins (successive confiscations), the almost despotic rule existing on some estates and the realities of arbitrary eviction. It is to these factors,




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O’Brien argues, that one must look for causes of Irish agrarian crime, not racial weakness. His second, and longer, work takes a different route, examining the unsuccessful attempts by the Imperial Parliament, over a period of forty years, to rectify the defects of Irish landlordism. The book tells the sorry tale of how various measures designed to provide the Irish tenants with certain safeguards (such as compensation for improvements and fixity of tenure) all failed to negotiate the hostility of a landowning Parliament. By showing in detail the past neglect of Irish tenants by British statesmen, he hopes to convince the English public of the need to do something now and pass those laws earlier generations had signally failed to deliver. The ‘more tardy has been justice to the Irish peasant in the past,’ writes O’Brien, ‘the more prompt and complete it ought to be in the present and future.’22 To him, this meant, at a minimum, the application of the ‘Three Fs’ (fixity of tenure, fair rents and ‘free sale’), along with improved measures for the creation of a peasant proprietary. Finally, his third major work of the decade, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, seeks to justify the nationalist claim for Home Rule by reviewing not just Irish land reforms but all the major Irish legislation of the previous fifty years. O’Brien’s object is to show how Westminster has failed either to consider or conciliate Irish public opinion, surrendering only to the threat of force, so that what ‘concessions’ there have been have lacked any generosity or grace. ‘There was hand-to-mouth legislation, but no true policy of redress,’ he writes.23 His conclusion is clear: the Union has been an unsuccessful experiment, and the Irish people, in light of these adverse historical experiences, are justified in demanding a system of ‘Home Government’. ‘I only wish to place John Bull before the Bar of history,’ O’Brien wrote in Actonian fashion to Bryce in 1907; ‘let Justice, pure & simple, be executed on him’.24 A more succinct and striking description of the literary method developed by O’Brien in the 1880s would be hard to find. Before we look at Gladstone’s reaction to O’Brien’s historical works, it is worth noting some points regarding O’Brien’s style and intellectual principles if the impact of these works on the Liberal leader is to be properly appreciated. First, reflecting his rationalist ethic, O’Brien’s books eschew the more emotive and partisan style of popular nationalist historiography. As their titles suggest, he often took recent parliamentary history as his subject rather than the bloodier eras of the past. The tone of his work is dispassionate and sober; he ‘gave the impression of being wholly unbiased’, said Michael MacDonagh. O’Brien tried to be as accurate as possible – he ‘had a ... love of truth’ – and for this reason based his writing, as far as he could, on original material. He hoped


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that, once the ‘facts’ had been established, long-term patterns would emerge from which statesmen could draw useful political lessons; his works of the 1880s all reflect this belief. While some of these values in part reflect his nationalist sensibility – the concern with historical patterns, for instance, can be linked to the nationalist desire to impose narrative order on the past – O’Brien clearly also wished to present himself as a liberal historian, for his approach to history placed him firmly within the world of contemporary intellectual liberalism, both British and Irish.25 In terms of the latter, his professed model was naturally Lecky, who was renowned for his impartial and objective treatment of history, and who believed that history’s political utility lay in its furnishing of long-term trends (as opposed to ready-made Gladstonian analogies).26 Lecky had also demonstrated in his Irish historical work the necessity of drawing upon manuscript material because of the partisan nature of most published Irish sources. In all these respects Lecky and O’Brien were close to liberal historians in Britain, especially the group of Oxbridge academics who, as Christopher Harvie has shown, came to the fore during the Reform struggle of the 1860s and included Bryce and Henry Sidgwick, among others.27 Positioning himself as a liberal historian was, in part, a way for O’Brien to advance both the nationalist cause and his own literary career: the British audience, and especially its liberal members, were arguably more likely to respond favourably to an approach which matched prevailing standards of scholarship and was marked by a balanced, dispassionate tone rather than crude partisanship. Even where a stronger note does arise, such as in the moral censure of Irish landlordism or the pleas for justice, it is to core liberal values that O’Brien is appealing. However, while he wished to have as wide an impact as possible, it was above all his Liberal heroes, Bright and Gladstone, whom he wished to target, of course. After all, without their influence the books would never have appeared. Furthermore, when it came to steering British opinion in a nationalist direction, O’Brien, with the Irish campaign of 1868–9 in mind, felt that these two men, back in government from 1880, would have much greater success than Irish nationalist politicians and publicists could achieve by themselves, and so he took care to ensure his arguments were aimed at them in particular. For a start, both his works on the land question close with a direct appeal to Gladstone and Bright. In The Irish Land Question he writes: ‘The development of a peasant proprietary ... will not present insurmountable obstacles in Ireland. Mr Gladstone and Mr Bright have already done much to redeem the past and if they resume the unfinished work of




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redress, and carry it firmly to the end, they will make Ireland ... the strength and not the weakness of the Empire.’28 Similarly, at the end of The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, he urges ‘Mr Gladstone, Mr Bright, Mr Forster, and Lord Hartington, to root not the landlords, but the tenants in the soil of Ireland’.29 Equally important, O’Brien sent copies of these two works and Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland to the two statesmen.30 Both men were impressed by O’Brien’s work, though it is naturally Gladstone’s response that concerns us here. The impact the books had on Gladstone from the start is clear. If anything, he was even more forcibly struck by the volumes than Bright, with The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question in particular making its mark (as the many annotations Gladstone made in his copy demonstrate). Concerning this book, Gladstone wrote to O’Brien on 5 November 1880: ‘I thank you for kindly sending me your work and I hope that the sad and discreditable story you have told so well in your narrative of the Irish Land Question may be useful at a period when we have more than ever of reason to desire that it should be thoroughly understood.’31 Then, in 1883, after receiving the first volume of Fifty Years of Concessions, Gladstone wrote in reply: ‘I have not forgotten your striking History of the Land Question of Ireland and I shall consequently read with much interest the work on the Half Century of Concessions.’32 Ten years later, in October 1893, the book was still in Gladstone’s mind when he received a copy of O’Brien’s edition of Wolfe Tone’s Autobiography. ‘You I think first gave me a true exposition of that most significant history of the Irish Land Question,’ he wrote.33 Thus, it is evident that O’Brien’s historicist method had the desired effect. Although, as Ruth Windscheffel has shown, it was Gladstone’s habit to read in order to remember, the fact that he recalled O’Brien’s work so strongly when, at the time he first read it, he was absorbing a wide range of both Irish and non-Irish material is still a vivid testament to the impact it had on him. The phrase ‘you ... first gave me’ suggests O’Brien was successful in furnishing the Liberal leader with a fresh perspective on a much-debated topic.34 But why should O’Brien’s work have resonated so strongly with Gladstone, and, more crucially, what does his enthusiastic response reveal about Gladstone’s attitude towards Ireland in the early 1880s and the possible influence O’Brien exercised upon him? With regard to the first of these questions, the importance of O’Brien’s commitment to intellectual liberalism immediately becomes apparent. By adopting a rationalist framework and applying liberal standards of impartiality and factual accuracy to his work, O’Brien naturally developed an approach


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well suited to engaging Gladstone’s mind. He was probably also helped by the distinctiveness of his subject matter, for no such detailed and accessible accounts of Parliament’s nineteenth-century Irish legislation had previously been available. Moreover, as noted, O’Brien was selfconsciously appealing to liberal values, as in the plea for justice for the Irish tenants at the close of The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question. Nor should his reference to the Imperial benefits of Irish pacification go unnoticed; this view of the Irish question was certainly one Gladstone took, and the loyalty and moderation it demonstrated would have helped make the essentially nationalist message more palatable (as well as further qualifying O’Brien’s supposedly Parnellite identity). Combined, these factors helped ensure that, in Gladstone, O’Brien found a receptive audience. In terms of the second question, any attempt to trace a connection between reading material and a politician’s subsequent actions inevitably invites a charge of speculation. Nevertheless, given, as David Bebbington and Windscheffel have shown, the important place books occupied in Gladstone’s life, the careful, methodical way in which he read them and the way they helped shape his mind and politics, some suggestive observations can be made.35 Most obviously, Gladstone’s positive reaction to O’Brien’s work helps demonstrate the value Gladstone placed on a historical understanding of the Irish issue even before the Home Rule crisis; it emphasises how he already felt a historical appreciation was a great aid in grasping Irish political subjects fully. ‘A most significant history’ is what he later called The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, implying he gained much from it. But what did this mean specifically? Perhaps one element which struck the Liberal leader in this text was how O’Brien, drawing a long-term lesson from history, based his call for justice for the Irish tenant primarily on the parliamentary failures of the past rather than the grievances of the then-current land agitation. It was a concept O’Brien also advanced at the end of The Irish Land Question, when he spoke of how Gladstone and Bright had ‘done much to redeem the past’ in their efforts at Irish land reform. This sense of legislation in the 1880s (and previously) being, in part, a recompense for repeated past mistreatment obviously parallels the ‘historical justice’ framework in which Gladstone would later place Home Rule. Another potential connection is Gladstone’s reference in 1880 to the ‘sad and discreditable story’ of Westminster’s handling of the Irish land issue, which brings to mind the concern he exhibited from 1886 with England’s international reputation and how Ireland was a ‘deep stain’ upon it. The possibility arises, therefore, of O’Brien playing a part




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in the gestation of Gladstone’s historical argument, supplying a sense of how present policy could be moulded by the past which appealed to the Liberal leader’s Burkean outlook and which Gladstone subsequently exploited fully. In one sense at least The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question and Fifty Years of Concessions, with their vivid accounts of Parliament’s dismal Irish record, would have strengthened Gladstone’s evolution towards Home Rule in the early 1880s, and that was how they surely reinforced his growing belief that the centralised system established under the Union had not been successful.36 Indeed, the phrase ‘you ... first gave me’ implies that The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question was influential in opening Gladstone’s eyes to the failure of Westminster in relation to the Irish land system. Either way, the idea that a historical understanding helped move Gladstone towards Home Rule in these years gains greater credibility. More immediately, it perhaps gave him a new angle on, and justification for, his Irish Land Act of 1881.

O’Brien put to use: the Nineteenth Century articles of 1885–6 For O’Brien, though, there was another important consequence of his work, which became clear during 1885 and which further illustrates the positive impact his writings had on Gladstone. This was the series of periodical articles he wrote for the Nineteenth Century between November 1885 and April 1886. These pieces mark the beginning of a process whereby O’Brien was drawn closely into the world of Liberal London, for they were soon followed by his enlistment in the Home Rule literary campaign in 1886. The series was overseen by Gladstone, and, consequently, the articles were closely tailored to his changing political needs in 1885–6. They also provide more evidence that a historical perspective on Home Rule was something he valued from the outset and wished to encourage in others rather than being a questionable late arrival. Gladstone initiated the series by writing to James Knowles, the editor of the Nineteenth Century, on 5 August 1885 advising him that the Irish question would soon occupy first place and that he should ‘present to the world solid and relevant materials of judgement’ with regard to it. Significantly, to Gladstone this meant history: a ‘searching and impartial’ article on the Union was required, he said. To help Knowles find authors, Gladstone added: ‘You might try Mr Bryce ... There was also an O’Brien, I think a Barry O’Brien, who wrote an excellent book on The Parliamentary History of Irish Land.’37 Having read O’Brien’s work


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over the previous five years, Gladstone not only was familiar with its quality but also knew that O’Brien had the necessary historical knowledge and the ability to write with the required balance and impartiality to ensure a fair reception for the articles from the English public; his nationalism was reasoned and moderate enough (as with The Irish Land Question, Fifty Years of Concessions ends with a commitment to the Empire38). Once again, the importance of O’Brien’s liberal intellectualism becomes clear. Following Gladstone’s advice, Knowles contacted O’Brien, and, after some delay, the first of the articles appeared in November 1885. At that time the Liberal leader, in his election speeches, was simply endeavouring to lay the ground with regard to Home Rule rather than put forward any scheme; he wished to fix attention on Ireland as the issue of the hour and to make others recognise the wisdom of a generous measure of Irish self-government. Until Ireland gave her electoral verdict it would be impossible to swing the Liberal Party behind Home Rule, and Gladstone was still clinging to the hope that the Tories might settle the Irish question. O’Brien’s November article was part of this process of laying the ground, with Gladstone having ensured this was the case by checking O’Brien’s piece prior to publication and successfully resisting Charles Gavan Duffy’s attempts to hijack the project.39 As Gladstone had desired, therefore, O’Brien’s article was a history of the Union, examining whether it had been effective. Entitled ‘Irish Wrongs and English Remedies’, it was essentially a condensed version of Fifty Years of Concessions, covering the same field of recent British legislative incompetence and making the same case: that the Union had failed and that the Irish cry for self-government was justified, springing from historical causes rather than an ‘irreconcilable’ temperament. ‘Are the Irish people unreasonable in being disloyal to an arrangement that has done this?’ O’Brien asks at the end. In this manner, the article prepared the way for Gladstone. By showing the historical validity of the Home Rule demand, it was hoped that the article would make its readers confront the issue and accept the necessity of some measure of Irish self-government. It also perhaps provides more evidence, albeit oblique, that Gladstone was brought to an endorsement of Home Rule through his study of Irish history, including the writings of O’Brien, for his wish that British opinion might be guided towards Home Rule through greater historical understanding possibly reflects a process he had undergone himself. Certainly, Gladstone was starting to realise what O’Brien had always said: that the British public was worryingly lacking in Irish historical knowledge.40




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It was around this time that O’Brien first met Gladstone, later recalling his ‘magnificent’ voice and ‘delightfully scoffing accents’. O’Brien in turn struck Gladstone, adding to the high opinion Gladstone already had of him from his work. Writing to Gladstone on 2 November, Knowles said: ‘I am so glad you liked him & his work ... what I see & hear of him is very prepossessing.’41 O’Brien’s second piece for the Nineteenth Century appeared in January 1886. As before, Gladstone was kept informed, approving the essay prior to publication.42 Accordingly, it again met his political needs. By early 1886 these had shifted from laying the ground to educating the Liberal Party in the realities of a Home Rule scheme, for it had become increasingly apparent that it was the Liberals, not the Tories, who would have to settle the Irish issue. However, Gladstone’s desire to avoid conducting that political education himself by producing a plan had intensified because, in addition to being concerned about Liberal unity (itself required to form a government), he was conscious that, with the parliamentary arithmetic finely balanced following the 1885 election, such a move would be deemed a bid for the Irish vote. O’Brien’s piece, ‘A Federal Union with Ireland’, therefore sought to address this problem by outlining the kind of constitution Parnell was likely to accept, with the main issue being the division between Imperial and Irish affairs, though the impact of such indirect education was rather limited.43 O’Brien’s last article, ‘Three Attempts to Rule Ireland Justly’, was published in April 1886 and coincided with the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons. It placed Gladstone alongside William III and Lord Melbourne as one of only three British statesmen, in O’Brien’s view, to have dealt honestly and constructively with Ireland (Gladstone’s mentor, Sir Robert Peel, was conveniently overlooked). This attempt to locate Home Rule within a Whig/Liberal tradition of pacifying Ireland was significant as it was an early move to counter two strands of opposition. First, in answer to the charge that Home Rule was an ‘unnatural’ break with the constitution, the article asserted that it represented a harmonious outgrowth of British political history and was thus a wise Burkean measure. Second, and more specifically, it rebutted claims by dissenting Liberals in 1886 that Home Rule went against ‘true’ Liberalism because the party always had been Unionist and had always focused on the moral instruction of the electorate rather than surrendering to numbers. By unveiling Home Rule as the latest instalment of a historic Liberal mission of ‘justice to Ireland’, the article showed that it was an inherently Liberal policy, in keeping with the party’s heritage and its ‘moral politics’.44 Once more O’Brien’s


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work had answered Gladstone’s political requirements, for this targeting of Liberal opinion was necessary given the fractures already apparent in Liberal ranks at that time. More broadly, this final article in the series also promoted the view, which had become even more important to Gladstone since the previous summer, that Home Rule and history were inseparable, that any true evaluation of the former involved a full understanding of the latter. It was a belief that Gladstone was, of course, to promulgate vigorously from the 1886 election onwards, and O’Brien, having proved his worth with the Nineteenth Century series, was to play a valuable role in the Liberal literary campaign in general and the historical argument in particular.

The historical campaign for Home Rule, 1886–90 O’Brien’s contribution to Gladstone’s historical case for Home Rule took several forms. Most significantly, Gladstone used his close knowledge of O’Brien’s works when constructing his historical argument in 1886. Also, O’Brien continued to supply the Liberal leader with historical information at this time, and he promoted the historical argument himself, both in his own writings from 1886 and as a key member of the Bryce-directed literary campaign. An examination of these different strands to O’Brien’s contribution will make it clear that Gladstone’s historical argument was broader in its scope, more extensive in its sources and more thorough in its organisation than perhaps has been appreciated. As noted earlier, it is often assumed that Gladstone’s historical case centred almost wholly on the eighteenth century in terms of subject matter, with ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ and the enactment of the Union as the key topics, and that it relied heavily on Lecky in terms of sources. Certainly, in addition to highlighting these issues in his speeches, especially the corruption behind the Union, Gladstone published a number of articles between 1886 and 1889 defending his interpretation of eighteenth-century Irish history and, in passing, acknowledging his debt to Lecky.45 However, closer scrutiny of his addresses and writings reveals that there were other strings to his historical bow, and this is where the influence of O’Brien’s work on Gladstone starts to become apparent. This is because O’Brien’s area of expertise, nineteenth-century Irish history, and particularly the shortcomings of Westminster, bulked almost as large in Gladstone’s historical argument as the eighteenth century. When he admitted to Bryce in July 1886 that the British people did not know his historical case, it was clear that, for Gladstone, this meant not




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only how the Union was enacted but also the subsequent failure of the Imperial Parliament to treat Ireland fairly. ‘The whole iniquities of the Union, and the subsequent English history which is shameful ... must be laid bare & become common property,’ he told Bryce.46 Gladstone certainly did his best from 1886 to lay bare Westminster’s dismal post-1800 Irish record, which, as this letter implies, figured most often as part of his theme of historical justice for Ireland, taking its place alongside the Union in the hall of shame for which England had to atone. It was exactly the kind of narrative shape so beloved of nationalists, including O’Brien, and showed how, in this instance, the Home Rule alliance was as much about Liberalism adapting to nationalism as the other way round. His letter to the London constituencies during the 1886 election is a good example of Gladstone’s approach, its moralistic language emphasising his desire to cast Home Rule as a true Liberal policy, as O’Brien had sought to do in ‘Three Attempts to Rule Ireland Justly’. The letter was almost entirely concerned with England’s ‘long record of disgraceful deeds’ against Ireland, and in this record the mistakes of the Imperial Parliament are just as prominent as ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ and the Union. Thus, after detailing the ‘shameful means’ by which the Union was carried, Gladstone went on to denounce, among other things, how the ‘sufferings of the people’ were ‘shamefully neglected’ in the early decades of the Union, how Catholic Emancipation was conceded only in response to the threat of civil war and how even after the ‘nation’ was enfranchised in 1832 and 1867 ‘evil’ continued to be done, while much ‘good’ was ‘left undone’.47 His earlier speeches had followed a similar pattern. At Liverpool, for instance, on 28 June he followed his attack on the Union by outlining in detail six aspects of Irish history under the Union: broken promises, such as Emancipation; unjust laws, especially on the land issue; successive coercion laws; the withholding of reforms applied in Britain; the surrender to force rather than justice; and the ‘shameful’ postponement of relief, including the long delay in land legislation. This was a ‘deplorable narrative’, Gladstone concluded.48 In constructing this sketch of nineteenth-century Irish history Gladstone had clearly drawn on O’Brien’s works of 1880–5. The six aspects delineated at Liverpool all reflect the arguments put forward in The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question and Fifty Years of Concessions, and the 1885 article ‘Irish Wrongs and English Remedies’ effectively supplied Gladstone with a ready-made text from which to preach. O’Brien’s claim at the close of the latter that the Irish people were not ‘unreasonable in being disloyal’ to a Union that brought such misery was echoed by Gladstone


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in his London letter. ‘Can you wonder that a cry long and loud has been heard against this Union,’ asked the Liberal leader. Thus, O’Brien was arguably one of those chiefly responsible for Gladstone’s incorporation of nineteenth-century Irish history into his historical justice narrative. Indeed, these O’Brien-inspired accounts of Ireland under the Union provide further evidence of O’Brien’s role in the formation of the historical justice concept, suggesting that if, as Donal McCartney has argued, Lecky was the man most likely to have ‘converted’ Gladstone to such a view, then Barry O’Brien was not far behind.49 Moreover, it is worth noting the emotive, thunderous language used by Gladstone when outlining Irish history, almost akin to the language of an Old Testament prophet in its denunciation of wrongdoing. Words such as ‘shameful’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘sufferings’ and ‘evil’ litter his statements. While they reflect a number of things – the ferocity with which he and his Irish allies were being assailed in certain quarters, his own conviction of a divine hand behind his Home Rule policy, and the uphill struggle the Liberals faced in the 1886 election – they also bear witness to O’Brien’s impact on Gladstone and the extent to which he now subscribed to the O’Brien version of nineteenth-century Irish history.50 It was not just as material for the historical justice theme that O’Brien’s writings proved valuable to Gladstone’s historical argument. On a more practical level they also helped the Liberal leader counter those opponents who argued that the Union had worked, that Ireland had received a great deal from Westminster in terms of relief measures and reforms, especially in more recent decades. In response to these challenges, Gladstone was able to assert, in the vein of Fifty Years of Concessions and The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, that when the circumstances in which each reform was carried were explored a different pictured emerged: long delays, hostility, a grudging spirit and a greater respect for threats of force than the claims of justice. As a result, the pacifying effect of such legislation had been negligible. These O’Brienite arguments were in evidence during the House of Commons debates on Home Rule in 1886. In the speech with which he introduced the bill on 8 April, for example, Gladstone described how many Irish reforms had been passed under the ‘influences of fear’ and in a ‘spirit of grudging and jealousy’, before referring specifically to the ‘still sadder tale’ of Irish land legislation. Here, the impact of The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question was clearly visible, with Gladstone’s close study of the text enabling him to adopt an authoritative tone on the subject: ‘Let no man assume that he fully knows that history, until he has followed it from year to year, beginning with the Devon Commission, or with




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the efforts of Sharman Crawford.’51 This critical view of Irish legislation under the Union resurfaced during the speech with which Gladstone closed the debate on the second reading of his bill on 7 June. Rebutting the assertion that the Union had seen a ‘steady redress of grievances’, he argued that there had instead been redress ‘under compulsion’ and amidst a ‘general failure of government’. ‘It is impossible to stand by the legislation of this House as whole since the Union’ was his damning, O’Brien-derived verdict.52 During this period and after, O’Brien also aided Gladstone in his historical argument by continuing to send him not only his own published work but also specialist historical material when required. For instance, O’Brien furnished Gladstone with a paper on the United Irishmen in July 1886, showing how his historical assistance was by no means confined to the nineteenth century. Around this time he also provided the Liberal chief with a copy of ‘Articles on Ireland’, an 1886 pamphlet of essays published in Dublin which covered a range of historical topics, including the failed attempt in the 1830s to make the Union work (the so-called Lichfield House Compact), which demonstrated that the opportunity for such an outcome had passed.53 This was followed over the next four years by three books: Irish Wrongs and English Remedies (1887), which, as the title suggests, contained the Knowles articles, among other pieces; Thomas Drummond, His Life and Letters (1889), a biography of the reformist Irish Undersecretary of the 1830s, whose impartial administration showed that justice, not coercion, brought peace; and The Home Ruler’s Manual (1890), a compact summary of the arguments in favour of Irish self-government. The last of these prompted Gladstone to write in reply: ‘Your former works give me every confidence in your ability and a glance at the volume you have ... sent me [shows] ... that it is calculated to gain the adhesion of moderate men.’54 Given this confidence in O’Brien’s ability, as well as his keen awareness of O’Brien’s historical knowledge, it is not surprising that Gladstone should have sought to involve him in the Liberal literary campaign which got under way after the 1886 election defeat. Although the historical appeals that Gladstone had made during the election had not had the desired effect (he expressed astonishment at ‘the deadness of vulgar opinion to the blackguardism ... which befoul[s] the ... history of the Union’), this is no way deterred him from intensifying Liberal efforts in this direction once it was over.55 Rather, as seen above, he felt it was the time to go forward with the historical argument, so history was at the heart of a literary campaign which itself was required


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to provide that political education which Gladstone had avoided the previous winter. Authorising Bryce to superintend this campaign in his letter of 8 July, Gladstone outlined two strands: ‘history’ and the ‘outlook beyond these shores’. He went on: ‘Could not you, Thorold Rogers, Barry O’Brien (possibly Lefevre), and such like men meet to consider this ... J. Morley would I think help.’ Thus, it was no longer a case of ‘there was an O’Brien, I think Barry O’Brien’. Instead, following the Knowles project, O’Brien was a known and trusted figure, and one of the first names to spring to Gladstone’s mind. Indeed, the day before, 7 July, he had written to thank O’Brien for ‘Articles on Ireland’ and, mentioning the need for disseminating historical information, had told him: ‘You have already done much & may do more.’56 Recruiting nationalist writers such as O’Brien had become especially important in view of the defection of many Liberal intellectuals to the Unionists (Lecky and Dicey being obvious examples here) and the lack of Irish expertise among those who remained in the fold.57 O’Brien therefore became a key ally of the Liberals during these years, his involvement in the Bryce campaign drawing him even closer into the world of Liberal London. And, as the 7 July letter makes clear, it was in the historical aspects of that campaign that Gladstone naturally expected him to prove most valuable. Bryce was a logical choice to head the Home Rule literary offensive, for he possessed the necessary Irish political knowledge (he had chaired the backbench Committee on Irish Affairs, which had endorsed Irish self-government by 1884) and had helped organise a similar publicity initiative during the Reform struggle of the 1860s. O’Brien had known Bryce since the early 1880s, something which no doubt facilitated his recruitment in 1886, and, after Bryce, he was probably the most active and important figure in the Liberal literary project, operating not only as a writer but as an organiser and editor too.58 A week after asking him to begin the enterprise, Gladstone sent Bryce a more detailed plan of the two areas to be tackled. ‘History’ was obviously one of these, and, in keeping with the historical justice theme delineated during the general election, Gladstone defined this as both eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Irish history. The other main area was the ‘political argument’, by which was meant such things as colonial experience, foreign opinion and Ireland’s democratic verdict. In response to this, a consultation meeting of ‘seven or eight persons’ was arranged by Bryce to discuss matters further; by mid-September, a committee had been formed, consisting of seven men, including Bryce, O’Brien, Shaw Lefevre and John Morley.59 The next month, and after some difficulties, they decided to




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divide the project in two. First, the political aspects would be covered, Bryce told Gladstone on 8 October, ‘in a series of magazine articles which might be subsequently reprinted in a volume’.60 This would not be a regular series; rather, individual writers would publish when and where they could. As anticipated, these articles were then collected in a single volume, which was edited by Bryce and published in October 1887, with O’Brien helping to oversee the printing process while Bryce was on holiday in September. Entitled the Handbook of Home Rule, it included contributions from Morley, Gladstone, Bryce, O’Brien and E. L. Godkin (a friend of Bryce and a former Crimean War journalist now resident in the United States), many of which had previously been published in periodicals.61 Ostensibly the political side of the literary campaign, the Handbook still advanced the historical argument in the shape, appropriately enough, of the contributions from Gladstone and O’Brien. While Gladstone’s piece, ‘Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century’, dealt with the fruitful precedent of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, O’Brien’s essay, ‘The “Unionist” Case for Home Rule’, took Unionist intellectuals such as Lecky, Dicey and Goldwin Smith and showed how their historical and political views were at odds. This was because their writings on Irish history detailed both the corruption associated with the passing of the Union and the subsequent mistreatment of Ireland by the Imperial Parliament, so that, even when written by Unionists, Irish history could point only towards Home Rule.62 Although somewhat hastily constructed, O’Brien’s essay had the merit of setting forth Irish grievances in both their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guises, thereby covering all the ground of Gladstone’s historical justice theme. The Handbook ‘has given great satisfaction’ to ‘many of our best people’, Bryce told Gladstone, and certainly the Liberal leader himself was doubtless pleased that O’Brien had begun to deliver the historical case behind Home Rule for which he had been recruited.63 This was just as well, because the actual historical side of the Bryce literary campaign had yet to appear, suffering many delays before it was eventually published a year after the Handbook, in 1888. In his letter of 8 October 1886 Bryce had told Gladstone that the historical case required ‘more systematic treatment’, before adding that he and O’Brien were ‘in communication with the proposed writers to settle their respective periods and subjects’.64 That O’Brien should have already emerged as Bryce’s chief assistant on the historical side of the project is understandable given his pedigree, and it demonstrates the prominent part he took in the literary campaign. Unfortunately for Bryce, assembling a ‘really


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capable team’ proved more difficult than he expected, and it was not until December 1886 that he was able to supply Gladstone with a plan. The previous two hundred years of Irish history were to be divided into five sections (1691–1782, 1782–1800, 1800–29, 1829–48, 1848–70), each being dealt with by a different writer. Gladstone approved of these proposals and even sent Bryce a few suggestions regarding the voting on the Union in the old Irish Parliament. Then, in January 1887, Bryce gave Gladstone a list of the authors involved: the positivist J. H. Bridges, J. R. Thursfield (a journalist), G. P. MacDonnell (a barrister), Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice and two Irishmen, Dr W. K. Sullivan, President of the Queen’s College Cork, and Dr George Sigerson of the Royal University Dublin, who were to tackle 1691–1782 and 1782–1800, respectively.65 As matters proceeded, the Irish part of the team became O’Brien’s remit, and, unhappily for him, they were the main cause of the delay in publication, with various problems preventing them from completing their essays on time despite the entreaties of O’Brien and Bryce, and threats on O’Brien’s part to cross over to Ireland. In the event Sigerson’s piece was a year late, not reaching O’Brien until March 1888.66 Finally, in October that year, the book appeared. Called Two Centuries of Irish History, it was introduced by Bryce and co-edited by him and O’Brien. As Bryce left for India shortly before its publication, O’Brien made the final arrangements. Writing to Bryce on 3 November, he said: ‘I sent the very first copy that came from the printers to Mr G ... & generally I shall do all I can to push the book.’67 O’Brien’s choice of recipient for the first copy was natural and appropriate, for Two Centuries of Irish History presented in solid form the factual evidence underpinning the various aspects of Gladstone’s historical argument, in terms of both historical justice and the analogy of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’. It sought to do this, however, in the sober, dispassionate manner expected of liberal historiography, though this in itself could be seen as a conscious strategy for winning adherents, especially the middle-class supporters lost in 1886. ‘A concise and impartial narrative of Irish history’ was being offered, said Bryce in his introduction, with the spirit of the book being ‘scientific enquiry’ rather than ‘partisanship’. These claims were underlined by the contributors, who, though Home Rulers, were mainly academics rather than politicians. Nevertheless, the political aspirations of the book’s backers still emerge as Bryce then asserts how, through the ‘indisputable facts’ it supplied, history was a means by which the ‘allegations of passion and prejudice may be tested and the underlying truth be discerned’.68 And, for liberal historians like Bryce and O’Brien, it was of course these long-term




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patterns, or ‘truths’, which provided useful political lessons. Unlike O’Brien’s works, Two Centuries does not spell out the political lesson of Home Rule explicitly at its close. Instead, it contents itself with establishing the ‘underlying truth’ that after repeated mistreatment Ireland had a legitimate claim against England. Bryce hoped that Gladstone would find ‘it a valuable contribution to the Irish question, in showing English people what are the causes which have produced and so largely justified the alienation of Ireland’.69 In July 1886 Gladstone had lamented how the people did not know the historical case behind Home Rule, especially its historical justice aspect. Now, at last, that case had been made available in substantial literary form, with both the ‘iniquities of the Union’ and the ‘shameful’ legislative failures that followed laid bare. In the process O’Brien had repaid Gladstone’s faith in him, his commitment and determination helping greatly to ensure the completion of Two Centuries of Irish History and with it the presentation of that historical argument with which he had been charged. The final way in which O’Brien aided the historical campaign for Home Rule was inevitably through the books he produced himself in these years. His various publications of 1886–90 have been detailed above. Of these, only one essay requires closer examination here, as it provides a fitting conclusion to this study of his part in Gladstone’s historical case. This is ‘Mr Lecky on Home Rule’ (published in ‘Articles on Ireland’ and then re-published in Irish Wrongs and English Remedies), O’Brien’s mid-1886 riposte to Lecky’s recent pronouncements against Home Rule, both in the press and on the platform. As noted earlier, Lecky ridiculed attempts to draw comparisons between a Catholic–Fenian Home Rule parliament and its ‘propertied, Protestant and loyal’ eighteenth-century predecessor. No basis for historical justice existed in such circumstances in his view. It was this argument that O’Brien’s article sought to combat, presenting a two-fold case. First, he argued that the community which the old Irish Parliament represented had, on the contrary, not always been indisputably loyal, citing as evidence the Volunteer demonstrations of the 1780s and the Protestant membership of the United Irishmen. Second, he asserted that the bulk of the Irish people in fact valued the link with Britain, provided their wishes were respected. The desire for separation sprang from English misgovernment rather than natural inclinations, said O’Brien, and he justified this claim by pointing out how both the Young Ireland and Fenian revolts had occurred only after the previous constitutional movements had failed.70 This tradition of latent loyalty coupled with forced rebellion no doubt appealed to Gladstone, anticipating as it did his own attempts to use


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‘Grattan’s Parliament’ as the basis for a constitutional pedigree for Irish nationalism. More significantly, in wider terms, this rebuttal of Lecky vividly underlines O’Brien’s importance to Gladstone’s historical argument. While Lecky’s works on eighteenth-century Irish history had furnished Gladstone with much ammunition, the sight of Lecky himself coming out against Home Rule was far less congenial. The very fact that the leading authority on Irish history opposed Home Rule could only threaten to undermine Gladstone’s historical case. It was worse when he actually contested that case and cited the past against Home Rule. It was therefore crucial to the Gladstonian historical campaign that Lecky be challenged; he was too weighty a figure to be ignored. Through his 1886 essay, O’Brien helped show that the Home Rulers were up to this daunting challenge. The following year he continued the process with his attempts in the Handbook to turn Lecky’s historical writings against him. This readiness to perform the critical task of tackling Lecky is eloquent testimony to the vital role O’Brien played in Gladstone’s historical crusade. He was arguably the Home Rule publicist who came closest to matching Lecky’s knowledge of Irish history and his high standards of scholarship; he may even have seen himself as the Gladstonian/ nationalist Lecky. By entering the lists against the historian he admired most, O’Brien helped give Gladstone’s historical campaign the extra intellectual ballast it needed after the flight of educated Liberals from the Home Rule standard.

Conclusion: what O’Brien demonstrates about the nature of Gladstone’s historical argument Equally important, O’Brien’s robust reply to Lecky’s claims emphasised in striking fashion the true scope of Gladstone’s historical argument, in terms of evidence and sources. It showed how, in constructing his historical argument, the Liberal leader was not unduly reliant either on Lecky or on his area of expertise, the eighteenth century, but ranged well beyond both for his material. If liberal intellectuals like Lecky had deserted him over Ireland, then Gladstone proved more than capable of recruiting suitable replacements from the nationalist ranks. And, in O’Brien, he found one who was admirably qualified to help advance the historical argument in a variety of ways. By 1886 O’Brien had not only supplied Gladstone with ample evidence from the nineteenth century for his historical argument but also arguably contributed to the formation of that argument, particularly its theme of historical justice, before going on to help disseminate it through the Bryce campaign and




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his own writings. Furthermore, the connection with O’Brien emphasises how Gladstone’s concern with Irish history pre-dated the Home Rule crisis, and it conveys a sense of how history may have helped bring that policy into being, especially in terms of establishing, as O’Brien’s works sought to do, that the Union had been a failure. Yet no journey into Irish history would be complete without a touch of irony. In this case it duly arrived in November 1890, when O’Brien, by now assistant editor of the Liberal weekly paper the Speaker, publicly declared his support for Parnell following the divorce court verdict, even going so far as offering to stand as a Parnellite candidate at the Kilkenny by-election in December 1890, his reason being the belief that the success of Home Rule was utterly dependant upon Parnell remaining as leader.71 While this close association with Parnell is no surprise to us, it was a great shock for his Liberal friends (‘some of the party are incensed against me,’ he wrote at this time), including Gladstone, who had, understandably, come to view him as a trusted and valuable colleague over the preceding four years. His new Parnellite status was a dramatic break with the political identity he had acquired since 1886. In fact, it seems almost certain that O’Brien is the ‘X’ referred to at this juncture in Morley’s Life of Gladstone. Upon hearing that a particular individual was a known Parnellite authority at the Kilkenny election, Gladstone exclaimed: ‘What X a Parnellite! Are they mad then? Are they clean demented?’72 If this was indeed O’Brien, then the Liberal leader can be forgiven his outburst, for, after all, O’Brien, the nationalist historian, had sided with Parnell, the man who knew little of Irish history, at the expense of Gladstone, the man whose preoccupation with the subject O’Brien shared. However, the Liberal leader would perhaps have gained comfort if he had known that, in the long run, his close concern with Irish history would receive some measure of recompense, for, while his vision of Home Rule itself may never have materialised, Gladstone’s reputation among Irish historians at least has been relatively secure over the past century or so, something which is perhaps a fitting reward for one of the few British politicians to invest so much energy in the subject.73

Notes 1. Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44499, fo. 162: Gladstone to Dicey, 12 Nov. 1886. Gladstone’s admission to Dicey regarding the limits of his knowledge reflects the fact that, although his Irish history reading increased in late 1885, it was in the spring of 1886 that he began to study the subject even more intensely. I am grateful here to Mary Louise Legg for allowing me to examine her work on Gladstone’s Irish reading, as drawn from the published diaries.


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2. Gladstone to Bryce, 8 July 1886, in H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, July 1883–Dec. 1886 (Oxford, 1990), p. 585; Richard Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, 1865–98 (London, 1999), p. 515. 3. ‘Of distinguished Irishmen’, wrote R. Barry O’Brien in 1901, ‘none probably knew less of political history than Charles Russell and Charles Stewart Parnell.’ R. Barry O’Brien, Life of Lord Russell of Killowen (London, 1901), pp. 134–6. See R. F. Foster, ‘History and the Irish Question’ in R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993) for how Irish history was made to serve nationalist political purposes. 4. Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44458, p. 106: Letter Books, 1885–86; W. E. Gladstone, Speeches on the Irish Question in 1886 (Edinburgh, 1886), pp. 302–11. 5. This article, entitled ‘Daniel O’Connell’, was reprinted in W. E. Gladstone, Special Aspects of the Irish Question (London, 1892). See also H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 560–1. 6. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, p. 561; Gladstone, Speeches on the Irish Question in 1886, p. 308; Hansard, series 3, 1886, vol. cccvi, cols. 1230–40. For Gladstone’s concern with England’s reputation, see also his ‘Notes and Queries on the Irish Demand’ from February 1887, in Gladstone, Special Aspects of the Irish Question, p. 63. This perception of Ireland as a ‘deep stain’ possibly owed something to Isaac Butt, the Irish Party leader of the 1870s, who also depicted Ireland as ‘a dark spot in the history of England’. Hansard, series 3, 1874, vol. ccxx, cols. 700–17. 7. For how Bryce saw Home Rule as a more palatable alternative to social reform, see Christopher Harvie, ‘Ideology and Home Rule: James Bryce, A. V. Dicey and Ireland, 1880–87’, English Historical Review, XCI (1976), pp. 298–314. The focus on Home Rule and history also reflected the preference of Gladstone and others for a ‘single issue’ approach as opposed to ‘programme’ politics. See here D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972) and John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford, 1968). 8. E. F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1908 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 4, 34. See also R. English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London, 2006), p. 210. 9. James Bryce (ed.), Handbook of Home Rule (London, 1887). In the speech with which he introduced the Home Rule Bill on 9 April, Gladstone touched on the ‘Imperial loyalty’ of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ (Hansard, series 3, 1886, vol. ccciv, col. 1045). 10. Donal McCartney, W.E.H. Lecky, Historian and Politician, 1838–1903 (Dublin, 1994), pp. 114–27. Rather than being heir to Grattan, claimed Lecky, Gladstone was following the tradition of Wolfe Tone and the separatist United Irishmen. 11. Ibid., pp. 4–25, 57–64, 142–3. The main sources of inspiration for Gladstone were Lecky’s The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 2nd edn. (1861) and his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (1878–90), the Irish chapters of which were published in a separate edition in 1892. 12. Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, p. 380. Shannon’s observation that the policy preceded the historical case reflects the point made above (note 1) that Gladstone’s Irish history reading intensified from the spring of 1886




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13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

onwards. Gladstone himself later admitted to R. Barry O’Brien, ‘[I] did not know as much about the way the Union was carried when I took up Home Rule as I came to know afterwards.’ R. Barry O’Brien, England’s Title in Ireland (London, 1905), p. 6. James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 175–88; Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, pp. 10–11. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 463–70; E. F. Biagini, Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 98–105; E. F. Biagini, ‘ “Exporting Western and Beneficient Institutions”: Gladstone and Empire, 1880–85’ in David Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 202–25; Robert T. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt (London, 1995). Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 463–70; Paul Bew, Ireland, the Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 274–8, 295–6; Richard A. Cosgrove, ‘The Relevance of Irish History: The Gladstone-Dicey Debate about Home Rule, 1886–7’, Éire-Ireland, XIII, 4 (1978), pp. 6–21. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 469–70; Biagini, Gladstone, pp. 11–13, 98–101; Bew, Ireland, the Politics of Enmity, p. 349; English, Irish Freedom, p. 210. Indeed, even in his first book, The State in Its Relations with the Church (1841), which was the key statement of his youthful Conservatism, Gladstone had shown much concern with an Irish historical perspective, drawing on many Irish historians, including Burke. I am grateful to John-Paul McCarthy for this point and for other evidence that Gladstone’s historical treatment of political issues, especially Ireland, was of a long-standing nature. The ‘high politics’ model is most closely associated with John Vincent and A. B. Cooke, The Governing Passion, Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–6 (Brighton, 1974) and Maurice Cowling, Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967), but Hamer also discounts the impact of ideology in Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery. A recent rebuttal of this approach can be found in Biagini, British Democracy, p. 13. For more on this shift of emphasis, see Alan O’Day, ‘Home Rule and the Historians’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), The Making of Modern Irish History, Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996) and Gary Peatling, British Opinion and Irish SelfGovernment, 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001). R. Barry O’Brien, John Bright, A Monograph (London, 1910), p. 6. The Times, 19 Mar. 1918. R. Barry O’Brien, The Home Ruler’s Manual (London, 1890), preface. R. Barry O’Brien, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, 1829–69 (London, 1880), p. 52. R. Barry O’Brien, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1883 and 1885), vol. II, p. 427. Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Mss. Bryce, 112, fos. 41–2: O’Brien to Bryce, 22 Mar. 1907. See English, Irish Freedom, pp. 444–8, for the nationalist concern with narrative shape and order when exploring the past. The Observer, 24 Mar. 1918. The definitive statement of both O’Brien’s intellectual liberalism and his admiration for Lecky comes in his article ‘The Best Hundred Irish Books’, Freeman’s Pamphlets no. 7 (Dublin, 1886).


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27. McCartney, Lecky, pp. 50–7, 70–7; Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism, University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860–86 (London, 1976), pp. 42–4, 100–1, 214–16. 28. R. Barry O’Brien, The Irish Land Question and English Public Opinion (London, 1881), pp. 82–3. 29. O’Brien, Parliamentary History, p. 204. 30. O’Brien, John Bright, pp. 9–10; H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. IX, Jan. 1875–Dec. 1880 (Oxford 1986), p. 474; H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. X, Jan. 1881–June 1883 (Oxford, 1990), p. 64. 31. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. IX, p. 609. Gladstone’s copy of O’Brien’s The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question is housed at St Deiniols Library, Hawarden. 32. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, p. 38. 33. Ibid., p. 38; Gladstone Papers, Add Mss. 44549, p. 283: Gladstone to O’Brien, 12 Oct. 1893. J. L. Hammond notes the effect of O’Brien’s second book on Gladstone in Gladstone and the Irish Nation, 2nd edn. (London, 1964), p. 190. Gladstone once told O’Brien that he was ‘deeply moved by the Parliamentary history ... of Irish land’. R. Barry O’Brien, ‘The Government of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’ in John H. Morgan (ed.), The New Irish Constitution (London, 1912), pp. 328–9. 34. Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 47; O’Brien’s The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question was one of seventeen works on the Irish land issue that Gladstone read between 18 October and 21 December 1880. See Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. IX. 35. David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone, Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004); Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone, pp. 45–6. 36. Biagini, Gladstone, pp. 98–100; Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 466–70; Bew, Ireland, the Politics of Enmity, p. 295. 37. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, pp. 380–1; Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, p. 474. Gladstone’s letter to Knowles on 5 August expressing his belief that Home Rule was about to become the predominant issue was prompted by a communication that day from Parnell, via Katharine O’Shea, stating that the previous ‘Central Board scheme would no longer suffice’ and that only ‘Colonial self-government’ would satisfy the Irish now. 38. O’Brien, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, vol. II, p. 427. 39. R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 2nd edn. (London, 1910), pp. 365–6; John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (London, 1908), vol. II, pp. 355–60; Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, p. 381; Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 475–83; T. A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 244–55. 40. R. Barry O’Brien, Irish Wrongs and English Remedies (London, 1887), pp. 1–30; Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, p. 379. 41. O’Brien, Parnell, pp. 366–77; Gladstone Papers, Add Mss. 44232, fo. 31: Knowles to Gladstone, 2 Nov. 1885. 42. O’Brien, Irish Wrongs, pp. 152–66; O’Brien, Parnell, pp. 374–5; O’Brien, Life of Lord Russell, p. 197. 43. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, pp. 481–5; Jenkins, Whiggery, pp. 244–63. Another example of this ‘indirect’ education of the Liberal Party was Bryce’s ‘Alternative Policies’ in Ireland, which appeared in the February issue of




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44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

Nineteenth Century. The choice of Bryce probably stemmed from the Knowles letter of 5 August 1885. O’Brien, Irish Wrongs, pp. 31–62; Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–98, p. 561; Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, p. 229; Tom Dunne, ‘Les trahison des clercs: British intellectuals and the first home rule crisis’, Irish Historical Studies, XXIII (1982–83), pp. 134–73. These articles were nearly all reprinted in the 1892 volume Special Aspects of the Irish Question. See in particular ‘Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 109–34; ‘Ingram’s History of the Irish Union’, pp. 135–86; and ‘Plain Speaking on the Irish Union’, pp. 303–42; but also ‘The Irish Question’, pp. 8–9, 47; and ‘Notes and Queries on the Irish Demand’, pp. 61–2. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, p. 585. Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44458, p. 106: Letter Books, 1885–86. Gladstone, Speeches on the Irish Question in 1886, pp. 304–5. Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44458, p. 106: Letter Books, 1885–86; McCartney, Lecky, p. 143. For attacks upon the Irish national character, for example, see Gary Peatling, ‘Victorian Imperial Theorist? Goldwin Smith and Ireland’ in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 27–36. The moral passion of Gladstone’s rhetoric also fits Biagini’s concept of the ‘politics of humanitarianism’ (see note 8 above). Hansard, series 3, 1886, vol. ccciv, cols. 1079–81. Ibid., vol. cccvi, cols. 1231–2. Gladstone also referred to the Irish failures of the Imperial Parliament in his 1886 pamphlet ‘The Irish Question’. See Gladstone, Special Aspects of the Irish Question, pp. 8–10. Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44498, fos. 164, 176–8: O’Brien to Gladstone, 8, 10 July 1886; Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, p. 584; R. Barry O’Brien, ‘Articles on Ireland’, Freemans Pamphlets no. 8 (Dublin, 1886). Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44509, fo. 73: Gladstone to O’Brien, 21 June 1890; H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XII, 1887–91 (Oxford, 1994), p. 28. For further evidence of O’Brien’s historical assistance to Gladstone at this time, see Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 44509, fo. 243: T. Wemyss Reid to Gladstone, 10 Mar. 1890. Shannon, Gladstone, Heroic Minister, p. 447. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, pp. 584–5. For the defection of Liberal intellectuals over Home Rule, see Dunne, ‘Les trahison des clercs’, pp. 134–73; McCartney, Lecky, pp. 114–36. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 213, fos. 5–11: ‘Committee on Irish Affairs’ circulars, Mar. 1883 and 15 Feb. 1884; James Bryce, England and Ireland (London, 1884), pp. 1–5; Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, pp. 129–33. O’Brien and Bryce probably met via legal channels (both had rooms in Lincoln’s Inn and Bryce practised as a barrister until 1882) and mutual friends such as the Ulsterborn advocate Charles Russell. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 143–6, 148–51: Bryce to Gladstone, 10 and 26 July and 2 Aug. 1886; Mss. Bryce 10, fo. 66: Gladstone to Bryce, 17 July 1886; Viscount Gladstone Papers, Add Ms. 46019, fo. 12: Bryce to Herbert Gladstone, 19 Sept. 1886; O’Brien, Parnell, pp. 404–5. For a full account of the Bryce literary campaign, see Ian D. Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists


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60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

and Litterateurs in Late Victorian London, c.1870–1910’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2003), pp. 175–80. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 152–4: Bryce to Gladstone, 8 Oct. 1886. Bryce, Handbook of Home Rule; Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 178–81: Bryce to Gladstone, 11 and 20 Sept. 1887. In the early 1880s Bryce had written for the New York Nation, the paper founded and edited by Godkin. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism, pp. 201–2. In Lecky’s case, quoting the great historian against himself was something many nationalists, including O’Brien, had already done. See McCartney, Lecky, pp. 136–42; Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, pp. 9–11. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 178–79, 182–5: Bryce to Gladstone, 11 Sept. and 5 Nov. 1887. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 152–54: Bryce to Gladstone, 8 Oct. 1886. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 11, fos. 155–65: Bryce to Gladstone, 29 Nov. and 22 and 28 Dec. 1886, 19 Jan. 1887; Mss. Bryce 10, fos. 75–6: Gladstone to Bryce, 28 Dec. 1886. See Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists and Litterateurs’, pp. 177–9, for a full account of the problems caused by Sigerson and Sullivan. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 112, fos. 7–8: O’Brien to Bryce, 3 Nov. 1888; Mss. Bryce 12, fos. 10–11: Bryce to Gladstone, 19 Oct. 1888. James Bryce (ed.), Two Centuries of Irish History (London, 1888), pp. v–xi. It was ‘in no sense as a political argument that it has been written’, Bryce told Gladstone just before publication. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 12, fos. 10–11: Bryce to Gladstone, 19 Oct. 1888. Bryce Papers, Mss. Bryce 12, fos. 10–11: Bryce to Gladstone, 19 Oct. 1888. R. Barry O’Brien, ‘Mr Lecky on Home Rule’ in Irish Wrongs and English Remedies, pp. 167–86. Freemans Journal, 24 Nov. 1890; O’Brien, Parnell, pp. 477–8, 505–19; John O’Leary Papers, Ms. 5927: R. Barry O’Brien to John O’Leary, 13 Mar. 1891. John O’Leary Papers, Ms. 5927: O’Brien to John O’Leary, 13 Mar. 1891; Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II, p. 518. That O’Brien was ‘X’ is suggested in particular by his remark to O’Leary in his letter of 13 March that ‘Mr G was much surprised and would scarcely believe what I had done’. For Gladstone’s relatively generous treatment at the hands of Irish historians, see Alan O’Day, ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievements and Reputation’ in Bebbington and Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays, pp. 163–83.




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6 N. C. Fleming

The failure of William Gladstone’s first and second Irish Home Rule bills is most often attributed to his peculiar handling of the political crises surrounding each measure. His approach to the so-called Ulster question is only one aspect of this, but the long-term repercussions mark it out as an area deserving specific attention. This chapter argues that for Gladstone there never was an Ulster question, at least not one deserving an answer which might jeopardise his relationship with Charles Stewart Parnell. How he reached this judgement is bound up with the familiar and contentious story of his ‘conversion’ to Home Rule. Gladstone’s strategy, despite his occasional and often vague assurances to the contrary, did not envisage the possibility of an Ulster dimension to Home Rule, even after the setback of 1886. This is not altogether surprising given that ‘Ulster’ was used by Conservatives and Liberal Unionists as a means of attacking the entire measure.1 Gladstone responded by refuting their arguments and suggesting he was open to proposals, should they be forthcoming. As a tactic designed to expose ‘Unionist’ intransigence Gladstone’s response was a success, at least in the eyes of his supporters. But in adopting this approach, in refusing to propose safeguards for Ulster himself, as advocated by some senior Liberals, Gladstone ensured the failure of Home Rule in his own lifetime. Why did Gladstone make such a tactical blunder? In short, he was utterly convinced of his own solution to the Irish question. Believing this sprang from providentially inspired insight, Gladstone saw his role as forming public opinion in pursuit of this objective.2 His essentially elite project – to recast and preserve the United Kingdom by marshalling the new mass democracy, persuading the English that Irish self-government would reconcile Ireland to the Union – foundered because crucial sections of that democracy, Conservatives, Liberal Unionists, and Ulster


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Liberals, remained unconvinced about Home Rule.3 Gladstone therefore regarded failure in 1886 as correctable, through persuasion rather than accommodation, believing that a second attempt at a similar measure would have a better reception, both in Parliament and out-of-doors. In time, Gladstone felt, his opponents of 1886 would come to view the Irish as a distinct nation, overwhelmingly Catholic and undeniably Nationalist. Applying the mandate principle, Gladstone felt this majority should possess the means of determining its own affairs, albeit in a parliament subordinate to Westminster. ‘Ulster’ did not factor into his reckoning, and intelligence available to him in 1885 suggested he was correct to give it little thought. Remarkably, this remained the case despite the prominence of the Ulster question in Home Rule debates, its potential to heal internal Liberal rifts, and political developments in Ulster demonstrating the erroneousness of Gladstone’s assumptions. Four additional reasons to those outlined above account for his refusal to adopt different tactics during the course of 1886 and afterwards. First, special treatment for Ulster risked undermining his relationship with the leadership of organised Irish nationalism and the rationale for a separate legislature. Second, Gladstone’s selective reading of Irish history and his personal experience of Catholic emancipation and Church of Ireland disestablishment indicated that Protestant resistance to heroic measures of reform melted away after their enactment. Third, if Gladstone was preoccupied with Irish Protestants at all, it was with the landed elite, whose anxieties about Home Rule he hoped to allay through detailed attention to economic matters and, in the case of the second bill, continued Irish representation at Westminster.4 Last, but by no means least, Gladstone possessed an instrumental view of party and was prepared to endure Liberal defections in pursuit of his ultimate goal.5 In their study of the high politics of Home Rule, A. B. Cooke and John Vincent emphasise Gladstone’s opportunism in allowing Cabinet colleagues to make the case for Ulster safeguards merely to humour them, and what they call the ‘cordial agreement’ between British Liberal and Conservative MPs not to ‘think’ about Ulster.6 The flaws in Cooke and Vincent’s assertions have been highlighted in a number of historical studies of the importance to deliberations at Westminster of out-ofdoors politics across Ireland.7 In addition, recent scholarship reveals the significant influence of officials based at Dublin Castle on Gladstone’s Irish policy.8 In a like manner, recent biographies of Gladstone, as well as affirming the Grand Old Man’s tenuous grasp of Ulster politics, emphasise the ‘long-, medium-, and short-term influences’ on his thinking.9


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Formative influences In the 1880s, few English politicians could rival Gladstone’s experience, as an elder statesman, of Ireland. After election to the House of Commons in 1832, Gladstone, then a Tory, engaged with Irish affairs through his anti-disestablishment position on the Church of Ireland.10 Passionate support for Anglicanism brought Gladstone into contact with prominent opponents of the Whig’s 1833 Irish Church bill, including the third Earl of Roden, an Irish landowner, a leading figure on the evangelical wing of Irish and English Anglicanism, and, from 1837, grand master of the Orange Order. It also attracted the favourable attention of Gladstone’s party leader, Sir Robert Peel, who appointed him the following year to the minority Tory government.11 As Peel’s ‘pupil’ Gladstone no doubt came to share his mentor’s view that Orangeism fomented sectarian unrest.12 As Chief Secretary for Ireland in the early 1820s, Peel was instrumental in curbing Orange influence, and in 1825 he was a senior minister in the government which outlawed its activities. Gladstone’s diaries reveal little about his early views of Orangeism. One of the few entries on the subject, for 22 February 1836, records his attending a debate on Whig measures to quell ongoing Orange activity, listening as Peel informed the House of Commons of his regret that any secret society in Ireland felt it necessary to organise.13 In retrospect, it is certain Peel’s clashes with Orangemen and die-hard Conservatives, especially over Catholic emancipation in 1829, provided Gladstone with the inspiration in later life for his own heroic measures of Irish reform, carried out against a backdrop of strenuous opposition from familiar quarters. The most formative of these heroic measures, in light of his later conversion to Home Rule, was Gladstone’s support in the late 1860s for disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Not only did Gladstone’s relatively recent conviction about the need for reform receive a sharp prompt from Irish Republican agitation, but Gladstone chose to interpret Protestant reactions in the manner best suited to his case. The Fenian insurrection of 1867 enabled Gladstone to shorten dramatically his plans for disestablishment and successfully pilot his bill through the House of Commons in 1869.14 But the emergence of


This chapter applies a similar method to examine why Gladstone did not rethink his approach to the Ulster question. It charts formative influences, considers the advice he received from Dublin Castle, and examines his handling of British Liberals and Ulster Liberals who questioned his attitude to Ulster.


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Fenianism also ended several moribund decades for Orangeism, transforming it into a formidable grassroots vehicle for those opposed to disestablishment. If this was a disappointment, Gladstone could find comfort in the fact that the general assembly of Ulster Presbyterians endorsed his disestablishment bill, a reaction he drew upon in the mid1880s in assessing the likely Presbyterian response to Home Rule. Had he looked more closely at the Presbyterian attitude in the late 1860s, however, Gladstone might have had cause for a more considered assessment. For the general assembly backed disestablishment only after an agonised debate in which concerns were raised about the increasing influence of Irish Catholicism.15 More ominously, a number of Presbyterian clerics opposed to the general assembly’s resolution leant their support at the 1868 general election to the Orange landowner William Johnston of Ballykilbeg, who was standing for one of the two Belfast seats and was a hero to Belfast’s Protestant working class following his defiant breach in 1867 of the ban on party processions. What Gladstone took away from this episode, therefore, if later behaviour is any indication, was the readiness of Presbyterians to agree to disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, rather than their parallel fears about Catholic power. In a like manner, he failed to apprehend the limits of Presbyterian support in Ulster for Liberalism. The pan-Protestant politics heralded by Johnston’s election victory in 1868 was largely confined to the industrial Lagan Valley. In rural Ulster support for Liberal candidates increased during the same period – encouraged by the Liberal government’s land acts of 1870 and 1881 – as Presbyterian and Catholic tenant farmers combined to defeat the Conservative interest. In retrospect, Gladstone assumed this represented, akin to 1798, the beginning of a broader convergence of political ambitions continuing well into the mid-1880s. But in doing so he failed to appreciate the subtle but crucial difference between Presbyterian and Catholic support for Liberal candidates. Whereas Ulster Presbyterian farmers looked to Gladstone as the source of land reforms, their Catholic counterparts tended to view these measures as the government’s response to Fenianism, particularly in the wake of the Land War (1879–81). As confirmed Gladstonians, most Liberal Presbyterians were resolutely convinced that ‘Ireland’s secular needs could only be met by a wider alliance within the British constitutional system’.16 Gladstone appeared to agree, at least before his conversion to Home Rule, sharing their antipathy to Irish Conservatives and the Parnellite Land League in equal measure. Leader and local party alike celebrated the Liberals’ Tyrone by-election victory in September 1881. A further by-election




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victory two months later, at Londonderry, led Gladstone in May 1882 to offer the victor, Andrew Porter, the office of Chief Secretary for Ireland.17 Porter’s decision to decline tempts speculation about the influence he might have exerted on Gladstone’s handling of Home Rule had he held onto his seat at the 1885 general election. At that crucial poll, the first following the extension of the franchise in 1884, the Ulster Liberals suffered the shock and indignity of losing all their seats. Their losses owed much to a concerted effort by Nationalists and Conservatives to squeeze the Liberal vote. Frank Thompson argues that Liberal defeat can also be attributed to the ‘very success of [Gladstone’s] land legislation[, which] had deprived Ulster Liberals of much of their political capital’.18 Gladstone preferred to read the results as proof that Ireland was chiefly represented by the Parnellite party, and had it announced on 17 December that he had converted to Home Rule. Its narrow victory in Ulster, winning seventeen seats to the Conservatives’ sixteen, confirmed Gladstone’s impression of Parnell’s island-wide hegemony, its corollary easily characterised as a rump of Orange Tory reactionaries confined to the northeast corner. Gladstone expected that his plan to accompany Home Rule with a land bill would, on the basis of previous electoral behaviour, ensure opponents of Home Rule remained marginal by winning over wavering Presbyterian Liberals to his overall policy. His assessment was supported by intelligence and analysis supplied by Dublin Castle, which, in a calculated breach of protocol, reached Gladstone via Lord Rosebery, despite the Liberals being in opposition.19

Dublin Castle On 28 December 1885 The Times published a letter by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchere: ‘The area over which the Orangemen hold sway is growing smaller and smaller every year. Many of the Presbyterians of Ulster have already thrown in their lot with the Home Rulers.’20 The confident tone may owe something to secret reports from Dublin Castle on the negligible risk of rebellion in the north, a possibility articulated the following year by Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, and, conversely, the high likelihood of rebellion in the rest of Ireland if Home Rule was not granted. The Assistant Under-Secretary for Police and Crime, Edward Jenkinson, was the main proponent of this analysis. A noted defender of Orangeism during the 1883 ‘Invasion of Ulster’, Jenkinson adopted two years later a stance on Irish affairs which was ‘likely to have been music to the ears of Gladstone’.21 Jenkinson’s expansive ‘Memorandum


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I do not believe this for a moment. Five, perhaps even only three, years ago the Orangemen would have been ready to fight the south and west of Ireland on the subject of Home Rule. But there has been an immense change since then. The North has been invaded by the Nationalists, and at the coming election [1885] a great many of the constituencies in the north will return Home Rulers to Parliament. I could give the names of Orangemen in support of what I allege. Jenkinson corroborated this position by presenting the findings from a visit to Ulster of one of his ‘best and most intelligent’ agents: ‘The Orangemen are joining the Nationalists everywhere, and in one village I found an Orangeman who had been elected as a Nationalist to the Board of Guardians.’ The agent met with the editor of the Derry Journal, a Nationalist newspaper, who introduced him to a number of persons, many of them Orangemen. Amongst these was the capitalist and speculator, McCarter, a leading Orangeman, and a proprietor of the above named journal. As a sign of the times, I may hear a remark that this journal, owned by an extreme Orangeman, is ‘run’ on Nationalist principles by ... the Local President of the [National] League, and a late extreme Fenian Centre. Jenkinson also quoted his agent’s reference to meeting an unnamed Englishman long resident in Ulster, who informed him that the Orangemen would hold out to the last in the outlying towns, where they are to a certain extent independent, but that intelligent Protestant farmers and the shopkeepers in the large centres of population would have eventually to cast in their lot with the Nationalists, and that this was already going on. The loose application of the label ‘Orangeman’, and conflation of Presbyterian enthusiasm for land reform with support for Home Rule, served only to distort rather than illuminate. Jenkinson nevertheless propounded his interpretation with vigour: ‘They are loyal to the Crown’, he claimed, ‘but they care for their land and their profits more than they do for their landlords, and will not hesitate to join hands


on the present situation in Ireland’ struck down what he believed to be the main objections to Home Rule, including the idea that ‘Home Rule would entail Civil War between the North and the rest of Ireland’:


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with those who can give them greater profits and greater security of tenure.’22 Jenkinson’s superior, the Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir Robert Hamilton, in his own secret memorandum to Cabinet, took a more sober view of the prospects for success, concluding that Protestants would cease to be antagonistic to an Irish parliament ‘if they felt secure that they would not be subject to Catholic domination’.23 Jenkinson’s and Hamilton’s nominal chief, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, the Conservative Lord Lieutenant (1885–6), cast doubt on this assumption during the course of the general election, but only in passing.24 Jenkinson, keen to prop up his analysis in the wake of the disastrous election result for the Irish Liberals, informed Gladstone directly that two alternative Irish policies lay before a new Liberal government: granting Home Rule or ruling Ireland by force. Ulster posed no problem to the former, Jenkinson contended: ‘[Because] Ulster for the first time is largely represented by Parnellites[,] have we not a splendid opportunity for approaching a settlement of the Irish question?’ I do not fear in the least any persecution of the Protestants by the Roman Catholics, nor do I believe for a moment that on the introduction of Home Rule there would be a Civil War between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. There are many Protestants in the National Ranks, and in the recent Elections many Protestants & Presbyterians voted for Parnellites. Let the land question be settled and there would be no difficulty about Home Rule.25 That Jenkinson’s advice so closely resembled Gladstone’s own view greatly increased its value to the incoming Prime Minister. Indeed, as a survivor of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, investigator of the Phoenix Park murders, and successful administrator of the Irish police, Jenkinson had a voice that was not easily ignored or disparaged.26 In the months that followed, however, the erroneousness of his assessment was clearly demonstrated.

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The Parnellites’ narrow but symbolically important 1885 electoral achievement in Ulster appeared to affirm the case of those Liberals, including Gladstone, who assumed ‘loyalist Ulster’ was anything but, and therefore did not warrant special safeguards. Nevertheless, a number of senior Liberals at Westminster demanded such provisions as part


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of a Home Rule settlement. The leading Radical Joseph Chamberlain was the most significant of these, being highly placed and having long taken an interest in both local government reform and Irish affairs. In March 1885 Chamberlain floated the idea of an elective ‘central board’ for Ireland, a tax-raising body with limited powers that could coordinate two provincial legislative assemblies, one representing the three southern provinces of Munster, Connacht and Leinster, sitting in Dublin, and another sitting in Belfast, representing the parts of Ulster that chose to be so represented. Modelled in part on the Canadian constitution, Chamberlain’s ‘detailed and carefully thought-out proposal’ received a mixed response from colleagues.27 Gladstone was among those in favour of the proposal, but this eagerness reflected a belief that Chamberlain had merely set the going rate for Irish policy. Over the coming months Gladstone edged his way surreptitiously towards Home Rule, careful to avoid a bidding war with the Conservatives for the support of Parnellite MPs, and sure only Home Rule could warrant his continuing in political life and taking control of a new Liberal government. The ‘Hawarden Kite’ announcement of 17 December 1885 was the first indication most Liberals had of Gladstone’s conversion. Chamberlain nevertheless agreed to join Gladstone’s government, formed on 28 January 1886, in the hope he might ‘improve’ any scheme put forward.28 The Prime Minister’s refusal to reveal the details of his Home Rule proposals led Chamberlain on 15 March to offer his resignation. Persuaded to postpone until Gladstone laid his scheme before Cabinet on 26 March, Chamberlain carried out his threat immediately afterwards, departing formally on the issue of land purchase. Chamberlain’s continued advocacy of a central board, and his favourable consideration of Home Rule all-round, including a separate assembly for Ulster, placed him at odds with Gladstone’s desire to satisfy the Nationalist conception of an all-Ireland parliament. Despite pleas from senior colleagues, including William Harcourt, Gladstone did not attempt to heal the rift with Chamberlain, either through personal contact or by constructively airing the possibility of special treatment for Ulster.29 Indeed, when the Prime Minister placed the Home Rule bill before the House of Commons on 8 April, he gave short shrift to the idea that Ulster or parts of Ulster might be removed from its operation.30 If the Gladstone–Chamberlain rift was a heady mixture of personal and political grievances, then other Liberals, without an eye on succession and in favour of Home Rule, were equally adamant on special consideration for Ulster. The Lancashire MP George Salis-Schwabe informed Gladstone that personal election pledges prohibited him




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from supporting an all-Ireland legislature, but that a separate assembly for Ulster ‘would make all the difference’.31 A similar proposal was mooted by the Liberals of Cambridge University. The veteran Radical John Bright, initially hostile to Chamberlain’s separate treatment of Ulster, quickly came to share the latter’s analysis. Of particular note, Bright criticised Gladstone’s willingness to attribute to Wales the status of a nation while ignoring what he regarded as the equally strong claims of Ulster.32 A more sustained expression of Liberal concern about Ulster came from the former Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs James Bryce. In his memorandum ‘The case of the Ulster Protestants’, circulated in March 1886, Bryce brought his personal understanding of the topic to the attention of the Liberal Cabinet. A noted intellectual, Bryce hailed from a prosperous family based in Belfast. His memorandum set out economic, religious, ethnic, and political reasons for Ulster to possess its own self-governing body or bodies to approve acts of a Dublin parliament, or, failing that, some form of restriction of the latter’s authority over the province. Bryce averred that opposition to Home Rule in Ulster was not the sole preserve of Orangemen, adding for good measure that their wariness of Catholic power was not entirely unfounded. He suggested his proposals could help conciliate ‘the best element’ of Ulster Protestants to an acceptance of the implementation of Home Rule, and, portentously, that ignoring their concerns risked provoking civil war.33 Applying the mandate principle, Gladstone asserted he could accept proposals along these lines only if they came from the representatives of Ulster. As Ulster’s loyalist MPs refused to make any such proposal, Gladstone declined to alter his great measure on the basis of the memorandum of a former minister. Indeed, Bryce’s case was only hindered by his inability to woo significant numbers of Ulster Liberals over to Home Rule.34 But if this made emulating his example unappealing to Gladstone, Bryce’s failure also underscored the hollowness of Gladstone’s own assumptions about Presbyterian political behaviour. The Bryce memorandum received a more direct and immediate challenge from the Attorney-General, Sir Charles Russell. The latter also hailed from Ulster, but from a Catholic family living in Nationalist south County Down. Repudiating Bryce, Russell argued Ulster Protestants neither deserved nor required special safeguards, and claimed loyalist objections to Home Rule rested on bigotry:


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I feel strongly that once they understand that they have no right to be regarded in any exceptional way, and must cast in their lot on equal


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Furthermore, ‘separate autonomy’ for Ulster would imperil Protestants in the rest of Ireland and unfairly remove from Ulster the duty of assuming ‘their share in the government of their common country’.35 Russell’s additional reference to the moral reprehensibility of Protestant bigotry chimed with Gladstone’s thinking, and his memorandum supplied the latter with sufficient grounds to dismiss the tactic suggested by Bryce.

Ulster Liberals Ulster Liberals were in turns maligned, ignored, and misunderstood by their erstwhile hero Gladstone. As he informed the Parnellite R. Barry O’Brien in November 1885: ‘The Irish Liberals,’ he said with an expression of sublime scorn which I shall never forget, ‘the Irish Liberals. Are there any Liberals in Ireland? Where are they? I must confess (with a magnificent roll of the voice) that I feel a good deal of difficulty in recognising these Irish Liberals you talk about; and (in delightfully scoffing accents ...) I think Ireland would have a good deal of difficulty in recognising them either.36 Gladstone expected Ulster Liberalism to be eclipsed at the forthcoming general election, but he was mistaken about the cause. Rather than transferring their allegiance to the Parnellites, an outcome predicted also by Dublin Castle, the majority of Ulster Liberals followed the advice of the Liberal Unionist Marquess of Hartington, who on the stump in 1885 urged them ‘to coalesce with the Ulster Tories against the Parnellites’.37 Even after this outcome became apparent, Gladstone continued to act as if his original interpretation still held. In the wake of the electoral defeat, Ulster Liberals remained determinedly committed to Liberalism and support for the Union. Incredulous at Gladstone’s ‘surrender and betrayal’, they nevertheless remained hopeful in the early months of 1886 that he might be dissuaded from bringing Home Rule before Parliament.38 Gladstone, however, demonstrated no intention of winning them over to his cause. Unable to identify significant Presbyterian enthusiasm for Home Rule, Gladstone justified his refusal to deal with the Ulster Liberals thereafter


terms with their Catholic brethren, that the repugnance which they now feel would be greatly lessened, and in time altogether cease.


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with reference to the general election result. After all, the polarisation of Irish politics which accompanied their demise presented a dichotomy better fitting Gladstone’s conception of the battle-lines created by Home Rule. As he admitted to Bryce: ‘Perhaps had we large and cordial support in Ulster it might have abridged our freedom more than it would have enlarged our votes.’39 Their political relevance questioned by Gladstone, and their allegiance variously and haphazardly interpreted as Parnellite or Orange Tory, the majority of embattled Ulster Liberals set about refuting their detractors. On 19 March 1886 the Ulster Liberals called a special convention to decide their response to Gladstone’s expected Home Rule bill. The majority of delegates supported a motion calling on the Prime Minister ‘not to risk the fate of his remedial legislation on land by entangling it with the vexed question of Home Rule’, warning it would result in a ‘disastrous collision between sections of people holding conflicting views upon social, economic and religious subjects’. Thomas Sinclair, a Belfast businessman, put their case plainly: We claim that it is to our distinctive honour that we have ever been in line with the great acts of remedial legislation that have marked the repentant relations of England to Ireland since Catholic emancipation. In that path we mean to continue ... There must be no Home Rule plank in the Ulster Liberal platform.40 A delegation of leading Ulster Liberals was duly despatched to Westminster to propagandise among Liberal MPs and arrange a meeting with Gladstone. Several months before, in early January, Gladstone had declined to receive a delegation of Belfast businessmen, largely Liberal in sympathy, on the grounds he did not think it appropriate to intrude on the incumbent Conservative government’s responsibility for Irish affairs.41 But even after his resumption of the premiership, Gladstone still refused to meet visiting delegations of Ulstermen, even from his own party. One of the disappointed delegates, Adam Duffin, a Belfast linen merchant, felt Gladstone’s stance obliged Ulster Liberals to offer no counterproposals, thereby ensuring the bill would be rejected outright by the House of Lords:


150 N. C. Fleming

The probability is that Mr Gladstone’s prestige & wonderful power of persuading himself & other people will carry his scheme through the House of Commons. I only hope he will make it thorough. If we


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Gladstone probably calculated that receiving the Ulster Liberals risked recognising some if not all of their claims, creating a breach with Parnell, and consequently undermining the intellectual framework of his Home Rule bill. Gladstone later suggested, in May 1893, that he had signalled his willingness in 1886 to exclude northeast Ulster from Home Rule, but his failure then to engage the Ulster Liberals, and a condescending attitude to Ulster in debate, combined at the time successfully to camouflage the sincerity of any such inclination.43 In any event, Ulster Liberals opted to oppose Home Rule in its entirety, regarding safeguards as the means of sweetening the poisonous pill of Home Rule.44 This tactic had the additional benefit of exploiting divisions between Gladstone and the Liberal Unionists, and of avoiding further exposure of divisions within Ulster Liberalism. A minority within its ranks was prepared to support Home Rule, and although motions opposing Home Rule went against them at the Ulster Liberal special convention and at a special convention of the Presbyterian general assembly held on 9 March, this pro-Home Rule minority were determined to make their voices heard. As the hostile Conservative Belfast Newsletter reported, they expressed ‘serious opposition’ at the Liberal convention and endured ultimately successful efforts to quash their objections at the Presbyterian convention.45 Unable to achieve success at these important councils, the pro-Home Rule strain of Ulster Liberalism asserted its presence in rural Ulster, where, in the guise of tenant-right activism, several had forged their political careers. Their most prominent spokesman, T. A. Dickson, celebrated victor of the Tyrone by-election in 1881, emerged in January 1886 as a supporter of Gladstone. Blocking attempts by north Tyrone Conservatives and Liberals to unite their electoral and registration associations, the following month he stood as a pro-Home Rule Liberal byelection candidate for mid-Armagh. Dickson lost heavily to his Tory rival, but succeeded – in the absence of an official Nationalist candidate – in receiving the Catholic vote. He was the leading opponent of the proUnion motion adopted at the Ulster Liberals’ special convention, and on 28 May he supported the Portadown Liberal Thomas Shillington in his efforts to establish a Protestant Home Rule association.46 The former MP for County Londonderry Samuel Walker was less active locally than Dickson, but as Gladstone’s newly appointed Attorney-General for Ireland he was considerably closer to the apex of


are to have it at all, it is the only thing that is of any use & besides there is more chance of his being beaten on it.42


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the national party. Primarily interested in land reform, Walker became a supporter of Home Rule in the belief the British state could not take over from landlords under existing conditions without ‘an agitation greater than any preceding one’.47 There is nothing to suggest either Walker or Dickson believed in the necessity of special treatment for Ulster; indeed, their subsequent careers indicate the opposite. Walker stood unsuccessfully as the Gladstonian Liberal candidate for Londonderry South at the 1892 general election. Dickson gravitated towards the Nationalists, representing from 1888 Dublin St Stephen’s Green, and from 1892 Tyrone South. Given Gladstone’s analysis of Irish affairs, it is likely he regarded Dickson’s subsequent career more favourably than Walker’s, for Dickson demonstrated the essential dichotomy which framed Gladstone’s Home Rule bill, between a majority of Parnellites and minority of Conservatives, and affirmed that Presbyterian interests ultimately lay with the former. The minority strain of Ulster Liberalism could not, therefore, be any more useful to Gladstone’s strategy than the majority opposed to the bill. For although they were a demonstrative example of Presbyterian enthusiasm for Irish self-government, small numbers and lack of electoral success diminished their worth and highlighted the flawed analysis of Gladstone and Dublin Castle. Not engaging with any Ulster Liberals, whatever their position on Home Rule, had the additional benefit of removing the risk of any deliberations on Ulster, for neither wing, like Conservatives and Liberal Unionists at Westminster, proposed safeguards. Gladstone’s comments introducing Home Rule to the House of Commons on 8 April, indicating that he was open to receiving such proposals if put forward by Ulster representatives, therefore served the purpose of making him appear reasonable without risking fulfilment. In any case, his attendant comments about no part of the Irish nation standing in the way of the majority and his recent refusal to receive a delegation of Ulster Liberals were scarcely likely to inspire confidence in his sincerity. As Gladstone well understood, the principal advocates of an ‘Ulster solution’ were British not Irish.48 The Ulster Liberal response to Gladstone’s speech came a week later, on 14 April, at a joint meeting with Conservatives at the Ulster Hall to back the new cross-party Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union. A fortnight later Ulster Liberals established new structures to publicise their objections to Home Rule, evolving by 4 June into the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association. Working alongside the breakaway Liberal Unionists at Westminster, led by Chamberlain, Ulster Liberals, led by Thomas


152 N. C. Fleming


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Sinclair, produced pamphlets and gave speeches targeted at a British audience.49 Many of these highlighted specifically Liberal objections to Home Rule, drawing from a rich seam of civic unionism that owed more to secular liberal values than denominational affiliation, and encompassing even Isabela Tod’s feminist critique of Home Rule.50 The cumulative message was that Ireland’s economic and social progress depended on Westminster and imperial credit.51 This propaganda tended to avoid dwelling on the potential for religious persecution, leaving this to the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and British Liberal Unionists, the latter exhibiting greater enthusiasm for the issue than Ulster colleagues still aspiring to attract Catholic electoral support.52 The effectiveness of such campaigning is not easy to gauge. In the short term, it probably helped embolden wavering Liberal Unionists and their supporters across Britain but failed to deflect Gladstone from his course.

Hardening resolve The opposition of these Liberal Unionists proved fatal to the first Home Rule bill. Its defeat in the House of Commons on 8 June 1886, and the return of a Conservative government after the general election a month later, provided space for Liberals of all hues to reassess their attitude to one another, to Home Rule, and to Ulster. In place of rapprochement, however, the resolve of most key protagonists hardened. In the immediate wake of the measure’s defeat, the Northern Whig criticised Gladstone’s complacent and cavalier attitude to Ulster.53 For his part, the former Prime Minister ruled out remodelling the bill or presenting a new bill. His quasi-apologia, The Irish Question, published on 19 August 1886, made no reference to Ulster. Indeed, Gladstone’s sense of mission, belief a second bill would succeed in a future House of Commons where the first did not, and conviction Ulster warranted no special treatment all deepened in the late 1880s. In 1892, a year in advance of the prospect of a second bill, he ruled out any major deviation from the first bill: ‘to propose any new measure, except such as [Nationalist] Ireland could approve on the lines already laid down, would be fatuity as regards myself, and treachery to the Irish nation’.54 In the early stages of drafting the second bill, in April 1893, he again dismissed Ulster loyalism: ‘the pretensions of Ulster to rebel were fully announced 6 or 7 years ago, & also the opposition of the parties (untruly) named “Ulster” to the Bill ... there is no new fact of moment since 1886 ...’.55 As before, Gladstone regarded the Ulster question as an irritant rather than




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N. C. Fleming

an issue and potential constituency to be manipulated to his political advantage. Ulster had played a conspicuous part several years before in failed discussions to bring about a reunion of the Gladstonian and Chamberlainite wings of Liberalism. Initiated by Chamberlain, the roundtable conference first met on 13 January 1887 and made speedy progress thereafter, agreeing on a scheme of Irish Home Rule as part of Home Rule allround for the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. Gladstone supported the conference for the sake of appearances but did not regard unity as vital, believing Chamberlain to be isolated and outmanoeuvred.56 Mutual acrimony soon resurfaced, with the proposal of a separate legislature for Ulster providing the issue over which both men could on 14 February break off negotiations without having compromised themselves. As a consequence, the alliance between Liberal Unionists and Conservatives strengthened appreciably, the former abandoning their equivocation on Ulster by adopting the Conservative strategy of using it to attack Home Rule in its entirety.57 The failure of the roundtable conference was not confined to high politics; it also overlooked the potential to cultivate a strain of Ulster Liberalism, hitherto unspoken for, favourably disposed to the Ulster legislature touted by Chamberlain. During the conference, Thomas MacKnight, editor of the Liberal Northern Whig, backed the proposal by advocating it in his newspaper.58 Unsuccessful then, it was briefly resuscitated during passage of the 1893 Home Rule bill, by the tenantright Liberal Unionist T. W. Russell, MP for Tyrone South and a former Sunday school pupil of T. A. Dickson, who indicated he might consider favourably an Ulster legislature in the eventuality of a successful bill.59 Statements on these lines faded as quickly as they emerged. The majority of Ulster Liberals, like the Liberal Unionists, had fallen into line with the Conservative strategy of opposing Home Rule in its entirety. Even if Gladstone was coming round to some special treatment for Ulster, as Eugenio Biagini suggests was a possibility in 1892, his low regard for Ulster Liberals helped ensure there was only a small minority willing to treat with him.60 Indeed, it would take another thirty years for the idea of a separate Ulster legislature, outside the remit of a Dublin parliament, to achieve ascendancy among Ulster’s Unionists. Having no practical use for the modified Unionism of MacKnight and Russell, Gladstone did not in 1892–3 ignore pro-Home Rule Ulster Liberals altogether, as he had in 1886. They remained peripheral to his strategy, certainly, but Gladstone probably found modest comfort in their resilience and protestations of support. The tenant-right activist


154


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Reverend J. B. Armour was by the early 1890s the province’s most prominent pro-Home Rule Liberal. In May 1893 he boldly asserted that the ‘principle of Home Rule is a Presbyterian principle’.61 The following August, when the House of Commons considered the second Home Rule bill, the Northern Whig and other British provincial newspapers published correspondence between Armour and Gladstone. In reply Gladstone revealed that old assumptions die hard:62 I have received with pleasure the address from 3500 Presbyterians favourable to Home Rule ... I attach to it great value, and I consider it as indicating a large section of favourable opinion, being well aware of the impediments which might deter many ... I look forward with confidence to a very large and early return of Presbyterians in particular to the sentiments in favour of Union with their fellow countrymen which governed them as a body one century ago ... It is certainly assumed by our opponents that what they term the loyal minority is homogenous on all important matters. The sentiments now placed before me as to the Land Laws remind me how likely it is that on this subject in particular they will ’ere long be largely undeceived.63 Gladstone’s tone is in sharp contrast to his correspondence with another leading Protestant cleric published in the same newspaper six years before, on 10 September 1887. The Reverend R. R. Kane, grand master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Belfast, requested of Gladstone clarification on recent indications he might consider favourably proposals to retain Irish MPs at Westminster in any future scheme of Home Rule. Kane suggested this might affect the attitude Ulster Unionists would adopt. Gladstone’s reply, published alongside Kane’s letter in the Whig and The Times, offered the Orangeman only the vaguest suggestion that he saw any merit in the idea.64 Kane’s relative moderation among Orangemen, if Gladstone was aware of it, made little difference to his long-held hostility to Orangeism; indeed, his published reply was considerably revised from an earlier, more acerbic draft.65 Tactically, Gladstone may also have wanted to avoid giving undue attention to the Ulster question ahead of Chamberlain’s imminent visit to the province.66 After resuming the premiership in August 1892, Gladstone, in a tentative effort to weaken criticisms surrounding the first bill, attempted to diminish the ‘prejudiced and feebleminded’ economic concerns of Ulster loyalists in a Cabinet memorandum circulated in October 1892.




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Reflecting his overall strategy, the safeguards proposed were of general application, although one sought to answer an oft-stated concern of Belfast business: ‘a restriction to secure equality of taxation, and to prevent (say) a common poor rate for the whole country, so as to relieve Ulster from the fear of being unduly taxed for the benefit of the poorer parts of Ireland’.67 None of these found their way into Gladstone’s subsequent Home Rule bill for fear of the reaction it might provoke from Nationalist MPs. The repudiation of such measures was all the more significant given Gladstone’s recent meeting on 18 March 1893 – indeed his first – with a delegation of Ulster businessmen. Having refused to parley with a similar delegation in 1886, Gladstone gave the visiting Ulstermen – representing the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and Harbour Commissioners, and the Linen Merchants’ Association – less than an hour of his attention, during which he constantly interjected to argue that loyalist claims were incorrect, that the religious antagonism in Ulster lay with Protestants and that religious differences had not detrimentally affected the Canadian economy. One delegate, Adam Duffin, afterwards recounted: As I expected we did not get much change out of Gladstone yesterday but he didn’t have at all as good a time with us as he expected. His deliberate plan was not to hear us at all on the plea that our case was before him on paper and then to read us a lecture ex cathedra ... Tom Sinclair had a hard time to get in even half of what he had to say, but the old man was jumping with impatience & we have at least got it clearly brought out that he closured us ... Geo. Clark says the old man is mad & and we ought to publish the fact & give no other answer! I say he is bad. He has the look of a bird of prey and the smile of a hyena. It was positively shocking to see the hideous mechanical grin with which he took leave of us. Clearly spurned, the Belfast delegates used their subsequent public correspondence with the Prime Minister, Duffin noted, as ‘a grand chance of bringing the whole controversy before the Gladstonian world, which is all I ever expected to get by the interview’.68


156 N. C. Fleming

Conclusion In September 1893 the House of Lords torpedoed Gladstone’s second Home Rule bill. Responsibility for this outcome rests largely with


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nobody else could have gained for Home Rule anything like the support it received in the House of Commons and in the country in 1886 ... But it may also be said that a man with gifts far inferior to his could have obtained a second reading for his Bill if once that Bill had reached the position that the Home Rule Bill had reached by April 1886. Eloquence, imagination, moral force had done their part and gained a triumph ... what was wanted now was tact, patience and the power of dealing with men, the very qualities that Gladstone lacked.69 Hammond here refers to Gladstone’s dealings with the Liberal Unionists, but the same can be said of his unbending determination to avoid cooperating effectively with Ulster Liberals. In retrospect, Gladstone’s handling of the Ulster question helped usher in developments he never intended or foresaw. The issue grew in importance in the years that followed, leading to the exclusion of Ulster as a rider to the Home Rule measure passed in 1914 and the establishment in 1921 of an autonomous ‘Northern Ireland’ Parliament within the United Kingdom. Such developments seemed remote during the 1880s and the early 1890s, but even then it was clear Gladstone had poorly handled the Ulster question. In contrast to the Conservatives, who used ‘Ulster’ to unite and reinvigorate their party and to form a fruitful alliance with Liberal Unionists, Gladstone allowed Ulster to divide his party and quicken the demise of Liberalism in Ireland. In both cases, strategic considerations influenced party tactics, but Gladstone’s mishandling of Ulster also reflected his flawed approach to Home Rule generally. British – and Irish – Conservatives alike raised ‘Ulster’ only as a means of undermining Home Rule in its entirety. As part of this strategy, Irish Unionists promoted pan-Protestant solidarity across the island, ensuring none of their MPs, mostly representing Ulster, proposed safeguards for the province that risked sweetening the pill of Home Rule. As their parliamentary leader, Edward Saunderson, declared on 12 April 1886, ‘we are determined to stand and fall, for weal or woe, with every loyal man who lives in Ireland’.70 In contrast, Gladstone refused to engage fully with the Ulster question or to make constructive use of it. This


Gladstone as the sole author of the bill, and of the first Home Rule bill. His attitude towards Ulster was not the central reason for its failure, but it was nevertheless symptomatic of a strategy that had serious weaknesses. As the sympathetic J. L. Hammond concluded:


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reflected his wariness of the harm it might do to his relationship with the Nationalist Party and a complete inability to conceive of it as anything other than a Tory tactic to undermine his Home Rule bills. Instead, Gladstone hoped his detailed handling of economics in the two bills, and in the case of the first bill an accompanying land bill, would be enough to mollify a section of Irish Protestant opinion. He stuck to this position even after the quick failure and withdrawal of his 1886 land bill and considerable criticism of the serious weakness of the second Home Rule bill’s financial provisions. That Gladstone carried on regardless reflected not only lack of due care about the Ulster question but also, more profoundly, an inability to take practical steps towards recasting it as a possible solution to the Home Rule crises. This can be illustrated with reference to Gladstone’s oft-quoted analogy between Irish Home Rule and Canadian constitutional reform. Like Chamberlain, Gladstone regarded the dominion’s 1840 and 1867 constitutions as precedents for the compatibility of self-government with British parliamentary supremacy, but the latter drew nothing on their relevance to reconciling two differing political communities divided in religion, ethnicity, and geography, and how they could be accommodated under a single constitution subordinate to Westminster.71 Gladstone’s attitude to Ulster, and Ireland generally, arose not only from political expediency but also from long-held familiarity with Irish affairs. History and personal experience convinced him Protestant objections could be overcome and did not require accommodation. This analysis received welcome support in 1885, when Gladstone began to frame his Irish policy and strategy, from intelligence gathered by officials at Dublin Castle, especially the latters’ assessment of the likelihood of political violence. When the erroneousness of this became clear in 1886, Gladstone brushed aside those who drew it to his attention, in particular Chamberlain, Bryce, and the Ulster Liberals. His unwillingness to take steps which might accommodate their objections reflected a quasi-religious belief in his destiny as the deliverer of Ireland and a stubborn refusal to take seriously the sincerity and range of opinion of all those in Ulster opposed to Home Rule. It was a position he barely wavered from in the years that followed, so the Ulster question was no more a practical consideration of the 1893 bill than of the measure framed in 1886. As the first English politician to consider seriously Ireland’s place within the Union, Gladstone unwittingly helped create, shape and animate the Ulster question he so determinedly refused effectively to answer.


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Notes

1. Thomas Hennessey, ‘Ulster Unionist Territorial and National Identities, 1886–1893: Province, Island, Kingdom and Empire’, Irish Political Studies, 8 (1993), pp. 21–35. 2. Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865–1898 (London, 1999), p. xvi. 3. Alan O’Day, ‘Ireland and the United Kingdom’ in D. George Boyce and Roger Swift (eds.), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800: Essays in Honour of Patrick Buckland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 13–31. 4. D. George Boyce, ‘In the Front Rank of the Nation: Gladstone and the Unionists of Ireland, 1868–1893’ in David Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 185–201. 5. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 38. 6. A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974), p. 158. 7. Patricia Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton, 1980); James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question 1882–1893 (Dublin, 1986); Alan O’Day, Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode (Dublin, 1986); Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons 1884–1911 (Oxford, 1989); Christopher Harvie, ‘Gladstonianism, the Provinces and Popular Political Culture, 1860–1906’ in Richard Bellamy (ed.), Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth Century Political Thought and Practice (London and New York, 1990), pp. 152–74. 8. Allan Warren, ‘Dublin Castle, Whitehall, and the Formation of Irish Policy, 1879–92’, Irish Historical Studies, XXXIV, 136 (2005), pp. 403–30; Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell 1884–1887 (Cambridge, 2008). 9. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. II, 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), p. 214. 10. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. I, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1886), p. 31. 11. Gladstone, diary, 13 May 1833, in M. R. D. Foot (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. II, 1833–1839 (Oxford, 1968), p. 29. 12. Eric Evans, ‘ “The strict line of political succession?” Gladstone’s Relationship with Peel: An Apt Pupil?’ in Bebbington and Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays, p. 32. 13. Gladstone, diary, 22 Feb. 1836, in Foot, Gladstone Diaries, vol. II, p. 224. Hansard records the debate taking place on 23 February 1836: Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 31, cols. 779–861. 14. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 46. 15. Frank Wright, Two Lands on One Soil: Ulster Politics before Home Rule (New York, 1996), pp. 309–14. 16. Ibid., pp. 437–8. 17. Frank Thompson, The End of Liberal Ulster: Land Agitation and Land Reform 1868–1886 (Belfast, 2001), p. 279; Gladstone, diary, 3 May 1882, in H. C.


A version of this chapter was presented as a paper to the British Seminar, Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 9 Mar. 2009. The author acknowledges the support of the US–UK Fulbright Commission and the School of Law and Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University.


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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

N. C. Fleming G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. X, 1881–1883 (Oxford, 1990), p. 249. Thompson, End of Liberal Ulster, p. 310. Ball, ‘Introduction’ in Dublin Castle, pp. 33–4. The Times, 28 Dec. 1885, p. 9. Ball, ‘Introduction’, p. 61. E. G. Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the present situation in Ireland’, 26 Sept. 1885, in Ball, Dublin Castle, pp. 251–2. Hamilton, ‘Very secret’, 31 Oct. 1885, printed for use of Cabinet, 8 Dec. 1885, in Ball, Dublin Castle, p. 264. Carnarvon, ‘Very confidential’, 7 Dec. 1885, in Ball, Dublin Castle, pp. 276–80. Jenkinson to Gladstone, 11 Dec. 1885, in Ball, Dublin Castle, p. 283. Ball, Dublin Castle, pp. 328–31. Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 233. Shannon, Gladstone, pp. 369, 413. Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (London, 1994), pp. 195–6, 221–2; Shannon, Gladstone, p. 422. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 304, cols. 1052–4 (8 Apr. 1886). Shannon, Gladstone, p. 417. Biagini, British Democracy, pp. 259–60. Loughlin, Gladstone, pp. 134–5. John T. Seaman, A Citizen of the World: The Life of James Bryce (London, 2006), pp. 113–14. Russell, memorandum, 17 Mar. 1886. Cited in Loughlin, Gladstone, p. 136. R. Barry O’Brien. Cited in ibid., p. 138. Sir George Fottrell, diary, 9 Dec. 1885, in Ball, Dublin Castle, p. 145. Graham Walker, ‘Thomas Sinclair: Presbyterian and Liberal Unionist’ in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds.), Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 26. Gladstone to Bryce, 2 Dec. 1885, in H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, vol. XI (Oxford, 1990), p. 439. J. R. Fisher, The Ulster Liberal Unionist Association: A Sketch of Its History 1885– 1914 (Belfast, 1914), pp. 15–17. Gladstone to Sir E. J. Harland, 16 Jan. 1886, in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, p. 480; Belfast News-Letter, 19 Jan. 1886, p. 5. Adam Duffin to Maria Duffin, 27 Mar. 1886, in Patrick Buckland (ed.), Irish Unionism 1885–1923: A Documentary History (Belfast, 1973), pp. 105–6. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 11, col. 1863 (3 May 1893). For Unionist reaction see Belfast News-Letter, 6 May 1893, p. 5. Paul Bew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in Myles Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007), pp. 25–40. Belfast News-Letter, 10 Mar. 1886, p. 5; Belfast News-Letter, 20 Mar. 1886, p. 4. Brian M. Walker, Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868–86 (Belfast, 1989), pp. 228–30, 236. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 158. Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921 (Manchester, 1998), p. 114.


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49. See N. C. Fleming and Alan O’Day (eds.), Charles Stewart Parnell and His Times: A Bibliography (Santa Barbara, CA, 2011), chapter 3. 50. John Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin, 2009), pp. 224–5. 51. Biagini, British Democracy, p. 256. 52. Belfast News-Letter, 8 Apr. 1886, p. 5; Alan Megahey, ‘ “Irish Protestants feel this betrayal keenly ...”: Home Rule, Rome Rule and Nonconformity’ in Boyce and Swift, Problems and Perspectives, pp. 164–79; Biagini, British Democracy, pp. 252–4. 53. Northern Whig, 28 June 1886, p. 8. 54. Cited in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 451. 55. Gladstone to Arnold Morley, 12 Apr. 1893, in H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, vol. XIII (Oxford, 1994), p. 224. 56. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 460–1; Marsh, Chamberlain, p. 264. 57. John D. Fair, ‘From Liberal to Conservative: The Flight of the Liberal Unionists after 1886’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), pp. 292–334. 58. Loughlin, Gladstone, p. 232. 59. Biagini, British Democracy, p. 262; Loughlin, Gladstone, p. 278. 60. Biagini, British Democracy, p. 260. 61. Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992), p. 440. 62. Northern Whig, 15 Aug. 1893, p. 5. 63. Gladstone to Armour, 12 Aug. 1893, in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XIII, p. 277. 64. H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XII, 1887–91 (Oxford, 1994), p. 58; The Times, 10 Sept. 1887, p. 8. 65. Loughlin, Gladstone, p. 235. 66. See ‘Mr. Chamberlain in Ulster’, Belfast News-Letter, 17 Oct. 1887, p. 5. 67. Loughlin, Gladstone, pp. 274–5. 68. Adam Duffin to Maria Duffin, 29 Mar. 1893, in Buckland, Irish Unionism, p. 273. 69. J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation, rep. ed. (London, 1964), p. 489. 70. Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 304, cols. 1395–6 (12 Apr. 1886). 71. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. II, p. 250; Biagini, British Democracy, p. 233. See also, Deryck Schreuder, ‘Locality and Metropolis in the British Empire: A Note on Some Connections between the British North America Act (1867) and Gladstone’s First Irish Home Rule Bill (1886)’ in J. A. Benyon, C. W. Cook, T. R. H. Davenport and K. S. Hunt (eds.), Studies in Local History (Cape Town, 1976), pp. 48–58.




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Burke in Belfast: Thomas MacKnight, Gladstone and Liberal Unionism Patrick Maume

The great Ulster chronicler Ulster Unionist political mobilisations have traditionally been driven by Orange/Tory populism, and its critics have argued that Ulster Unionism is simply an archaic leftover from the era of Protestant ascendancy. In this interpretation, self-identified Liberal Unionists such as those Ulster Liberals who refused to embrace Gladstonian Home Rule after 1886 are seen as dupes or bigots who have deserted the authentic traditions of their United Irish ancestors; this was Gladstone’s own view of his erstwhile Ulster followers. This view has in turn been criticised. John Bew argues that nineteenth-century Belfast produced an eliteled ‘civic Unionism’ in which Whigs deriving from the conservative wing of the late eighteenth-century ‘Patriot’ movement and moderate Peelite conservatives could share the belief that Union and Empire allowed Irishmen to participate in a wider British culture of reform and improvement driven by enlightened administrative elites, and the somewhat naïve expectation that Orange populism and Catholic discontent would be rapidly dispelled through popular education and scientific–technical progress.1 Paul Bew similarly argues that throughout the nineteenth century significant elements of the British and Irish ruling elites justified the Union as a Burkean project aimed at reconciling Irish discontents by containing the warring elements within a wider political framework which would permit their gradual accommodation to British civility.2 The Burkean legacy was double-edged; nationalists, Tory nostalgics and late Gladstonians could claim that it was Unionist reformers who were imposing a mechanical political scheme without


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regard for deeper loyalties. Both Bews would agree that the Achilles heel of this civic Unionism was its limited ability to mobilise mass popular support, and Eugenio Biagini, while noting that Radical Unionism offered a coherent vision of executive-led reform, states that in competing against Gladstonian populist moralism for the Liberal inheritance after 1886 it was fatally handicapped by its advocacy of the ‘temporary’ deployment against Irish nationalism of authoritarian methods of governance, appearing to British liberal populists both to contradict liberal faith in popular opinion and to set a precedent for the revival in mainland Britain of the sort of repression deployed against radicals before 1832.3 At the core of the version of civic Unionism identified by John Bew stood Belfast’s Northern Whig newspaper (founded 1824), and its most influential editor, Thomas MacKnight (1829–99), is central to an understanding of the traumatic nature of the severance between Gladstonianism and Ulster Liberal Unionism. An Englishman disturbed by Ulster’s factionalism, combining a Palmerstonian view of the British Empire as a force for progress and liberty with cautious advocacy of franchise extension and social reform, participating alike in the discourses of Ulster politics and of London political clubland, MacKnight seemed to symbolise the progress made towards integrating Ireland into the British political system. He is best remembered for his 1896 chronicle–memoir Ulster As It Is, in which he argues that Gladstone abandoned Liberal principles which Liberal Unionists upheld. Later Unionists laying claim to the Liberal heritage, such as the Belfast Telegraph editor E. M. Sayers during the O’Neill era, have seen MacKnight as a valuable resource for their project.4 For Biagini, MacKnight is ‘the great Ulster chronicler’,5 whose Northern Whig editorials, together with Ulster As It Is, are significant sources for the Liberal Unionist mindset frequently cited in the footnotes to his chapter 5. In the ‘Burke wars’ between unionists and Home Rulers discussed by Paul Bew, MacKnight polemicised respectfully against John Morley and clashed with Gladstone himself. Yet this battle over Burke encapsulates the failure of the hopes MacKnight had once entertained for Gladstone as a Burkean moral hero whose combination of Peelite executive reform and national integration through moralist popular mobilisation embodied the Liberal Unionist project. MacKnight’s comparatively neglected earlier works and his letters among the Gladstone Papers display a Whig viewpoint self-consciously based on Burke, including an interpretation of eighteenth-century history later eclipsed by Namierite criticism. This viewpoint (derived from Burke’s Cause of the Present Discontents) held that political parties should


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embody certain great principles, apply them to issues as they arise and educate the public by explaining their rationale. MacKnight originally admired Gladstone as embodiment of these moralist politics contrasted with the belief that politicians should primarily seek power, manoeuvring as circumstances dictate. This latter view, associated with the early eighteenth-century Tory statesman Viscount Bolingbroke and his admirer Disraeli, MacKnight presented as based on irreligion, leading to corruption, absolutism, revolution and anarchy. MacKnight’s admiration for Gladstone was reinforced by experience of personal generosity, and he regarded Gladstone as a friend, but later experience brought the slow dissolution of his interpretation of Gladstonian sensibility. In 1886 Gladstone proclaimed that the truly Burkean course was to abandon an unenforceable and artificial political union in order to create, through conciliation, a new union of hearts between Britain and Ireland, just as Burke had wished to conciliate the Americans. For MacKnight, the Gladstonian proposal to break down the central executive power which in his view remained necessary to prevent Ireland’s speedy reversion to the bloodbaths of 1798 was as delusionally irresponsible as Charles James Fox’s eulogies on the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Burke and Bolingbroke: MacKnight on Gladstone and Disraeli before 1868 MacKnight was born in Gainsford, County Durham.6 MacKnight studied medicine at King’s College, London (1849–51), where he was influenced by the ‘Christian Socialist’ Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice; MacKnight’s admiration for Gladstone began when Gladstone opposed Maurice’s 1853 dismissal as Professor of Theology at King’s for alleged heterodoxy.7 (Maurice’s ‘socialism’ advocated collective social responsibility on the basis of an organic view of society and a Platonist view that social well-being required eternally valid principles of truth and righteousness; it was compatible with social hierarchy.8) MacKnight remained a devout Anglican throughout his life, reading the Greek New Testament daily.9 MacKnight’s earliest publications were two articles on Burke in Fraser’s Magazine (November and December 1851), an address to a student society on ‘The Literature of the Age’ (1851) and a prize essay on ‘The Historical Plays of Shakespeare’ (1852). Shakespeare is called a distinctively English student of unchanging human nature who displays historical fairness and balance. Those who prefer Corneille and Racine are denounced in Burkean terms for putting abstract rules above truth


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to life; the Shakespearean criticism of Voltaire and Hume disproves their claim to unprecedented discernment. (Denouncing Disraeli’s Tragedy of Count Alarcos, MacKnight declared Shakespeare would have handled this tale of adultery and murder without impropriety. Had the prize essayist read Titus Andronicus?10) ‘The Literature of the Age’ informs MacKnight’s fellow-students that King’s College’s location in the London streets symbolises their mission to address the problems of the age, unlike the favoured but remoter products of Oxford and Cambridge. MacKnight desires an epic poet to dramatise the condition of the people, presenting life as an epic struggle over the eternal fate of oneself and one’s fellow-creatures. Macaulay is a brilliant but shallow rhetorician who, despite personal honesty, equates the Whig aristocracy with mankind and glides over religious motivations. Dickens is praised for social concern but criticised for limited intellect; Carlyle (‘a thorough John Bull’ despite his Germanic grumblings) is exalted for taking up the cause of the common people. MacKnight complains, however, that Carlyle offers no coherent remedies; his hero-worship presents the man of letters as beyond good and evil, justified by success. MacKnight prefers St Augustine to St Goethe, and he declares that men of genius must suffer if necessary for truth and future generations. (This foreshadows MacKnight’s denunciations of Disraeli.) After university MacKnight was a journalist on London Whig papers and a reader for a London publishing house. In 1853 he published an anonymous Literary and Political Biography of Benjamin Disraeli. The publisher advertised it in Disraeli’s newspaper, leading many of his admirers to buy it. Disraeli’s lieutenant George Smythe published a reply declaring the struggles and intrigues described by MacKnight creditable for a genius denied the advantages of more fortunate statesmen. Disraeli added some paragraphs declaring that his unaided efforts turned Jewish descent from a reproach to pride, and denouncing Lionel Rothschild’s Liberalism.11 For MacKnight, Burke is the touchstone of principled moral politics by which Disraeli is found wanting. Disraeli’s hero Bolingbroke combines sensuality, bigotry, irreligion and anarchy.12 These vices are traced through Disraeli’s writings and political career, culminating in his opportunistic 1852 Chancellorship of the Exchequer. The submission of the Conservative Party, professing traditional loyalties in Church and state, to this adventurer and sceptic showed moral degeneration and ‘political infidelity’.13 Echoing Burke’s denunciations of the philosophes and of diplomatic recognition of the French revolutionary regime,14 MacKnight declares that if Disraeli is accepted at his own valuation,




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Britain will share the fate of France.15 MacKnight particularly denounces Disraeli’s equation of Burke with Bolingbroke and his claim that Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution reflected laudable resentment at Fox’s leadership.16 MacKnight’s Burkean belief in national character shades his view of Disraeli’s Jewishness. MacKnight endorses Jewish emancipation, criticising Disraeli for leading a party which viscerally opposed it.17 He repudiates Disraeli’s openly expressed racism,18 accusing him of maintaining that Jews deserve full citizenship not because oppression is wrong but because their racial characteristics entitle them to oppress.19 Nevertheless, MacKnight expresses belief in collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion and insinuates Disraeli does not understand the English character and constitution because he is a ‘Caucasian’ (oriental) favouring despotism and sensuality. (MacKnight replies to Disraeli’s view that Old Testament Jews possessed essential Christianity by highlighting their sexual behaviour.20) MacKnight later cited the book’s praise for Gladstone (as a moral, Christian, English and fiscally responsible statesman destined for great things) as showing the depth and sincerity of his Gladstonianism.21 Smythe denounced it as the political manifesto of Puseyism (that is, Gladstone). The book also contrasts Disraeli unfavourably with Palmerston.22 MacKnight later praised Gladstone’s criticisms of Palmerston over the Opium War (‘the first wretched war with China’) and Don Pacifico,23 and Ulster As It Is speaks of Ulster Palmerstonians such as Sir Shafto Adair as antiquated Whigs whose universe centred on Brooks’ Club,24 but the Palmerstonian view of British imperial power as instrument for the extension of liberty appealed to him. MacKnight’s next book, Thirty Years of Foreign Policy (1854), argues that although Palmerston and Aberdeen (now joined in Whig–Peelite coalition) had accused each other (respectively) of promoting revolution and of encouraging despotism as Whig and Tory Foreign Secretaries, both consistently supported constitutional government against continental autocracies. MacKnight defended Burke against accusations of political apostasy after the French Revolution by pointing to Burke’s simultaneous condemnation of the Partitions of Poland and arguing that the Revolutionary Wars could have ended in the mid-1790s with a French constitutional monarchy had the rulers of Europe taken Burke’s advice on immediate support for French Federalist and Royalist insurrections. Instead, Pitt sought territorial gains at France’s expense while the absolutist Northern Powers devoured Poland.25 (MacKnight noted that


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Burke disapproved of the Foxites’ Russophilia as well as their support for the French Revolution; Fox’s nephew Lord Holland maintained this Russophilia in the Whig Cabinets of the 1830s.) The errors of the 1790s were compounded, MacKnight argued, by the Vienna settlement. Failure to restore Poland as buffer state and Austrian and Prussian unwillingness to enlist popular support through constitutional reform rather than rely on Tsarist bayonets reduced the Northern monarchies to Russian satellites. MacKnight defended the disastrous First Afghan War as necessary to deter Russian expansion, predicting Britain would yet make Afghanistan a military strongpoint and avenue of British trade. Louis-Philippe fell through deserting his British alliance; through British alliance Louis Napoleon might establish a stable constitutional dynasty. This was instant history justifying the Crimean War. Its predictions of millennial struggle between Russian despotism and constitutional government reflect the high expectations which began the conflict; the ensuing blunders and setbacks explain why it is MacKnight’s rarest major work. MacKnight was haunted by the faces of Crimean veterans in the victory parade.26 The book’s most embarrassing aspect in retrospect was its insistence that the Ottoman Empire would reform if preserved from Russian expansionism. MacKnight’s Gladstone obituary declares that ‘the Crimean war, vividly as it fired the national spirit ... [was] a blunder bred of a misunderstanding’,27 though his final statement follows Gladstone in calling the war a legitimate reaction to Russian aggression while lamenting that its leaders had not realised the worthlessness of Turkish reform pledges.28 Gladstone read Disraeli,29 but MacKnight’s first documented contact with him came through his wife, the actress Sarah Thorne (1836–99; they married c.1852). According to a March 1854 letter from MacKnight to Gladstone, Sarah responded to a ‘very serious and unexpected embarrassment’ by writing to Gladstone without her husband’s knowledge, received an interview and requested assistance. On receiving a cheque she informed MacKnight. MacKnight expressed gratitude (‘It cannot be degrading for me to accept what one whom I so much respect has thought it right to offer’) while asserting his independence:



I ask nothing from any minister, but the means of exerting my own faculties unfettered. My circumstances, and the well intentioned but perhaps imprudent application of one who is very dear to me, have compelled me to address you personally. I expect no answer to this letter but I trust you will excuse it.30


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the work on which I had then been long engaged and on which I have always relied as the means of establishing my reputation. This work, as I believe you are aware, is the ‘Life and Times of Edmund Burke’ in which I have endeavoured to unfold his whole literary and political career with as much of the history of the period as has direct bearing on himself and his conduct. Such a work on the scale and plan I have undertaken has never yet been attempted, and anyone who has endeavoured to form a true image of Burke, and of the motives and principles which actuated him must have felt – as none can judge better, Dear Sir, than yourself – how unsatisfactory were all other works on his life that have yet made their appearance. This, I think, is the true reason why so many absurd and contradictory notions are prevalent on every portion of his political career, and it has certainly been the great inducement with me to prosecute the labour on which I have now been engaged for six years and by which I hope to be humbly instrumental in rendering the life of this great and good man more intelligible to the world which seldom has time to analyse motives, and deliberately examine year by year, and day by day, the unobtrusive efforts of statesmanship. The first volume (there were eventually three) of the Burke biography was ready to print; the second would be ready in three months. Rather than selling the copyright of the first volume, MacKnight desired a less immediately lucrative deal allowing him to retain copyright and publish the two volumes simultaneously so ‘that the scope of the whole work may be fairly seen’, since he expected to be attacked by enemies of his political books ‘although there is not the most remote allusion to present politics in my new work’. MacKnight had managed to stay out of debt while researching the Burke book; however, My present means are, as you are aware, very limited, and from the manner in which I have prosecuted my researches far and wide and the personal inspection which I have been obliged to give to registers and documents in different parts of Ireland and England, this purely mechanical labour has been attended with considerable expense ... that I might concentrate all my efforts on this and not dissipate my


Gladstone’s diary shows he read Thirty Years in December 1854 and then wrote to MacKnight.31 In March 1855 MacKnight asked Gladstone’s assistance in completing


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mind over the surface of periodical literature I have hitherto declined all offers to write for the Edinburgh Review and other publications which are immediately remunerative. When directly requested also last November to write another political work I positively refused from motives which you will at once understand but to which I do not wish more particularly to allude. (Either the proposal involved criticism of Gladstone or MacKnight feared the help received compromised him as a commentator.) MacKnight asked Gladstone for £100 until next August (he specified a loan, not a gift), when both volumes would be ready and he could save his copyright: I have now in the simplest and most straightforward manner I could command laid before you my hopes and fears. I feel indeed that to anyone else such a letter as this might be misunderstood: but to you with your generous sympathies, I should be ashamed of circumlocution or apology. Among great political personages I have never had, nor wished to have, any friend but yourself; and whatever may be my future, I trust at all events to prove to you that when I acknowledge an obligation, the most implicit confidence may be placed in me. I have no right to presume on your kindness, or even to parade any little sacrifices I may have made through my attachment to you particularly: for in this I have only done my duty. If you have leisure for such an employment, I should indeed have much pleasure in submitting the manuscript of the first volume to your inspection; and on publication I should be proud to dedicate this work to you, as I am sure that there is no living statesman to whom the history of Edmund Burke could be so appropriately described.32 MacKnight retained his copyright (he was preparing a revised edition at the time of his death).33 MacKnight often voiced outspoken criticism of Gladstone (even to Gladstone himself) but knew Gladstone’s beneficence had secured his magnum opus. After the Home Rule schism, MacKnight reminisced:



Year by year my admiration increased of his many resplendent qualities, his marvellous intellectual skill, his elevated tone, combining the highest morality with the most acute intellectual subtilty, his untiring industry, his impassioned earnestness, and his many and versatile accomplishments. Kindness shown to myself converted what


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The Life and Times of Edmund Burke appeared between 1858 and 1860 (it provoked Lord Acton’s most sustained review essay on Burke).35 Presenting the first two volumes to Gladstone, MacKnight commented, ‘I hope it will excuse in a certain degree my having troubled you. I am at present writing another political book which I fear you will scarcely sympathise with so much ... no difference of opinion can ever make me forget your kindness.’36 This ‘political book’ was the Life of Lord Bolingbroke, published in 1863. Both are scholarly works based on extensive (though largely unreferenced) use of primary sources. The relationship between the two is underpinned by MacKnight’s adherence to the pre-Namierite belief that George III was guided by Bolingbroke’s The Patriot King, which equates party divisions with destructive factionalism; the ideal monarch should overcome them by drawing advisers from all parties. MacKnight, like other Whig historians, presents this as a quasiabsolutist project sustained by official corruption; Burke is seen as its decisive opponent through his defence of party allegiance in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, support for the American colonists and restriction of official corruption through economic reform as Paymaster-General.37 Forwarding Bolingbroke to Gladstone, MacKnight noted, ‘though this has not been my avowed intention, it cannot but make some of Mr. Disraeli’s supporters ask on what grounds he has held forth Lord Bolingbroke as the model statesman of a party devoted to the Church of England? Therefore I hope it is calculated to do you service.’38 MacKnight maintains in Burke that severance of America from Britain was not inevitable, argues that maintenance of the connection might have prevented the survival of American slavery39 and suggests that a monarch would have been better placed than an elected president to mediate American sectional rivalries. For MacKnight, Burke was the greatest philosopher of all time, uniting theoretical and practical wisdom. He identified with him, both as journalist (he treats Burke as refuting the view that a statesman’s greatness is measured by time in office40) and self-made man. MacKnight defends his hero against the aristocratic Liberalism of Lord Holland and his protégés, Macaulay and Lord John Russell (son of the Duke


was at first a mere political attachment into something of personal devotion ... with increasing years respect deepened into veneration. Even now I cannot refer to my feelings towards the Mr. Gladstone of that time, I cannot write his name without finding what might then be characterised as youthful enthusiasm all revived.34


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of Bedford attacked by Burke), who portrayed Burke as a mercenary panic-monger.41 MacKnight displays a certain resentment (reminiscent of Burke’s Letter to the Duke of Bedford, and perhaps also of Disraeli) against confident assumption of superiority by those born to privilege. He points out that Burke never opposed government pensions in principle and could have enriched himself in the 1770s and 1780s had he deserted Fox.42 He added that sneers at Burke’s anxiety to provide for his family and pay his debtors came badly from the Hollands and Horace Walpole, who were living off massive ancestral embezzlements.43 MacKnight admired Macaulay’s Indian legal reforms as continuing the reforming spirit displayed by Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings,44 but he still thought him prone to unthinking repetition of commonplaces. MacKnight contrasted Macaulay’s citation of French stability under Louis-Philippe as proof that Burke had overreacted to the French Revolution with Macaulay’s denunciation of the milder 1848 revolution as a threat worse than Attila.45 MacKnight himself declared that French history before and after the great revolution confirmed Burke’s view that French national character was radically defective, citing the plebiscitary adventurism of Louis Napoleon and his continuing rivalries with Britain.46 (MacKnight does, however, display leniency towards Fox47 and Paine that he denied to George III; after denouncing Paine as possessing a mechanical mindset greatly inferior to Burke’s, he points out that Paine opposed revolutionary Terror and possessed genuine integrity.48) MacKnight’s Bolingbroke includes an extensive critique of Macaulay’s portrayal of William III, which is of interest for his later view of Orangeism. MacKnight believed – like most modern historians – that William’s primary concern was Holland and that he showed little interest in British constitutional monarchy.49

MacKnight and the heyday of Ulster Gladstonianism, 1868–80 MacKnight was now an established leader writer, but the financial hardships of the 1850s undermined his marriage. Sarah returned to the stage, and although they had a son and daughter they separated (without divorcing) after the birth of their second child, in 1862.50 (The last volume of Burke, published in 1860, makes sympathetic reference to Paine’s marital difficulties.51) In February 1866 MacKnight became editor of the Belfast daily Northern Whig, voice of Presbyterian tenant farmer politics. (MacKnight




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liked to recall that since its foundation in the 1820s it had consistently opposed Orangeism and Repeal.) His subsequent career is chronicled in Ulster As It Is (1896), a Burkean apologia maintaining that MacKnight and the Liberal Unionists led by Lord Hartington (to whom the book is dedicated) consistently upheld Liberal principles, while Gladstone and his followers in embracing Home Rule displayed political folly and inconsistency unmatched even by the ministers who precipitated the American War of Independence.52 In 1866 the Whig had been weakened by suspicion of its proprietors’ Unitarianism (the Conservative Belfast Newsletter called it ‘our infidel contemporary’) and its support for the North in the American Civil War. MacKnight forwarded some vigorous editorials supporting Gladstone in the debates leading to the Second Reform Act and received ‘a very gracious letter written in his own hand’ to ‘the editor, Northern Whig’, of whose identity Gladstone was ignorant.53 The final struggle for disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, with enfranchisement of tenant farmers by the Second Reform Act and a renewed campaign for tenant-right legislation, reinvigorated Ulster Liberalism and the Northern Whig. (MacKnight experienced difficulty in finding a Belfast Church of Ireland congregation not obsessed with denunciations of disestablishment and Popery; he worshipped at St Thomas’s on Eglantine Avenue.54) MacKnight brokered (as go-between and editorial advocate) the informal electoral alliance between the Independent Orangeman William Johnston and the Liberal Thomas McClure which defeated the outgoing Belfast Conservative MPs in the 1868 general election, and he was presented with silver plate by rejoicing Belfast Liberals.55 (MacKnight believed Irish circumstances made disestablishment necessary, but did not oppose established churches in principle – Coleridgeans like Maurice saw establishment as symbolising the moral bonds holding a nation together. MacKnight hints he wishes Irish disestablishment could have been averted by earlier Catholic Emancipation and concurrent endowment; in later life he opposed disestablishment in Scotland and Wales, criticising Gladstone for supporting such measures.56) MacKnight was soon recognised as a perceptive analyst of Irish affairs. He kept in touch with British high politics by annual London visits in May or early June, staying at the Devonshire Club and mixing with Liberal leaders. Knowledge of foreign languages gave him access to continental news sources. He holidayed regularly on the Continent and often recalled his 1870 visit to Sedan a fortnight after the surrender of the French Army.57 He was one of the few Irish Liberals who


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regarded Gladstone as a friend and corresponded with him on Irish matters. (MacKnight’s Northern Whig obituary for Gladstone is generally impersonal but recalls Gladstone’s personal appearance: ‘He had a strong personality. This was felt in the look of his eye, the tones of his voice, the movement of his hands, and even of his feet, in which there was something sharp, rapid, sudden, expressing the impulses of his energetic mind.’58) Except when in London, MacKnight wrote two leading articles for the Northern Whig every day, making copious references to Burke. MacKnight’s meetings and correspondence with Gladstone were intermittent (an 1870 letter briefs Gladstone on Belfast developments since 1868). MacKnight was entrusted with such errands as asking whether ‘a workingman who had the honour of presenting a spinning wheel to Her Majesty’ might make a similar presentation to Mrs. Gladstone. I could have wished that Mr. McClure had undertaken the task himself, but I do not want the poor man to think that I was indifferent to doing him a service. He showed me a photograph which you had sent him in exchange for one of the spinning wheel and himself ... the acceptance of this present on the part of Mrs. Gladstone would do us good here in a political point of view. MacKnight forwarded letters sent to the Northern Whig expressing tenant farmers’ fears about how the 1870 Land Bill might be circumvented if not amended. It is almost too much to ask you to read these letters, but as emanating from Ulster tenants whom it is of so much importance to carry with us on the Land Bill, they do deserve consideration. I did not myself think the measure was open to the objections they allege; but it is of great importance that all its provisions should be thoroughly understood.59 On 8 January 1871 Gladstone replied to a letter from MacKnight which has not been preserved but enclosed an editorial ‘which handles the subject so wisely and well, unless ... it is too favourable to me personally’; he reassured MacKnight (and through him, presumably, the Belfast Liberals) that his opinions on the Pope’s temporal power were unchanged and the government had no intention of drawing up ‘a Bill of Education such as you describe’.60




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From 1874 MacKnight associated with the Catholic Liberals around Lord O’Hagan;61 many of these, like O’Hagan himself, achieved official positions under Gladstone’s first two administrations and were called traitors by radical nationalists.62 While celebrating disestablishment and the 1870 Land Act, MacKnight regretted Gladstone’s unsuccessful attempt to solve the Irish University Question, which divided Irish Liberals along sectarian lines. MacKnight strongly advocated shared secular and separate religious instruction; he opposed Disraeli’s replacement of the Queen’s University of Ireland by the Royal University of Ireland as endangering this principle and denounced any proposal for a state-recognised Catholic University.63 His friendship with Gladstone, however, meant that even mild Northern Whig editorial criticisms of Fawcett’s Private Member’s Bill secularising Trinity College produced accusations that he was betraying the Education cause to Mr. Gladstone. MacKnight advised Gladstone to adopt and modify Fawcett’s Bill. If you could give me any private hint for my guidance on this question as editor of this journal, I should be much obliged ... I of course wish to do the very best I can for the Government without in any way sacrificing the interests of this newspaper ... for an Englishman who will not lend himself to the dishonest Irish factions that seem altogether to lose sight of the best interests of their country, the task has been sufficiently arduous and, in certain quarters, sufficiently unthankful.64 After the 1874 election MacKnight sent Gladstone a Northern Whig editorial maintaining that by calling the election when the Liberal Party in the country was unprepared Gladstone exacerbated its defeat; it was therefore his duty to remain Opposition Leader until the party recovered: ‘I am afraid that you will not agree with it; but it expresses my very decided conviction. I never had a more decided opinion on any political question; otherwise I should not have troubled you.’ MacKnight attributed Liberal defeat in Belfast to the sudden dissolution, compounded by Catholic–Presbyterian disputes; he saw gains elsewhere in Ulster as indicating a permanent trend, while Disraeli’s victory was temporary.65 ‘The veteran statesman ... appeared to admit that there was some justice in the observations ... He said there was no one whose opinions he valued more than those of his correspondent.’66 Later that year


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The Times Dublin correspondent [G. V. Patten, editor of the Dublin Daily Express67] who always writes in the interest of the Conservatives, represented me as the solitary journalist in Ireland opposed to the visit, and this on party grounds. All I objected to was the attempted moral coercion of the Liberal Party to take part in a visit with which they could have, and ought to have, no sympathy.68 MacKnight was so proud of Gladstone’s reply, which praised ‘a powerful, and what is more, a manful protest against imposture’ while deprecating ‘much too indulgent references to myself’, that he reprinted it after Gladstone’s death.69 MacKnight was dismayed by Gladstone’s 1875 pamphlets against Papal Infallibility and thought even Orangemen seemed embarrassed at being outdone in ‘No Popery’. Ulster As It Is quotes an editorial accusing Gladstone of the fault (decried by Burke) of attaching too much importance to statements of abstract principle and comparing Gladstone’s polemics to the ultra-Tory MP and anti-convent agitator F. W. Newdegate.70 MacKnight gave extensive coverage to Ulster tenant-right agitation in the Northern Whig; his recollections emphasise its law-abiding character and protest against arbitrary power. In 1877 he conveyed a request from Samuel M’Ilroy, the North Antrim tenant-right campaigner, that while visiting Ireland Gladstone should come to Ulster and meet delegations from tenant-right associations. MacKnight reported the absence or illhealth of leading Ulster Liberals but declared himself happy to place my local experience at your service ... if you would agree to attend a public banquet here, I am sure that we could still get you up a very successful one – Home Rulers and Vaticanists notwithstanding. You would have however to depend almost exclusively on the Liberal Protestants who are now almost the only Irish Liberals.71


MacKnight sent Gladstone an editorial attacking a proposed Irish visit by Disraeli:

Ulster As It Is speculates sadly on possible arrangements for Gladstone’s reception (he would have stayed with the Sharman Crawfords at Crawfordsburn) and the very limited experience of Ireland gained by Gladstone on his visit.72


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MacKnight predictably thrilled to Gladstone’s denunciation of the Bulgarian Horrors: ‘With the cause came forth the man once more, and he who had ostensibly laid aside the cares of public life rushed into the breach on behalf of outraged humanity.’ Disraeli’s ‘spirited foreign policy’ is scornfully described in MacKnight’s Gladstone obituary as ‘gaudy with Besika Bay incident and boasts of “peace with honour” ’.73 Just before the 1880 general election, having countered an attempt by one David Allen to represent an ambiguous Gladstone letter as opposing all land reform,74 MacKnight predicted Liberals would gain three or four more Ulster seats if Catholics and Home Rulers continued to support them against Conservatives. He noted Conservatives angling for Catholic votes by playing down sectarian prejudice: Some time ago when our friends here wished you to visit Ulster, I was afraid that some unpleasantness might occur. I think now however that if you could visit Ulster before the general election, you would be enthusiastically welcomed by the tenant farmers in Down, Antrim, Derry and Donegal ... neither Orangemen nor Home Rulers would give any trouble ... the Ulster tenant farmers have for your services to them an intense feeling of gratitude and thankfulness – such as no political benefits have before produced and maintained. In many an Ulster home your name will long be remembered as it ought to be.75 After the 1880 election MacKnight wrote to Gladstone discussing the seats gained by Ulster Liberals. This letter has not been preserved, but MacKnight quotes Gladstone’s reply of 1 April 1880 stating ‘the North of Ireland generally has been eminent, even amidst the disasters of 1874, for its adherence to Liberal principles, and I rejoice in the present results.’76

The great estrangement, 1880–6 MacKnight declared boycotting ‘contrary to all laws, human or divine’ and was a strong supporter of the coercion measures undertaken by W. E. Forster and Earl Spencer in the early 1880s. (He later pointed out that Gladstone’s first two governments passed coercive legislation resembling that Gladstone condemned after 1886.77) MacKnight contrasted Forster’s initial belief that the Ulster Liberals were Orange bigots with the sympathy the embattled Chief Secretary received from Ulster.78 MacKnight always maintained strong personal respect for Spencer; they still met


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on friendly terms after the Red Earl’s conversion to Home Rule (which MacKnight attributed to despair at factious Conservative exploitation of Parnellite support in 1884–5), and MacKnight recorded that Spencer winced when reminded of the invective by his new Parnellite allies.79 MacKnight defended the verdicts at Maamtrasna, as he later defended the policemen who fired on a crowd at Mitchelstown in 1887,80 and complained that by protesting at the trials of moonlighters while refusing sympathy to the victims of moonlighting, the Parnellites made themselves accomplices to the criminals. His retrospective account of the growth of the Home Rule Party emphasises the influence of disgruntled Tories, the personal trust and confidence expressed in Gladstone by Ulster Liberals (especially tenant farmer beneficiaries of the 1881 Land Act), Parnellite obstruction of Gladstonian reforms, and cynical alliances between Home Rulers and Conservatives against Ulster Liberal candidates. MacKnight believed Home Rule would throw Ireland into the hands of classes who would not govern fairly or competently, bringing economic ruin, sectarian civil war and eventual reconquest – unless Britain pursued containment, keeping strategic harbours while the island sank into chaos. On arrival in Belfast MacKnight had been startled by the freshness of memories of 1798 (hearing one Liberal activist tell another ‘Your grandfather hung my grandfather’).81 MacKnight’s belief in social reform and responsiveness to the well-being of the poor coexisted with Whig fear of ‘demagogues’. He supported Irish household suffrage under the Third Reform Act – calling the political damage to Irish Liberalism a necessary sacrifice to the Liberal principle of equal laws – but declared that a government where the propertyless majority ruled would prove disastrous82 and called the House of Lords an inviolable ‘Estate of the Realm’.83 He supported the British Empire as (among other things) an invaluable outlet for the talents of Irishmen, and he believed Home Rule would bring loss of imperial prestige (particularly damaging in India, whose sectarian divisions meant it was no more a single nation than Ireland).84 MacKnight praised Ulstermen who expanded and administered the British Empire. He prized Lord Dufferin’s friendship; in his last book Dufferin’s speeches as Governor-General of Canada are given more credit for promoting Canadian unity than Canadians themselves.85 In the run-up to the 1885 election, MacKnight prided himself on the Northern Whig’s continued loyalty to Gladstonian Liberalism despite increasing Ulster Liberal fears – privately shared by MacKnight – that Gladstone was unsound on Home Rule. The last letter from MacKnight




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When Lord Hartington was here[86] I told him that an Irish Parliament, which would be sure to have in it a separatist party as soon as it ever assembled, would end in a civil war. I have seen nothing to change my conviction on this point. I met Mr. Herbert Gladstone and Mr. Charles Russell when I was in London last May,[87] and I desired them to remember me to you. I should have gladly called upon you and talked over Ulster matters, but I did not wish to trouble you. I suppose we shall never meet. I could write you a long letter on our Ulster Liberal defeats. The low franchise has given electoral power to all the agricultural labourers, who in Ulster are, among the Catholics, Irish nationalists, and among the Protestants, Orangemen. When both these parties combined against us, we were almost inevitably and necessarily beaten. Under the old franchise we could have carried nearly all Ulster. The tenant farmers generally increase in intelligence and liberality and are grateful for what you have done for them and for all Ireland.88 ‘These were my convictions,’ MacKnight commented ten years later, ‘expressed, I hope, with becoming diffidence and respect for one whom I had so long admired and honoured, and for whom, for many years, I had done what I could, in a comparatively humble position, politically to serve.’ Gladstone sent MacKnight a reply on 21 December which, after some personal compliments, referred to his telegram stating that if he put forward an Irish plan he would do so on his own responsibility. ‘From this time I never doubted that Mr. Gladstone had decided on bringing in an Irish Home Rule Bill’; MacKnight privately expressed his fears to friends, lamenting ‘Politics are a vile trade.’89 MacKnight threw his support behind the Liberal Unionists led by Lord Hartington, whom he praised as a model of Burkean statesmanship and consistency.90 Ulster As It Is describes London interviews with prominent Liberals on both sides in the crisis. Watching an early stage of the Home Rule debate, MacKnight was dismayed by the cold gaze Gladstone turned towards Hartington and the warm affection with which he followed a William O’Brien diatribe.91 MacKnight lamented that Gladstone had fallen victim to delusion mixed with opportunism and that most of his lieutenants had been misled by despair or expediency. (He excepted


in the Gladstone Papers, attached to an editorial denouncing the Hawarden Kite, is an anguished declaration that fear of Home Rule is ‘beginning seriously to affect the commercial relations of Ulster’:


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John Morley, whom he acknowledged to have behaved consistently and sincerely.92) MacKnight’s memoirs contain numerous embarrassing comparisons between the pre-1886 Unionism and subsequent Gladstonian declarations of certain Liberals;93 he pointed out that all but one of the Ulster Liberal MPs defeated in 1885 remained faithful to the Union.94 George Otto Trevelyan (who opposed Home Rule in 1886 but returned to the Gladstonian fold in 1887) attracted MacKnight’s particular scorn.95 MacKnight had one last interview with Gladstone, in June 1887, mostly devoted to whether Burke would have opposed the Union. (Gladstone quoted Burke’s protégé French Laurence;96 MacKnight undertook further research and decided Burke would have opposed Union without Catholic Emancipation but not on principle.) Gladstone hinted he might consider separate treatment for Ulster if Ulster Unionists proposed terms (a suggestion rejected by MacKnight’s Belfast friends).97 MacKnight had already deployed Burke in another context; while David Miller suggests the Northern Whig editor’s declarations that Ulster Unionists would resist Home Rule by force reflect eccentric Ulster-Scots belief in the early modern concept of the right of resistance by a ‘public band’,98 the Englishman MacKnight in fact justified such threats by citing Burke on the folly of asserting the nominal authority of the Crown against Americans who believed their dearest interests at stake, and on unrestrained majority rule as dissolving the social compact.99 Finally renouncing his view of Gladstone as Burke’s moral heir, MacKnight lamented that he had shown himself ‘the most inconsistent statesman who ever lived’, citing in contrast Burke’s boast of his own consistency: ‘Strip him of that, and he is naked indeed.’100

‘A great man has been lost’: MacKnight’s last years and final view of Gladstone, 1886–99 The composition of Ulster As It Is began in 1891, when the outcome of Gladstone’s last crusade was still undecided. It compares (in format, not political sentiment) to A. M. Sullivan’s New Ireland as a political autobiography written in the form of a narrative of recent Irish political events. (MacKnight regularly refers to himself in the third person and quotes extensively from Northern Whig editorials without naming the paper.) The book is devoted to disproving Gladstone’s claims that the Liberal Unionists of Ulster were renegade Liberals turned virtual Orangemen, and it remains the most accessible contemporary statement of the Liberal Unionist case that Gladstone betrayed Liberal principles.




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(It may be contrasted with Barry O’Brien’s contemporary works calling Gladstonian Home Rule the logical extension of Liberal reforms.) It provides a long catalogue of reckless statements on Irish history and current politics by Gladstone, including what MacKnight describes as deliberate and libellous obstructions of Balfour’s Irish administration and an apologia for moonlighters,101 exaggerated statements on the number of Protestant Liberals who supported Home Rule102 and a description of the brusque treatment accorded by Gladstone to a Belfast Chamber of Commerce deputation.103 MacKnight acknowledged that many of Gladstone’s admirers saw the denunciation of the Lords in his final parliamentary speech in 1894 as a last statement of reforming principle: MacKnight thought it a war-cry against all the venerable institutions of state and professed himself uncertain ‘whether ... he may be said to have politically departed in a blaze of glory or only in a blue flame’ (as in stage presentations of a descent into Hell), clearly conveying to his readers that he saw Gladstone’s departure as the latter.104 MacKnight hailed the land purchase legislation and infrastructural development pursued by A. J. and Gerald Balfour as important steps towards the solution of the Irish question. Completed after the Unionist landslide of 1895, Ulster hails the continued growth of Belfast and predicts the Union will be cemented by an underwater tunnel between Ireland and Scotland.105 In 1898 MacKnight’s Northern Whig obituary for Gladstone proclaimed ‘the venerable statesman ... has followed Home Rule to the tomb’. A ‘special Memoir’ outlining Gladstone’s career followed the standard Liberal account of Gladstone moving from ‘the chains of past utterances and associations ... bound to the body of an effete Toryism’ to ‘a better and wiser Liberalism’. MacKnight lamented an epoch in Mr. Gladstone’s career which cannot but be regarded with the deepest regret, not unmingled with indignation. Would that the chapter might remain closed which records his sudden stultification of his former policy and utterances, his abandonment of old friends and devoted adherents, his surrender to the forces of Irish Nationalism against which none had charged more trenchantly their dangerous and lawless tendencies.


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In a more conciliatory vein than in his memoir, MacKnight recalled that Gladstone advanced the Second Home Rule Bill with ‘vigour remarkable for his years and worthy of a better cause’ and emphasised that Liberal Unionists ‘still felt an affectionate and reverent regard for the


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old leader ... a great man has been lost, a great career has closed for ever, however deeply they may feel that a cloud of political error had rested over the last active period of his life ... it will indeed be long ere we shall look upon his like again in force of intellect, energy, or character’.106 When he died of heart failure at his home in Wellington Park, Belfast, on 18 November 1899, MacKnight was revising his Burke biography, preparing an annotated edition of Burke’s works and composing a history of political progress in the nineteenth century. He had finished the tenth chapter of this history, bringing the story up to Gladstone’s first government and digressing to discuss Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II. The book was completed by another and published posthumously. Although the book was commissioned for a series whose format must have exercised restraint on him, MacKnight’s characteristic views persist. Burke figures very noticeably; MacKnight emphasises he was a Whig rather than a Conservative. (He even argues that Burke’s opposition to parliamentary reform was appropriate in the era of the Gordon Riots, and does not cover later Reform Acts.107) Gladstone’s inconsistencies are emphasised.108 MacKnight predicts the twentieth century will bring a federated British Empire through further development of British representative institutions.109 (He even reassesses unilateral Free Trade, and echoes Maurice in criticising opponents of the Factory Acts who ‘applied the doctrine of laissez faire to social questions which required to be dealt with in the interests of millions and problems which were thoroughly social though not identified with ordinary socialism’.110) His account of the Indian Mutiny declares it self-evident that Sepoy victory would have retarded political progress, bringing civil war followed by Russian invasion;111 he maintains, however, that Indians are being deeply influenced by Shakespeare, Milton and Burke (he ignores such disturbing authors as John Stuart Mill) and may eventually achieve full participation in British institutions.112 On MacKnight’s death, newspapers as distinct as the ultra-Tory London Globe and the outspokenly Liberal Westminster Gazette praised an honest and outspoken defender of the Union and Liberal principles. The nationalist Irish News recalled his work against Anglican privilege and for ‘fair land laws’; the Conservative Belfast Newsletter remarked that even before 1886 they recognised the editor of the Northern Whig as a scrupulously fair-minded controversialist.113 The Northern Whig boasted that ‘A friend to Plato, he was a greater friend of truth. A lifelong admirer of Mr. Gladstone, he admired still more the principles of true Liberalism, which Mr. Gladstone unfortunately abandoned.’114




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Notes

1. John Bew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin, 2008). 2. Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007). 3. Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), especially chapter 5, ‘Joseph and His Brethren: The Rise and Fall of Radical Unionism’. 4. Letter from Sayers to Connolly Gage, 5 July 1967, in Andrew Gailey, Crying in the Wilderness – Jack Sayers: A Liberal Editor in Ulster, 1939–69 (Belfast, 1995), p. 123. 5. Biagini, British Democracy, p. 98. 6. When criticising romantic conservatives who exalted the social role of the Church in opposition to political economy, MacKnight noted the extensive Church estates in Durham were ‘an eyesore in English agriculture’. Thomas MacKnight, The Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli, M.P.: A Literary and Political Biography Addressed to the New Generation (London, 1853; 2nd ed. 1854; replica by Elibron Classics 2006), p. 365 (henceforth Disraeli). 7. Anonymous editorial preface to Thomas MacKnight and C. C. Osborne, Political Progress in the Nineteenth Century (London, Toronto and Philadelphia, 1902), p. vi (henceforth Political Progress); Thomas MacKnight, Ulster As It Is, or Twenty-Eight Years’ Experience as an Irish Editor, 2 vols. (London, 1896), vol. I, pp. 310–11 (henceforth Ulster). 8. David M. Thompson, ‘F. D. Maurice: Rebel Conservative’ in S. Mews (ed.), Modern Religious Rebels: Essays Presented to John Kent (London, 1993), pp. 123–43. 9. Northern Whig, 20 Nov. 1899, p. 5. 10. Disraeli, pp. 269–70. 11. Press, 7 Jan. 1854; on Smythe and Disraeli’s shared authorship see Mary S. Millman, George Smythe: Disraeli’s Scandalous Disciple (London, 2006), pp. 275–7. 12. Disraeli, pp. 5–6. 13. Ibid., p. 19. 14. Cf. Seamus Deane, ‘Philosophes and Regicides: The Great Conspiracy’ in Seamus Deane, Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke (Cork, 2005), pp. 66–85. 15. MacKnight, Disraeli, pp. 3, 8–11, 604–8. 16. Ibid., pp. 362–3. 17. Ibid., pp. 14–15 (contrast Burke and Catholic Irish), 498, 537–8. 18. Ibid., pp. 506, 509–11, 518–9. 19. Ibid., pp. 496–536, esp. pp. 500–1. 20. Ibid., pp. 11, 16–19, 513–14. 21. E.g. ibid., pp. 568, 587, 595–6, 599–600. 22. Ibid., pp. 291–301, 597–8. 23. Northern Whig, 20 May 1898, pp. 6–7. 24. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 49–51, 105.


Thanks to Paul Bew, Derval Fitzgerald and James McGuire. An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper at the University of Ulster conference on nineteenth- and twentieth-century loyalism in July 2007.


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25. See also Thomas MacKnight, The Life and Times of Edmund Burke (London, 1860), vol. III, pp. 353–4, 488–9, 510–12, 534–43 (henceforth Burke). 26. Political Progress, pp. 117–18. 27. Northern Whig, 20 May 1898, pp. 6–7. 28. Political Progress, pp. 113–22. 29. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew (eds.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1974), vol. IV, p. 580 (30 Dec. 1853). 30. Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44379, fos. 4–5. Undated but endorsed ‘27 March 1854 Mr. Macknight’. This letter shows the marriage was earlier than 1856–9, the date given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries for MacKnight and Thorne. 31. Gladstone Diaries, vol. IV, pp. 666–7 (12, 14, 16 Dec. 1854; wrote to MacKnight 15 Dec.). 32. MacKnight to Gladstone, 13 Mar. 1855, marked ‘Private’, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44383, fos. 139–42. The published book has no dedication. 33. Northern Whig, 20 Nov. 1899, pp. 4–5. 34. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 3–4. 35. Rambler, NS 9 (Apr. 1858), pp. 266–73; J. Rufus Fears (ed.), Lord Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty (Indianapolis, 1985). Acton thought MacKnight ‘the most impartial and unprejudiced’ of Burke’s biographers and praised his ‘great industry in minute facts’, particularly in reference to the role of Burke’s Catholic relatives, but he criticised MacKnight’s diffuseness and pompous grandiloquence. 36. MacKnight to Gladstone, 11 Feb. 1858, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44389, fos. 55–6. Gladstone read Burke on 17 and 19 February and 2 March 1858 (H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1978), vol. V, pp. 278–81). When the bulky third volume appeared, Gladstone read it on 20 December 1860 (Gladstone Diaries, vol. V, p. 540), 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30 and 31 January and 1, 4, 5 and 6 February 1861 (H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1978), vol. VI, pp. 5–7). Did he reread the whole book? 37. E.g. MacKnight, The Life and Times of Edmund Burke (London, 1858), vol. II, pp. 318–92, 500–56; Political Progress, pp. 54–5. 38. MacKnight to Gladstone, 6 Mar. 1863, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MS. 44400, fo. 105, annotated by Gladstone ‘Sent thanks. Look to perusing with great interest.’ Gladstone Diaries, vol. VI, p. 188 show that Gladstone read Life of Lord Bolingbroke on 14 March 1863; he reread it on 15 April 1873 (H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1982), vol. VII, p. 316), presumably seeking anti-Disraelian inspiration. 39. Burke, vol. II, pp. 45–6. Cf. Disraeli, pp. 521–2. 40. Burke, vol. III, pp. 725–6. 41. E.g. ibid., pp. 402, 649–56. 42. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 546–51. 43. Ibid., vol. III, pp. 608–10, 734. 44. Political Progress, pp. 127–8. 45. Burke, vol. III, pp. 495–6, 749–51. 46. Ibid., pp. 476–7, 486, 680. 47. Ibid., pp. 492–8, 532–3, 711–12. MacKnight also thought Burke culpably inconsistent in supporting the Fox–North Coalition (vol. III, pp. 14–16),




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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

believed him too harsh towards Price and Priestley (vol. III, p. 331) and regretted his late intolerance towards Dissenters. Ibid., pp. 356–61. Thomas MacKnight, Life of Lord Bolingbroke (London, 1863), pp. 28–30. MacKnight also criticises Macaulay’s portrayal of Marlborough. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Sarah Thorne by C. M. P. Taylor. Burke, vol. III, p. 355. Ulster, vol. II, pp. 95–7. Political Progress, p. 143; MacKnight to Gladstone, 22 Feb. 1870, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44429, fos. 249–50. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 38–40. Ibid., pp. 150–69. Ibid., p. 241. Political Progress, pp. 149–51. Northern Whig, 20 May 1898, pp. 4–5. MacKnight to Gladstone, 22 Feb. 1870, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44429, fos. 249–50. Gladstone notes on the letter that he will take MacKnight’s advice. Printed in Gladstone Diaries, vol. VII, p. 428 (8 Jan. 1871). Cf. MacKnight reporting the views of O’Hagan and William Monsell on Fawcett’s Bill: MacKnight to Gladstone, 26 Jan. 1872, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44433, fos. 107–8. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 190–9. Ibid., pp. 41–8, 276–82, 354–6. MacKnight to Gladstone, 26 Jan. 1872, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44433, fos. 107–8. Gladstone advised MacKnight to say the government was weighing all relevant factors before a final decision. MacKnight to Gladstone, 11 Mar. 1874, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44443, fos. 89–91. MacKnight thought Cardwell should have been Gladstone’s successor and regretted his move to the Lords. Ulster, vol. I, p. 302. T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day (London, 1928), vol. I, p. 60. MacKnight to Gladstone, 30 Sept. 1874, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44444, fo. 262. Gladstone to MacKnight, 2 Oct. 1874, in Political Progress, p. 173. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 319–20; see also vol. II, pp. 263–4. For Newdegate see Walter Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian Britain: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, MO, 1982). MacKnight to Gladstone, 9 Oct. 1877, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44455, fos. 175–6; Ulster, vol. I, pp. 344–5. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 338–46. Northern Whig, 20 May 1898, pp. 6–7. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 309–10 says Gladstone’s reply to Allen fails to realise the extent of Irish land agitation. MacKnight to Gladstone, 5 Dec. [recte Jan.] 1880, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 44462, fos. 21–2. Ulster, vol. I, pp. 380–1. Ibid., p. 249; vol. II, pp. 5–27.


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78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

185

Ibid., vol. I, pp. 383–6, 392–3; vol. II, pp. 5–7. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 135–7, 180–4. Ibid., pp. 25–6, 194–5. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 21–3. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 54–60, 184. Ibid., pp. 364–6. Ibid., pp. 237–8. Political Progress, pp. 62–6. Ulster, vol. II, pp. 100–8. Ibid., pp. 61. MacKnight to Gladstone, 17 Dec. 1885, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add MSS. 56446, fos. 189v–90; Ulster, vol. II, pp. 112–13. Ulster, vol. II, pp. 113–14. Ibid., pp. 221–3. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid., pp. 120–1, 184–5. Ibid., pp. 100–8. Ibid., pp. 193–4, 206–8. Ibid., pp. 139–40, 176–7. Ibid., pp. 191–2. Although this meeting is not recorded in Gladstone’s diaries, Gladstone attached sufficient importance to MacKnight’s argument that Home Rule required exclusion of Irish Members from Westminster to raise it in a discussion with G. O. Trevelyan (H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1994), vol. XII, p. 36, 26 May 1887). David W. Miller, Queen’s Rebels (Dublin, 1978), pp. 91–2 (omits to mention MacKnight’s Englishness). Ulster, vol. II, p. 184. Ibid., vol. I, p. 366. Ibid., vol. II, p. 347. Ibid., pp. 214–15. Ibid., pp. 321–7. Ibid., pp. 366–7. Ibid., pp. 396–9. Northern Whig, 20 May 1898, pp. 4–5, 6–7. Political Progress, pp. 85–6. Ibid., pp. 36, 40, 91–2, 133–4, 139–40. Ibid., pp. 62, 82. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Ibid., pp. 124–5. Ibid., pp. 129–30. Northern Whig, 20 Nov. 1899, pp. 4–5; 21 Nov. 1899, p. 4; 22 Nov. 1899, pp. 4–5. Ibid., 20 Nov. 1899, p. 4.




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The union of hearts depicted: Gladstone, Home Rule, and United Ireland D. W. Bebbington

William Ewart Gladstone detested political cartoons. They embodied caricature, the exaggeration of a particular feature into a deformity to excite ridicule or hatred. Cartoons, Gladstone once pointed out, had not existed in ancient Greece. There the ideal of human beauty was so deeply cherished that its distortion was not tolerated.1 Yet cartoons did the statesman powerful service during his long career. Their very frequency consolidated his image as a popular politician, bringing out qualities such as courage and tenacity that he was happy to have publicised. Nowhere, however, did they advance his cause more than in Ireland after his introduction of the first Home Rule Bill. The nationalist journal United Ireland, as the illustrations in this chapter will show, gave currency to striking depictions of Gladstone; these illustrations vividly portrayed the union of hearts between England and Ireland that he preached so persistently during the late 1880s. This chapter examines a sample of the cartoons, but first they need to be placed in their context. The great age of British political cartoons is usually located in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era of James Gillray and George Cruikshank. By the beginning of Gladstone’s career in the 1830s and 1840s, the single sheets of the earlier period were being replaced by comic journals, of which the most celebrated was Punch. Ireland was less well served, for it was not until 1870 that the first comic journal was launched in Dublin. Soon, however, the cartoon became a popular genre produced by able artists. John F. O’Hea (1850–1922) contributed telling cartoons to the press from the late 1860s down to the decade of the Irish revolution,2 and Thomas Fitzpatrick (1860–1912), who began his career as an illustrator in the early 1880s, was eventually to found his own satirical magazine, The Lepracaun, in 1905.3 The prints that we shall


8

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examine fall into this age of the burgeoning of the cartoon in Ireland. It was not the case that the Irish people needed visual means of communication to compensate for their illiteracy. By 1891, 82 per cent of the Irish population could sign the marriage register, and a higher proportion could read.4 Nevertheless, cartoons exerted a potent appeal. Images were drawn from a variety of fields familiar to the mass of the people: folklore, entertainment, military conflict, the law, the Bible and popular art. The resulting illustrations probably did less to transmit new political ideas and allegiances than to reflect existing convictions and prejudices, so reinforcing rather than creating attitudes. Yet they did help identify the friends and foes of the cause to which their constituency was already committed. To that extent they could be agents of change, dignifying supporters and demonising opponents. The cartoons could go beyond revealing assumptions about the affairs of the day to playing a role in the construction and destruction of popular perceptions of politicians. The journal from which the pictures here are taken, United Ireland, was a weekly, published each Saturday. Its predecessor, The Irishman, had begun in 1858. From 1865 to 1881 this newspaper was owned by Richard Pigott, later the notorious forger in the ‘Parnellism and Crime’ affair. Under his guidance its editorial stance was critical of the involvement of politicians in the Land War. In 1881, however, Charles Stewart Parnell’s nationalist party bought the newspaper, merged it with the Flag of Ireland and created United Ireland.5 Now it gave full coverage to the Land League, Parnell’s organisation for sustaining the agitation against landlordism. The paper carried no advertisements at all so that it could concentrate instead on publishing nationalist news, managing to achieve high sales through the popularity of its editorial statements and its coloured cartoons.6 Its circulation, which in 1882 was 30,000, had reached 100,000 by 1886.7 The editor claimed in retrospect that it was regularly seen by half a million readers.8 The newspaper’s significance can be appreciated by contrasting the figures for the circulation of political prints in the British golden age. In Gillray’s day, because of technical limitations, in most years the total production of political prints was no more than 50,000. The most widely distributed of all the satirical sheets, Cruikshanks’s illustrations to George Hone’s booklet The Political House that Jack Built (1819–20), sold only about 100,000 copies.9 In only a single instance, therefore, was the regular weekly circulation of United Ireland equalled by the total sales of a political print in the pre-Reform era. The cartoons reached a vast audience. The editor, chosen by Parnell in 1881, was William O’Brien, and he remained in the newspaper’s chair throughout the 1880s. O’Brien had


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previously shown journalistic flair on the Freeman’s Journal, the organ of the nationalist parliamentary party. In the pages of United Ireland, however, he dwelt not on constitutional politics but on the agrarian issues that concerned the Irish masses, concentrating his fire on landlordism.10 The degree to which O’Brien was exclusively concerned with the Land War can be exaggerated. Philip Bull has argued that he supported tenant farmers as part of a broader nationalist commitment.11 Certainly in the year after his appointment as editor he was prepared to enter the House of Commons as MP for his home town of Mallow, Co. Cork. In Parliament and in the pages of United Ireland he was loyally uncritical of Parnell. In 1881, for example, he followed his leader’s policy over Gladstone’s Land Act. Rather than either endorsing or rejecting the measure, he advocated testing it before the Land Courts to see whether it would benefit the people. This was a moderate and essentially pragmatic stance. Yet O’Brien’s journalistic hallmark was to dress up an issue as though it were part of an apocalyptic struggle. In this case he launched into an inflammatory assault on landlordism. ‘Impoverish it’, he wrote, ‘and manacle it in the Land Courts, if that be possible; and if not, or whether or not, hunt it down steadily, patiently, remorselessly – to the death!’12 The unbridled rhetoric was typical of O’Brien. It was part of a calculated strategy of drumming up support by sounding far more radical than in reality he was. He thought up extraordinary schemes to capture the popular imagination. In the following year, for instance, he advocated kidnapping the Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary and holding them hostage in the Dublin mountains until land reforms were conceded.13 O’Brien, who as a boy had enjoyed playing with toy soldiers, loved metaphors of battle.14 He has been described as nurturing an ‘anti-English culture’ in the pages of United Ireland.15 It is hardly surprising that in October 1881 he was arrested for ‘treasonable and seditious writings’ and that in February 1883 Dublin Castle put him on trial for questioning the course of justice.16 O’Brien returned the compliment by fierce assaults on the Irish administration, and especially virulent attacks on Lord Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant in the latter part of Gladstone’s second premiership. When the government left office in June 1885, United Ireland rejoiced at the fall of Spencer, who ‘had struck murderous blow after blow at the people under his rod’.17 The editor had been a strident critic of Gladstone’s administration in Ireland. Before the statesman’s declaration in favour of Home Rule, therefore, O’Brien was no friend to his policies. There was, however, another side to O’Brien. He does not seem to have developed a personal animus against Gladstone. In his autobiography of 1905, Recollections, he treats the statesman with respect. In writing of Gladstone’s second administration, for example, O’Brien remarks


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that the Prime Minister ‘hated Coercion’.18 Although O’Brien’s attitude was coloured by Gladstone’s later championship of Home Rule, there is something here of the reverence of a typical Liberal backbencher. In his later volume, Evening Memories (1920), O’Brien recalls Gladstone introducing the first Home Rule Bill in April 1886 as a ‘massive figure set four-square to all the world’s contumely in a great cause’.19 Like many another, O’Brien seems to have been bowled over by his experience of Gladstone’s oratory. A man of warm passions, O’Brien had them kindled by Gladstone’s new-found commitment to the Irish cause. The editor’s esteem for the statesman showed in the pages of United Ireland from 1886 onwards. O’Brien guided the newspaper’s policy and ultimately the content of its cartoons. He may even have taken a direct role in generating ideas for the journal’s illustrations. His biographer surmises, though without evidence, that it was so, and his successor as functioning editor certainly played a large part in inventing the cartoons.20 O’Brien possessed a precise visual memory – as distinct, he claimed, ‘as the outlines of a Flaxman drawing’.21 This quality may have carried over into inventing themes for the political imagery that was so important to the success of his newspaper. The endorsement of Gladstone shown in the cartoons from the time he took up Home Rule may owe a great deal to O’Brien. Although O’Brien remained editor of United Ireland after 1886, in that year he launched the Plan of Campaign that was designed to reignite the land agitation. By April 1887 his unguarded speeches had put him back behind prison bars. When leading the Plan of Campaign and even when in gaol, he was still in overall charge of his journal’s policies, but the actual work of producing the newspaper passed into the hands of Matthias Bodkin as acting editor. Bodkin, a Catholic lawyer from a Galway county family, had served with O’Brien on the Freeman’s Journal and was recruited to write occasional editorials from the launch of United Ireland. The acting editor was a resolute nationalist, but a moderate man, expecting the landlords to play a full part in a restored Irish parliament. His stock argument in favour of Home Rule was that it meant bringing about friendship between the two countries, Ireland and Britain. This stance was very like that of Bodkin’s close friend Justin McCarthy: a firm commitment to Irish interests, support for a devolved parliament and reconciliation across the Irish Sea.22 Like McCarthy, who wrote a popular biography of Gladstone, Bodkin held the statesman in high regard. Although it was only after Bodkin had entered Parliament for Roscommon in 1892 that he first set his eyes on Gladstone, the new MP had long been a devotee. He believed Gladstone’s support for Home Rule was a genuine commitment to Ireland. In his memoirs, Bodkin waxes eloquent about many a ‘matchless oration’ of the ‘miraculous




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old man’.23 His admiration undoubtedly impinged on the pictures in his newspaper. Bodkin tells us that while he served as acting editor, he ‘suggested in detail the cartoon depicting the chief political event of the week’.24 He imparted his own vivid sense of the power of scorn into the illustrations. Bodkin was in the Irish tradition of Jonathan Swift, believing in satire as a death-dealing weapon in public affairs. Especially in Ireland, he held, where the sense of humour was so strong, ridicule could kill.25 The lawyer ensured that the foes of Ireland did not escape unscathed. Consequently, while Gladstone was presented favourably, his opponents suffered from trenchant mockery in the cartoons published during Bodkin’s period in charge. Yet the men who actually designed the cartoons were artists. Chief among them was John D. Reigh, who signed nearly all of the illustrations in the bottom right-hand corner. Very little is known of this man. He flourished from around 1875 to 1914, but we are not even aware of his second name. He was an accomplished painter, for he sold pictures at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in the early 1880s. He contributed to United Ireland from early in O’Brien’s editorship, and he was also the favourite illustrator for the Shamrock, the nationalist monthly. According to Parnell, Reigh was ‘the only one who can do justice to my handsome face’.26 Reigh naturally derived the subject of some of his graphics from high art, which he clearly saw as his province, but he also had a penchant for historical content. He portrayed, for example, several episodes from the 1798 rebellion, often depicting battle scenes.27 Reigh was an ideal illustrator for a broad audience, combining bold images, popular themes and a clear message. In the new age of chromolithography, he delighted in using bright colour. Almost every week his creations appeared on a sheet enclosed with United Ireland, of the dimensions of a whole newspaper page, which was designed for posting, like a calendar, on the wall. Although various commentators and numerous parish priests mobilised the people of Ireland in favour of Gladstone’s 1886 proposals, Reigh’s command of the visual made him perhaps the most potent force in rallying the masses to the cause. He was probably the man who, more than any other, constructed the Irish view of Gladstone in the years immediately after the proposal of Home Rule. The cartoons that will be examined fall into three groups, relating respectively to the emergence of the policy of Home Rule in 1886, to the general election of that year and to the later 1880s. In the years before the first group, in 1884 and 1885, the cartoons consistently show Parnell as hero and Spencer, for so long as he remained Lord Lieutenant, as villain – a role for which, with his flowing red beard, he was well


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cast. Gladstone was a marginal figure, generally not treated as inveterately hostile but equally given no particular favour. There had long been Irish hopes that Gladstone, as a believer in constitutional liberty, might advance towards a policy of Home Rule,28 but only after the flying of the Hawarden Kite in December 1885 was his sympathy publicly known. Accordingly, on 6 February 1886 Gladstone comes forward into prominence in a United Ireland cartoon. In ‘The Cabinet Trick’ (Fig. 1) the whole illustration, which shows a wooden cabinet, is an elaborate



Figure 1 The Cabinet Trick


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pun, for the Prime Minister had been forming the Cabinet of his third administration during the previous week. On the very day the cartoon was published, the new ministers travelled to kiss hands at Osborne House.29 The performance of the trick, according to the caption, was to take place at the Royal Theatre, St Stephen’s, that is, at Westminster. The question was ‘How will he get out of it?’ How, Reigh was asking, would Gladstone escape from the restrictions on his freedom? The statesman was now known to favour Home Rule, but would he be able to introduce so radical a departure in Irish policy? Gladstone appears benign and is treated sympathetically. He is bound by forces external to him, represented by the ropes labelled ‘Anti-Irish Prejudice’, ‘Whig Mutiny’, ‘Integrity of Empire’ (twice), ‘Rack Rents’ and ‘No Popery’. At the top are the Protestant drum and the Catholic chapel bell, the religious components of the problem confronting the Prime Minister. With all these forces arrayed against him, he was like a stage escapologist about to attempt the apparently impossible. A measure of confidence in his abilities, however, is already in evidence. Gladstone is ‘the renowned Wizard of the North’, an allusion to his Midlothian constituency, and, after all, stage performers did succeed in disentangling themselves within closed cabinets. Clearly United Ireland is prepared to give Gladstone some credence: the long-desired Home Rule might indeed come from his hands. The second cartoon, ‘A Flag of Truce’ (Fig. 2), appeared just over a month later, on 13 March. Drawing on the military imagery beloved by O’Brien and Reigh alike, it showed two armies drawn up for battle. On the left, Irish troops, marshalled under the banner of the harp, are commanded by Parnell. They face, on the right, British soldiers under the Union Flag led by Gladstone, who, no doubt because he would appear wholly incongruous in military outfit, wears ordinary civilian clothes complete with a top hat. The prudent champions of the Irish cause have been told to ground arms, to wait and see what the Prime Minister is offering. O’Brien had heard from Parnell at a meeting in Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin that Gladstone was indeed intending to proceed with a Home Rule measure. 30 Accordingly, the white flag of truce carried by Gladstone is inscribed ‘Home Rule’. It also carries the legend ‘Abolition of Landlordism’, for the Prime Minister had indicated that the legislative programme would include drastic Irish land reform. The illustration still depicts Gladstone and Parnell as enemies, but there is nothing abject about the erect pose of the stalwart Prime Minister. The man, like his proposals, is appreciated as being worthy of respect.


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Figure 2 A Flag of Truce

Less than another month later, Gladstone has turned into a friend of the Irish people. In ‘Taking the Landlords at their Word’ (Fig. 3), issued on 3 April, Gladstone offers to put his projected land legislation into the fire. The intended massive compensation of £120,000,000 to landlords will perish with the plan. A representative Irish landlord, the booted figure at left centre, rejects Home Rule and land scheme alike. Colonel Edward Saunderson, leader of the Ulster Unionists, had threatened to bring more than 10,000 northern English Protestants to fight for Ulster,31 and so in the cartoon the landlord is backed by ‘Drummer Sanderson’, crying ‘Hooray! Death or glory! Blood and Civil War!’ An unruffled Gladstone, however, outfaces his two opponents. The revolver falls from the landlord’s hand as he blames Saunderson for losing him his compensation. The landlord and Saunderson are equally treated as figures of ridicule. A more sympathetic character, however, offers commentary on the scene. This is Pat, the cheerful young farmer who stood for Ireland in many a caricature of the




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Figure 3 Taking the Landlords at Their Word

period. 32 From behind the table, Pat expresses in national brogue his satisfaction that Saunderson’s alarmism has scotched the land bill because, when the time comes for a settlement, the landlord will be more ‘raisonable’. Gladstone, unperturbed by the resistance of his opponents, is now master of events. His policy is shown as receiving the approval of Ireland even before he had put his proposals for Home Rule before Parliament. In the following week, on Thursday 8 April, Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill. Two days later, on Saturday 10 April, United Ireland issued a portrait of the Prime Minister as its pictorial supplement. This portrait was followed in successive weeks by three others: Henry Grattan, the leading orator in the last independent Irish parliament in the eighteenth century; Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the contemporary Irish national cause; and John Morley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. Gladstone, together with his appointee, had entered the gallery of Irish heroes. Gladstone’s portrait was a roaring success, making its edition


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of United Ireland the best-selling issue ever. More than 125,000 copies were published, and production halted only because the litho machine broke down under the strain.33 In the following month, on 29 May, as though to confirm Gladstone’s new-found status in Ireland, Reigh’s cartoon depicted him, after Landseer, as ‘The Grand Old Stag at Bay’, standing on the Home Rule rock with hostile hounds baying all round. At that point the Home Rule Bill hung in the balance in the House of Commons, with Lord Hartington’s Whigs and Joseph Chamberlain’s Radicals threatening to vote it down. By the time they did, on Tuesday 8 June, Gladstone had already been established as the central figure in Irish nationalist iconography. On Thursday 10 June the dissolution of Parliament was announced. During the subsequent election campaign, in the second group of cartoons for examination, United Ireland projected an image of Gladstone as the defender of the Irish people. On Saturday 12 June it offered its comment on the defeat of Home Rule in ‘Arraigned!’ (Fig. 4). A sour and crestfallen Chamberlain, easily identified by his trademark monocle, is presented as a prisoner in the dock charged with wilful murder of the bill. There was a prehistory here. Irishmen, according to Bodkin,



Figure 4 Arraigned!


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found Chamberlain easy to dislike because of his ‘alert self-assurance’ and his ‘caustic speech’.34 United Ireland had run a campaign against the Birmingham politician’s visit to Ireland in 1885, and subsequent cartoons had portrayed him unflatteringly as an assassin (27 March 1886) and as an ass (5 June 1886). He had betrayed Ireland when, as Radical leader, he might have been expected to endorse Home Rule. So on 12 June Chamberlain is shown as being haled into court before the august female figure of ‘English Democracy’, who grasps the sword of justice. Police Constable Gladstone guards the prisoner, holding a truncheon marked ‘Democracy’. The odd symbolic tautology of democracy occurring twice in the same print is explained by its close association with both the politicians who appear. Chamberlain’s earlier efforts, especially around the 1885 general election, to identify himself with the rising tide of democracy meant that he was justly answerable to its tribunal, but it is also clear that in Ireland Gladstone was perceived as its champion. By means of the 1884 Reform Bill, Gladstone’s government had given the vote to a much larger proportion of the male population. There had been a special impact on Ireland, where the level of the franchise had previously been set lower than in Britain. The Irish electorate had more than tripled in numbers. The change, and even more the associated redistribution measure, enabled Parnell to sweep virtually all the southern Irish seats for nationalism at the 1885 general election. The democratic franchise that Gladstone had introduced, the cartoon implies, would bring Chamberlain to account at the new election that was just beginning. The charge against Chamberlain in the caption of the illustration is also revealing. The victim of the murder was ‘a Treaty of Peace and Conciliation between the Irish and the English Peoples’. That was exactly the high view of the Home Rule Bill that Gladstone himself had envisaged. The measure was designed to establish a new and permanent relationship between the islands. So far as United Ireland was concerned, Gladstone’s purpose had been fulfilled. As the policeman’s uniform suggested, the statesman had become the agent of justice for Ireland. In the same issue, William O’Brien described Gladstone as ‘a white old man with a face like a benediction and a voice like an Archangel’s’.35 He had become a sublime figure in the nationalist pantheon. As the general election gathered momentum, turning into a referendum on Home Rule, the cartoons unequivocally took Gladstone’s side. On 3 July, the day after the first contested elections took place, United Ireland published ‘Whose shall the Coffin be?’ (Fig. 5). The coffin bears the inscription ‘General Election 1886’. Drawing on a folk tale, the message was that the combatants were entering on a ‘death-


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Figure 5 Whose Shall the Coffin Be?

struggle’. In the wake of the duel, one contender or the other would be consigned to the grave. On the left, defending the viewer, is Gladstone, wielding a sword which again is marked ‘Democracy’. Rolling up his sleeves as though to chop down a tree, he wears no wing collar, for


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he is as ready for the fray as any ordinary worker. In Ireland, as in Britain, Gladstone had become ‘the People’s William’. On the far side of the coffin, in a loping pose, stands a three-headed monster marked ‘Coalition’. The three heads are readily identifiable as (in the centre) Lord Salisbury, the leader of the Conservatives, and (on either side) Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Hartington, the dissident Liberals who had spurned Home Rule. The image stands in a long iconographic tradition of many-headed monsters, which in the eighteenth century had usually stood for arbitrary power.36 Similarly, in a previous picture, published on 8 May, Gladstone had been depicted as a mounted hero of ancient Greece attacking ‘the Hydra-Headed Dragon of Prejudice, Bigotry and Treachery’. Now, however, the heads are personalised as the Unionist leaders, the three baleful opponents of the Liberal/Irish cause. The denunciations of Gladstone by Salisbury, Chamberlain and Hartington, as has recently been pointed out, were helping to swing nationalist opinion behind Gladstone.37 But the statesman had also gained endorsement in Ireland by his own efforts. Crucially, the monster’s sword is marked ‘The Classes’. The word reflects Gladstone’s rhetoric: in March of the same year, he had cast the struggle as one of the masses against the classes. 38 The Liberal leader was now setting the terms of the commentary presented by the newspaper. He had captured the ascendancy in Irish political culture. Two weeks later, on 17 July, the cartoon was entitled ‘Well Done!’ (Fig. 6). By this date, all the poll results except that for Orkney were in, and so the election was virtually over.39 This time the imagery is chivalric. Gladstone is a knight in armour, resting against a tree after combat. Once again, his sword is labelled ‘Democracy’, an indication of the strength of the association of the statesman with popular involvement in constitutional affairs. The dark maiden is Erin, wearing a green cloak, displaying a Tara brooch and holding her harp, a favourite representative figure for Ireland that Reigh used regularly.40 She proffers Gladstone a glass of water to refresh him after his struggle. Below is a monster labelled ‘Liberal Unionism’, writhing in its death throes with a spear thrust through its head. This depiction represents no more than wishful thinking. As many as 78 Liberal Unionists had been returned to the new parliament, while the Gladstonian Liberals had been reduced to a rump of 191. The old serpent of Liberal Unionism was far from slain. In the eyes of United Ireland, however, it had been dealt a mortal wound by Gladstone’s performance. The knight, Erin’s champion in the lists, had won a moral victory. She offers him a symbol of her personal affection, for the cup is marked ‘Love’. The word is perhaps appropriate to a scene governed by the conventions of courtly love, but


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Figure 6 Well Done!

it is a remarkably strong expression for the attitude of Ireland towards Gladstone. Here was a union of hearts indeed. The third group of cartoons comes from the period in the later 1880s when Lord Salisbury headed a Conservative government that usually


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enjoyed the support of the Liberal Unionists. Its Irish policy, administered by the premier’s nephew Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary, pursued both conciliation and coercion, mingling small favours with resolute enforcement of public order. During this period the iconographic canons that had become established during the short time in 1886 when Home Rule was coming to the fore remained in full force. On 16 April 1887, in ‘The Last of the Wolves’, Reigh depicted Gladstone and Pat together resisting the wolf of coercion. Four months later, on 6 August 1887, in ‘Thrown Over Board’, a rack-renting Jonah is shown as tossed out of the Government Coercion boat by Salisbury and Hartington and pleading to be thrown a lifebelt marked ‘Gladstone’s Land Bill’ from the Home Rule craft occupied by Gladstone and Parnell, again together. And in the following year, on 9 June 1888, a picture entitled ‘The Key to the Position’ illustrates John Bull, representing Great Britain, locked in fetters over the Irish difficulty. Various suggested solutions are on offer: Balfour carries the sledge-hammer of coercion, Hartington wants to keep the fetters on, and Chamberlain, the former metal manufacturer, holds a Birmingham file. Only Gladstone holds the key, and that is Home Rule. The former Prime Minister, now leader of the opposition, is perceived as totally aligned with the Irish people in their quest for a devolved parliament. In a print published on 29 December 1888, Gladstone’s birthday, he receives something of an apotheosis in ‘The Grand Old Man and his Puny Calumniators’ (Fig. 7). The anonymous design is not by Reigh and suffers from rather lifeless draughtsmanship, with too much blank space. Yet the purpose of glorifying Gladstone is self-evident. His statue holds an olive branch of peace in the right hand and a scroll of Home Rule in the left. On the plinth of the statue, the central figure of Britannia for England grasps the hands of Erin for Ireland and of another female figure for Scotland. The poetic inscription runs: ‘A type that blends / Three steadfast friends / In love and peace for ever.’ Gladstone, that is to say, has achieved permanent national reconciliation within the British Isles. Below to the right, a rabble led by Salisbury and Balfour cry ‘Down with Gladstone’ and are reduced to throwing stones. Irish folk apparently disport themselves to the left, but their significance is obscure, another sign of inferior craftsmanship. All the other figures are dwarfed by the imposing statue of the Grand Old Man. The use of that title of affectionate respect, so common in Britain, is a further indication that Gladstone had earned a high place in the regard of nationalists. He is the Grand Old Man in Ireland too. Six months later, on 22 June 1889, the picture supplement was of ‘The Parting of the Ways’ (Fig. 8). Britannia finds herself at a fork in the


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Figure 7 The Grand Old Man and His Puny Calumniators

road, wondering which way to turn. She is poised, as the caption blatantly states the matter, ‘between her good and evil geniuses’. On the left is a well-groomed Gladstone, looking younger than his years, proffering an olive branch with ribbons marked ‘Freedom’ and ‘Friendship’.


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202

Figure 8 The Parting of the Ways

On the right stands a portly Salisbury, appearing rather ridiculous in court dress, trying to jog Britannia’s elbow to persuade her of the merits of manacles labelled ‘Hatred’ and ‘Force’. One road is signposted ‘Home Rule’; the other, ‘Perpetual Coercion’. Britannia faces Gladstone


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and is inclined to take the olive branch, a visual prophecy that Britain will choose to support Home Rule at the next general election. Who is now the agent of Ireland’s liberation? It is not an Irishman, for there is no trace of Parnell or even Pat upon the scene. It is Gladstone alone, embodying all that is good, who will bring about a favourable solution to the question of Ireland’s future. The cult of personality attained fresh heights six weeks later. On 3 August 1889 the United Ireland cartoon was entitled ‘Gladstone’s Golden Wedding’ (Fig. 9). This illustration was remarkable because its theme was derived not from battle, folklore or any of the other conventional sources, but from Gladstone’s private life. On 25 July the Liberal leader had celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his wedding. The occasion was marked by the erection in Hawarden, Gladstone’s home village near Chester, of an elaborate monument in the centre of the High Street and by an outpouring of popular enthusiasm in the opposition press for the event as a model for married folk. Reigh, however, treats the event as ‘example and encouragement’ in public affairs. Erin on the left, decked with flowers for her nuptials, steps forward shyly. On the right John Bull, sporting a rose in his buttonhole for his wedding day, offers his hand. The reconciliation between Ireland and Britain, it is implied once more, is to be founded on affection and so to be as permanent as Gladstone’s marriage. The statesman himself is the central figure, bringing the two together. Perhaps there is an allusion to his celebrated piety, for he presides like a priest over the ceremony. In any case, the main thrust is spelt out: the picture commends ‘The Union of Hearts’. Gladstone’s own phrase has become Ireland’s watchword. Clearly Gladstone the man as well as the statesman had come to dominate the Irish popular imagination. Home Rule, of course, was not destined to come about. There was no Liberal landslide at the next general election, held in 1892, but rather a small majority of forty for the Liberals and nationalists combined. It was possible, with difficulty, to press a Home Rule Bill through the Commons in 1893, but the Lords felt secure in dismissing it contemptuously. The chief explanation of the weakening of the Liberal/nationalist cause, by universal consent, was the scandal surrounding the O’Shea divorce case. When Parnell was pronounced guilty of adultery in a court of law, Gladstone declared that he could not continue to act with the nationalists so long as Parnell remained their leader. A majority of the Irish Parliamentary Party threw Parnell out, but a minority clung to him, and he, with all his native obstinacy, insisted on remaining at their head. The breach was not healed by Parnell’s death in October




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204

Figure 9 Gladstone’s Golden Wedding

1891 but persisted, so at the election of the following year the Irish were ruinously divided. In a sense, it was a polarisation between the two chief celebrities of the Home Rule campaign over the previous decade. Parnell, the earlier hero, naturally retained the loyalty of a significant


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number of supporters. But Gladstone, who had so evidently eclipsed Parnell in the graphics of United Ireland, was the choice of a larger proportion. He was supported by tacticians who calculated that Home Rule could come only through the Liberal alliance, but also by those who, mindful of the teaching of the Catholic Church about personal morality, saw him as the embodiment of nobility in public life. That was possible because of Gladstone’s projection as the champion of the Irish cause since 1886. The Parnell split caused a revolution at United Ireland. Bodkin was initially puzzled about which side to take, but Gladstone’s statement, followed by Justin McCarthy’s election to the leadership of the parliamentary party in place of Parnell, convinced O’Brien that the newspaper should align with the anti-Parnellites. Accordingly, on 6 December 1890 Bodkin’s editorial declared against Parnell, and the cartoon, not by Reigh, took the same line. Before the subsequent issue, however, Parnell seized the offices of the newspaper at night, dismissed Bodkin and destroyed most of the copies of the next edition. On 13 December United Ireland duly endorsed Parnell, publishing a cartoon by Reigh entitled ‘Hail to the Chief!’ that attempted to reinstate him in popular regard.41 Gladstone did not appear in the illustrations published at the time of the breach. Later, however, as the newspaper persisted in its support for the Parnellites and came out in favour of outright independence, Gladstone is seen as trying to impose his will on Ireland. On 30 January 1892, for instance, Gladstone tells McCarthy, as leader of the anti-Parnellites, to take his medicine of a ‘Subordinate Parliament’ without opening his eyes. Reigh now depicts the Liberal leader as dictatorial and untrustworthy. The artist continued to serve the Parnellite cause in United Ireland down to its closure in 1898. In his eyes Gladstone was no longer a national hero but an alien politician playing fast and loose with Irish affairs. For a while, however, from 1886 to 1890, Gladstone was accorded a supreme place in Irish nationalist esteem. The party that he led, as has recently been demonstrated, shared an array of liberal values with advocates of the Irish cause.42 United Ireland presented that tie visually. Although the journal had a record of extreme hostility to British rule, it began to depict the statesman as the hope for Ireland’s future. He was shown alongside Parnell, or more frequently by himself, as the champion of the nation. Gladstone’s solution to the chronic problem of British misrule in Ireland seemed the right one: Home Rule. It was, after all, the remedy that the journal had long been advocating. When Gladstone proposed Home Rule in 1886, United Ireland quickly




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gave him its backing. The support of the newspaper ripened into adulation akin to that felt among British Liberals. The cartoons illustrate this development vividly, bearing eloquent witness to the nature of mass Irish opinion. Ordinary Irish folk saw Gladstone as their spokesman, his enemies as theirs and his leadership of the Liberals as full of promise for their island. Because William O’Brien and Matthias Bodkin fell under his spell, and because John Reigh skilfully executed their wishes, Gladstone was able to forge a new sense of bonding between Ireland and Britain. Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule created a new political culture in Ireland. The cartoons of United Ireland show that he achieved his central aim in the later 1880s: a union of hearts.

Notes 1. W. E. Gladstone, ‘Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order’ [1865], Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–79, 7 vols. (London, 1879), vol. VII, p. 63. 2. L. Perry Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. ed. (Washington, DC, 1997), pp. 68–72; Roy Douglas, Liam Harte and Jim O’Hara, Drawing Conclusions: A Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations, 1798– 1998 (Belfast, 1998), pp. 71, 88–9, 149. 3. Curtis, Apes and Angels, pp. 77–81; Douglas, Harte and O’Hara, Drawing Conclusions, pp. 3, 131, 137. 4. S. J. Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford, 1998), p. 319. 5. Ibid., p. 387. 6. M. M’D. Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge: Press, Bar and Parliament (London, 1914), p. 149. 7. Sally Warwick-Heller, William O’Brien and the Irish Land War (Blackrock, 1990), p. 50. 8. William O’Brien, Evening Memories (Dublin, 1920), p. 169. 9. H. T. Dickinson, Caricature and the Constitution, 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 13. 10. Warwick-Heller, O’Brien and the Irish Land War, pp. 53, 63. 11. Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin, 1996), p. 103. 12. United Ireland, 17 Sept. 1881, quoted in Warwick-Heller, O’Brien and the Irish Land War, p. 54. 13. William O’Brien, Recollections (London, 1905), pp. 493–6. 14. C. C. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880–90 (Oxford, 1957), p. 81 n. 15. E. F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 31. 16. Warwick-Heller, O’Brien and the Irish Land War, pp. 55, 71. 17. United Ireland, 20 June 1885, quoted in ibid., p. 73. 18. O’Brien, Recollections, p. 350. 19. O’Brien, Evening Memories, p. 115.


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20. Warwick-Heller, O’Brien and the Irish Land War, p. 51; Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge, p. 149. 21. O’Brien, Evening Memories, p. 123. 22. Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge, pp. 147–8, 156, 231–2, chapter xxviii. 23. Ibid., p. 205. 24. Ibid., p. 149. 25. Ibid., p. 168. 26. F. S. L. Lyons, John Dillon: A Biography (London, 1968), opposite p. 133. 27. L. W. McBride, ‘Nationalist Constructions of the 1798 Rebellion: The Political Illustrations of J. D. Reigh’, Eire-Ireland, 34 (1999), pp. 120–1, 125, 129. Reigh’s first name is given by Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. 69. 28. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, pp. 142–4. 29. A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974), p. 368. 30. O’Brien, Evening Memories, p. 101. 31. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 105. 32. Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. 75. 33. O’Brien, Evening Memories, p. 169. 34. Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge, p. 235. 35. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, p. 193. 36. Dickinson, Caricature and the Constitution, p. 21. 37. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, p. 147. 38. Michael Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain, 1885–1894 (Hassocks, UK, 1975), p. 90. 39. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 438. 40. Curtis, Apes and Angels, p. 75; McBride, ‘Nationalist Constructions’, p. 121. 41. Bodkin, Recollections of an Irish Judge, pp. 172–5; Douglas, Harte and O’Hara, Drawing Conclusions, pp. 120–1. 42. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, chapter 3.




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Gladstone and the Irish civil service Martin Maguire

The question as to why Gladstone was determined on offering a rather minor piece of administrative reform, home rule for Ireland, as a major new departure for the Union has generated a daunting volume of debate.1 The answers to this question have offered a spectrum of interpretation on Gladstone’s 1886 ‘conversion’ to home rule that ranges from a haphazard and opportunistic calculation of advantage to the intentional development of a moral purpose in government. The former interpretation has emphasised the factious nature of the Liberal Party, its vulnerability to faddism and Gladstone’s anxieties around the growing influence of Chamberlain. In this high politics school of interpretation, private ambition – the need to isolate rivals, dominate the party and climb the greasy pole of Westminster – is sufficient explanation, and public utterances and Irish realities can be safely ignored. A. B. Cooke and John Vincent may be taken as the paradigm of this school of interpretation.2 Vincent finessed this somewhat with his 1977 Raleigh Lecture, in which he suggested that Gladstone was indeed convinced on home rule, but only as the lesser evil, with further repression as the greater evil. Gladstone, stirred by an irrational passion for a country about which he knew little, jumped tracks and went from a procrastinating and reluctant home ruler to an enthusiast, although Vincent still explained this as a manoeuvre to outflank both Chamberlain and Hartington. Ireland was merely the pawn in the game of Liberal politics in 1886. The result was that Gladstone was sidetracked from his true genius, which was as a finance premier. The unintended benefit was that the Irish home rulers were bound into an alliance with the Liberals and therefore kept within the Union.3 Colin Matthew’s magisterial biography and edited diaries of Gladstone transformed the interpretation of Gladstone’s engagement with Ireland.


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First, rather than being ignorant about Ireland in 1885–6, Gladstone had been evolving his thinking on Ireland over his whole political career, and his adoption of home rule was no conversion.4 Second, Matthews reinstated home rule as a deliberate and thoughtful measure designed as a ‘big bill’ from the imperial centre conferring social, political and civil order on a ‘distinct but component part of the United Kingdom’ and so transforming the whole of UK politics at a stroke.5 The idea of home rule as a big bill is also central to the most recent and stimulating interpretation of Gladstone’s Irish policy, that of Eugenio F. Biagini.6 Biagini’s reading of Gladstone’s home rule policy is that, rather than being a party political ploy or an obsession, it was part of a radical project to show the public that the state was infused with moral energy. More than simply big bills, Gladstone wanted the United Kingdom to develop a political culture that reflected a moral imperative. He was initiating an emotional ‘politics of humanitarianism’.7 Home rule for Ireland was a way of reshaping popular expectations of the state and understandings of citizenship which would in turn act as a catalyst for popular radicalism after 1885. Gladstone, he argues, is to be understood as being concerned with ideas and idealism rather than engaging in mere political manoeuvring.8 All these historians of Gladstone’s engagement with Ireland refer in passing to his other claim to greatness, his terms of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Vincent goes so far as to suggest that Gladstone’s unfortunate obsession with Ireland has obscured his greatness in matters of finance.9 Matthews notes the role of ‘big budgets’ in Gladstone’s politicisation of the chancellorship and his elevation of the budget as the key debate of the parliamentary year.10 In an earlier article Matthew emphasised the role of Gladstone’s period as Chancellor in securing public belief in the fundamental equity of taxation and of government budget strategy.11 Biagini refers in passing to the shared roots of Irish and British Liberalism in a belief in cheap government and the necessity of meeting deficits with adequate revenue rather than borrowings.12 Gladstone established the link between taxation and political responsibility, except in Ireland. If we consider Gladstone the Chancellor alongside Gladstone the home ruler, then a new interpretation of his home rule policy emerges; had Gladstone the Chancellor offered home rule as a big budget proposal to discipline Ireland financially rather than as a morally inspired big bill to bring justice to Ireland, it might have matched the administrative reality of what he was proposing, it might have been better argued, and he might well have succeeded in getting it passed.


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One of the great political achievements of Gladstone was his establishment of the minimal state as a central value in British public life during his 1868–74 government.13 The civil service of this minimal state was informed by a deep sense of duty to minimise the expenditure of public moneys. This was achieved through strict Treasury control of state spending allied with full public accountability for money spent. Under Gladstone, the core function of the civil service of raising and spending taxes achieved a moral as well as a fiscal dimension.14 But this was not the case in Dublin Castle, where it appeared that the role of civil servants was to encourage the Irish demand for expenditure. That Dublin Castle provided an ineffective administration was not disputed by any opinion; in fact it had become axiomatic that the Irish administrative system was hopelessly chaotic. Any who came in contact with the Castle were stunned by the disarray.15 But it was the inexorable rise in the cost of the Irish administration that most worried Gladstone and offended his own convictions on the proper relationship between the state and the electorate. Presenting home rule as a necessary moral lesson to teach the Irish frugal self-government would have been more popular in the House of Commons than righting historical wrongs and more consistent with Gladstone’s essential conservatism on the role of the state. Gladstonian penny-pinching and tight-fistedness would have been more convincing than displays of righteousness. Such an argument would also have kept the home rule debate within the context of fiscal politics and the pursuit of British interests.16 Scattered throughout Gladstone’s great introductory speech of 8 April 1886 there is an argument that might well have succeeded in getting the legislation through the House of Commons, had it been presented as a coherent whole.17 Gladstone argued that, as the Irish electorate did not have to bear the cost of the expansion in the state’s responsibilities in Ireland, their political representatives could freely demand innovations in state activism. Indeed these politicians courted popularity by encouraging the view that the Irish had a right to pillage the British Treasury. The Castle administration, which ought to have been animated by a consciousness of the permanent necessity of retrenchment in government, either acquiesced or positively assisted in the attack on the British Treasury. The Irish administration, instead of acting as a restraint on state expenditure, had evolved into a mechanism for aiding and abetting Irish politicians in extracting more and more from the British taxpayer. Few in the Conservative or Liberal ranks would have disagreed with his view that the capacity of the poorer country of the United Kingdom to draw without restraint from the pocket of


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her wealthier partner was actually assisted rather than hindered by the Irish administrative system. Therefore, as Gladstone argued privately but failed to drive home in the debate, the efficient (that is, cheaper) government of Ireland was as much a British as an Irish problem.18 H. C. E. Childers, expressing the Treasury view, was prepared to support home rule for Ireland as a ‘welcome relief for the British taxpayer’.19 Hartington was prepared to admit the necessity for the reform of the Castle and the need for devolved administrative authority.20 The urgent need fundamentally to recast the Irish administration was admitted on all sides and so had no politically divisive implications. None could have opposed a proposal to compel the Irish themselves to pay the cost of the interventions that they now constantly demanded.21 A similar problem had already been addressed in the colonies where planters and settlers were reluctant to impose taxes to meet the costs of government. Reforms in administration had created locally elected assemblies to provide a sense of participation. Consent to local taxation depended on conferring local responsibility. Financial rectitude was established by ensuring that the beneficiaries of government expenditure also bore the costs through their own locally elected tax-imposing authorities.22 If we compare the 1886 and 1893 home rule bills it is even more apparent that Gladstone’s unchanging core objective was not to devolve legislative authority but to reduce the ability of an Irish executive to draw on the British Treasury. The legislative body went through radical changes. John Kendle lists several significant ways in which the later proposal differed from the earlier one. In both the 1886 and 1893 proposals the position of Lord Lieutenant, as representing the executive power of the crown, was retained, but in the 1893 proposal he was to be assisted and advised by an executive committee drawn from the privy council of Ireland, and his term of office was to be fixed at six years. The 1886 bill proposed a complex mix of a single chamber with two orders. The model that was being drawn upon was not Westminster but the Church of Ireland Synod created after disestablishment. The orders could meet and vote separately or together, as they wished. In the 1893 bill this had been replaced by two distinct chambers meeting separately. Irish representation at Westminster showed Gladstone to be even more undecided. In 1886 Ireland was to be excluded: the ‘out’ option. In 1893 Irish representation at Westminster was to be retained, but on an ‘in and out’ basis. This was abandoned in committee, and Ireland was ‘in’ by vote of the Commons.23 In contrast to the woolliness on legislative and representative structures, Gladstone showed a consistent determination to limit the ability




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of an expansionary Irish state to draw from the British Treasury.24 It is clear that despite the rhetoric of ‘Justice for Ireland’, Gladstone’s primary objective was financial rather than legislative autonomy for Ireland. In fact Ireland was to be made to pay for the services of the British civil service under home rule. The financial clauses of the 1886 bill imposed a prior annual charge on the Irish budget of £110,000 for the ‘imperial civil service’ in Ireland (that is, for the non-transferred departments such as customs or the ordnance survey), thus charging the Irish taxpayer for the privilege of imperial rule. The pursuit of more economical government under home rule was therefore expected to bear down especially hard on the Irish civil service. Gladstone had experienced Irish civil servants’ ability to combine with Irish politicians against the Treasury when they inflicted a defeat on his 1868–74 government. In 1866 in Dublin a Civil Service Committee memorialised the Treasury with a request for equality with London salaries, a request that was promptly rejected. The problem with the memorial was not the claim that it made for equality with London but the threat to mount a political campaign among the Irish MPs to put parliamentary pressure on the Treasury should it refuse to accede to their request. This, as the Treasury fumed, was expressly forbidden by official procedures and was ‘subversive of all discipline and of the proper subordination which ought to exist in the various grades of the civil service’.25 However, the Irish civil servants were not at all afraid of breaching discipline and, using David Plunket, Conservative MP for Dublin University, launched their campaign. Plunket was close to the civil servants and often reflected their views and concerns.26 In July 1870 he rose in the House of Commons to ask Gladstone whether he was aware of the statement prepared by a committee of the permanent civil servants in Ireland which showed that a great disparity existed between the salary scales of corresponding government offices in London and in Dublin and whether he was prepared to redress this inequality. Gladstone’s reply, while denying the validity of the comparison between London and Dublin and upholding the Treasury view that valid comparisons could be only with comparable local employers, conceded that were it to be shown that civil servants of the same class were on a poorer pay scale in Dublin than in London that would require a fuller examination.27 The civil servants then submitted an analysis of the work and salaries of the General Register Offices in Dublin and London, detailing the inferior scales in the former. Shrugging off the Treasury rebuttal of their analysis the staff continued to mount a political lobby of their case.28 Aggressive political pressure succeeded where


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submissive memorials failed, and the Irish civil servants eventually got their inquiry. Charged with investigating specific Dublin departments, the inquiry had also to look into the ‘causes of dissatisfaction which exist amongst the members of the civil service serving in Ireland’.29 With the formation of the commission Irish civil servants bombarded their departmental heads with memorials asking for improvements in pay, knowing that these would be just as quickly passed on to the Treasury without examination, with a suggestion that they be referred on to the commission. The Treasury had to remind the Castle that ‘nothing has occurred to relieve the Irish government or the chiefs of particular departments from the ordinary responsibility of minutely criticising every application for increased salary which is made to them and of submitting to the Treasury those applications only which they themselves believe to be just and necessary’.30 The commission immediately opened up the rich vein of ambiguity around the civil service in Ireland, as it was not at all clear what exactly the term ‘Irish’ civil service meant. The Geological Service in Ireland (GSI) was a very big department. In response to pressure from the GSI staff for inclusion in the inquiry, the Treasury replied that this department was part of the ‘imperial’ service and therefore could not be included in an ‘Irish’ inquiry. Attempting to clarify this newly created distinction between the Irish and the imperial service, the Treasury decided that the Irish service comprised those departments with their centre in Dublin and with a classification of salaries exclusively Irish; all other departments were imperial.31 The evidence of the civil servants to the commission shows a Pooteresque obsession with status and respectability, values which permeated the civil service and were in all probability shared by the commissioners. Civil servants, they complained, were so poorly paid they could not maintain an upright and independent position in society. It was even the case that as a result of their low salaries some civil servants were compelled to live side by side with artisans rather than among the respectable middle classes. Not surprisingly, the inquiry found that the causes of dissatisfaction among the Irish civil servants were the general inadequacy of their salary scales and the inferior rates of pay offered to offices in Dublin compared with analogous offices in London. However, the commissioners decided that to determine whether that disparity was justified would require a classification of all the offices in the entire United Kingdom civil service, a task beyond the ability of the inquiry.32 The government sat on the report while Treasury officials dissected it.33 In Parliament David Plunket once again took up the case of the




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Irish civil servants. His resolution in the House of Commons asked that now the commission had reported that the Irish civil service salaries were indeed inadequate, the Irish civil servants should get ‘equality as to remuneration with those performing duties in England corresponding in difficulty and responsibility’.34 Plunket, and presumably the civil servants who briefed him, were only too willing to admit that a classification of the entire civil service to meet the special case of the Irish civil service was impractical. He assured the House of Commons that the Irish civil servants would be perfectly content with the simple removal of inequalities between London and Dublin.35 The debate shows that support for the Irish civil servants’ case crossed Liberal and Conservative party boundaries among the Irish MPs. Plunket was himself a Conservative. He was supported by his fellow Conservatives Jonathan Pim, MP for Cork City, and Henry Bruen, MP for County Carlow. Liberal supporters were Dominic Corrigan, MP for Dublin City, and McCarthy Downing, MP for Cork County. The supporters of Plunket’s motion, in quasi-nationalist speeches, attacked what they saw as the degraded status implied by the inferior salaries of the Irish civil servants. The most striking thing about the government response in the debate is the absence of any contribution from either the Lord Lieutenant or the Chief Secretary Ireland. Instead, the government side was monopolised by the Chancellor, Robert Lowe, and by Gladstone, thus signalling that the government viewed this as an economic rather than Irish debate. The Treasury analysis of the report informed both Lowe’s and Gladstone’s responses.36 Lowe first dismissed the view that prices should determine salaries. Only the immutable law of supply and demand could regulate salaries. Second, he offered as a concession that the Treasury might be directed to examine, in accord with its usual procedures, the staffing and salary levels of the various Irish offices, while admitting that the salaries in the Registrar General’s Office (RGO) were self-evidently too low and required immediate redress. Gladstone strongly supported Lowe, although he would force his resignation as Chancellor within the month and absorb the office into his own. Gladstone, in a very defensive speech, said that the government advocated the national interest whereas the Irish MPs had been representing the cause of a class, and that Irish pressure would not deflect his government from the correct and economical practice toward a wholesale revision of Irish civil service salaries. The government suffered a humiliating defeat in the vote on Plunket’s motion. The defeat was due less to sympathy for the Irish civil servants


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among the Conservatives than to loss of control of the House of Commons by the Liberals.37 This was a tired government running out of energy and ideas. It had been weakened by its own badly managed resignation and resumption of office earlier in March. Its reputation for sound fiscal policy was struck a blow by irregularities in the Post Office Savings Bank and by the scandals that surrounded the award of a contract for the telegraph to South Africa.38 In the aftermath of the defeat the government made it clear that regardless of any House of Commons motion they intended to adhere to the orthodoxy of market forces and periodic Treasury scrutiny of all departments.39 Before we leave the 1873 debate, it ought to be noted that the Irish civil servants were, in comparison to other Irish salary levels, quite well paid. What rankled with the Irish civil servants was the gross inequality with London levels in a service that was supposedly becoming uniform. If merit was the criterion for entry and promotion in the civil service, then unequal salaries for the same post in London and in Dublin implied a deficit of merit in Dublin civil servants. As he prepared the 1886 home rule proposal, one of the immediate benefits Gladstone anticipated, therefore, was that it would free the British state of a large part of the cost of the Irish civil service. In apologising to his Chancellor, Lord Herschell, for the ‘very good pecuniary terms’ offered to civil servants by his home rule bill, Gladstone pointed out that the British exchequer ‘shall be well paid in being relieved from the constantly growing charge of the Irish civil service and in the reversion of a large part of that very claim upon our money’.40 When the bill was discussed at Cabinet, among the cardinal points agreed was that civil government would continue as it was until altered by arrangement, with some protection for the Dublin civil servants when those inevitable alterations did occur.41 Gladstone indicated that to ‘meet the case of the civil service’ he envisaged a provision to fix the compensation that might be given to people dismissed by the new Irish government, suggesting that he expected a significant number of such dismissals.42 Earl Spencer, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, suggested that the legislation ought to contain ‘a better refuge for civil servants who may be driven out by the new Government of Ireland’.43 James Bryce, the Liberal politician and former Professor of Law at Oxford, suggested a clause to maintain the civil service unchanged for three years, with provision thereafter to retire on pension.44 In introducing the bill Gladstone’s initial suggestion was that the civil service would be retained for two years only, to ensure stability. After the two years both parties, the civil service and the Irish government, would be ‘free to negotiate afresh’.45




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In the initial draft of the home rule bill, under the heading ‘civil powers’, Gladstone envisaged that the Irish Parliament should have complete autonomy to pass ‘any bill touching civil offices in Ireland and the mode of appointment thereto’. Under the heading ‘executive powers’ he provided that all the civil appointments already made would continue unchanged until altered by statute, except that the costs would now be charged upon the consolidated fund for Ireland.46 Thus it was generally expected, and accepted, that a home rule government would have complete control of its civil service and that this would lead to a significant reduction in numbers. In the 1886 bill sections 28, 29 and 30 dealt with the civil servants.47 Section 28 expressly stated that Irish civil servants would continue to hold the same offices, with the same or analogous duties, at the same salaries, allowances and pensions as before but that the cost would be charged to Irish customs and excise receipts or to the consolidated funds. Section 29 provided for voluntary retirement after two years of service under the home rule government – one year less than suggested by Bryce, perhaps to ensure finality on the status of the civil servants in the event of the return of a Conservative government at the next general election. The pensions of retiring or dismissed civil servants were to be calculated by the Treasury according to the never-completed fourth schedule. Section 30 provided that existing pensions would, as far as possible, be drawn out of Irish revenues. It is clear that the main concern in drafting the bill was to ensure that the Irish Parliament would bear the future cost of the Irish civil service, along with any pensions consequent on dismissals, thus ensuring a prudent and cautious approach to both dismissals and recruitment. Here, Gladstone may well have been responding in part to the fears of the Irish Unionists. In February their parliamentary leader, Major Saunderson, had outlined their objections to home rule. Acknowledging that whether home rule would be good or bad for Ireland was, in itself, a matter of opinion, he forcefully outlined his objections to the home rulers themselves and his fear that once in control of the administration they would make a total sweep of all appointments and re-introduce the worst evils of corrupt patronage appointments.48 The 1886 home rule bill did not reflect any analysis of the function of an Irish administration. It contained no provision for ministerial or departmental structures but simply proposed to distribute the government of Ireland between Dublin and imperial administrations. Clearly it was expected that the vast bulk of the civil service in Ireland would be transferred to the home rule administration. When asked for a list of


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the civil appointments which would be ‘put at the disposal of the Irish government’, John Morley, the Chief Secretary, indicated that the intention was that ‘the whole of the Irish civil service would be transferred, with the exception of those who may be in the service of the imperial government’, though he assured the House that ‘provision was made for those whose service may be dispensed with’.49 Four days later, when pressed to list the government departments that would be transferred to the Dublin government, Morley remained quite vague, indicating that the answer depended on the view that an Irish executive took of its requirements. In terms of personnel and grades, those transferred would include heads of departments, superior appointments, clerical staff, servants and messengers. Morley also referred briefly to a problem that was to become more intractable: what exactly was a civil servant? Morley offered three qualifications of a civil servant: an official whose whole salary is voted by Parliament, whose whole time is at the disposal of the public and whose appointment carries a pension or gratuity.50 As was to become apparent, that neat definition did not even approach the reality of the Irish civil service. Civil servants, it was axiomatic, would always support a government policy, even if they disagreed with it. The Dublin civil servants seemed to have been ill prepared for the 1886 home rule bill. Some, no doubt, could anticipate improved promotional prospects. There was some home rule sympathy at the top of the Castle bureaucracy: E. G. Jenkinson, the head of the Criminal Investigation Division, and Sir Robert Hamilton, the Under-Secretary, were considered pronounced home rulers during the caretaker ministry of 1885.51 On his appointment as Under-Secretary, Hamilton had been regarded as one of the best civil servants in Whitehall.52 Gladstone had turned to him, rather than the Parnellites, for advice when drafting the 1886 bill.53 However, for the lower ranks the emphasis which the Liberal government put upon economy, and the apparent certainty of wholesale dismissals by an Irish government wholly dependent on its own financial resources, can only have been threatening. In concrete terms what the bill offered the Irish civil service was nothing more than security for pensions already earned. The best that the civil servants could hope for was an improvement in the terms on which they might be dismissed. During the protracted 1886 home rule debate it became apparent that the Irish civil service as a whole had few political friends, and the treatment of the civil service failed to make an impact on the debate. There was general cross-party agreement that, whatever the political merits or otherwise of home rule, the Irish administration was in need of a thorough shake-up. The




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duty of the British state extended no further than making sure that this shake-up was no more painful for the civil servants concerned than was necessary. The bill itself and the debate in Parliament brought home to the Irish civil servants their dispensability and encouraged a consciousness of their separate status within the United Kingdom. Their previous organisation and agitation as a body had been fitful, focused on pay and conducted under the hostile eye of the Treasury. Home rule touched on fundamental issues of security and status, and yet the Irish civil service proved slow to react. Luckily for them the 1886 bill failed, but the continued possibility of home rule in the future necessitated, and made acceptable, the emergence of a more organised Irish civil service representation. Despite belonging to a tradition-laden service, civil servants had no rights as such. All civil servants were employed ‘at the pleasure of the crown’ and were therefore liable to be dismissed at any time without notice or redress. Civil servants were pensionable but had no absolute right to a pension. Pensions remained granted by grace and favour. The security enjoyed by civil servants was based on the good faith and practice of the government, which any cynic within the Irish civil service might justly have set at nought. The fate of Sir Robert Hamilton was a further lesson on the fundamentally insecure status of the Irish civil service, as well as a warning that it would be a foolish civil servant who became too closely identified with government policy. When Hamilton, a Scot in the Admiralty, took the post of Under-Secretary after the murder of Burke he was acclaimed for his courage and sense of duty. In the home rule debate nationalists often cited him as a supporter of and advisor to Gladstone on home rule. With the defeat of the home rule bill, The Times began a campaign to have him removed from the Irish Under-Secretaryship, though this was now a post considered part of the permanent civil service. Despite the opposition of Lord Lingen of the Treasury and of some few supporters from within the Irish civil service who were alarmed that a civil servant would be punished for too enthusiastically supporting government policy, Hamilton was kicked upstairs to become governor of Tasmania. This was about as far away from Ireland as he could be posted. (In fairness it ought to be noted that most Irish civil servants who feared being driven out by a National League government precisely because they would not be seen as supporters would have had little sympathy for Hamilton, who at least secured a better post and was assured a generous pension.)54 With the return of the Liberals to government in 1892 a second home rule proposal was expected. The Chief Secretary, John Morley, was under pressure from the Irish MPs T. M. Healy and William O’Brien, who had


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both been advocating a different strategy for the Irish administration since the failure of the 1886 home rule proposal. Instead of waiting for a successful home rule act to transform the Irish government, they had been separately urging executive use of the power of patronage to eradicate Unionist power in Dublin Castle through the recruitment and promotion of Catholic nationalists as civil servants.55 Morley immediately began to infuse the Castle with Catholic civil servants, but more as a way to dilute the resistance that he anticipated any home rule proposal would raise. He was made well aware of the profound hostility towards home rule among the Castle officials.56 Gladstone was much taken with the idea of ‘Drummondizing the administration of Ireland’ in preparation for another home rule attempt. Thomas Drummond had served as Irish Under-Secretary under the Earl of Musgrave in 1835 and had therefore effectively been the head of the Irish civil service. A Benthamite technocrat, he had cleaned the Castle of Orange Order influences and promoted some able Catholics. But he was principally concerned with bureaucratic efficiency, which meant centralising and consolidating power within the Irish administration.57 In Gladstone’s mouth ‘Drummondizing’ was an ambiguous term which could mean either Morley’s policy of promoting Catholics or a policy of promoting ruthlessly efficient technocrats.58 In framing the second home rule bill Gladstone was even more vehement on the necessity to reduce the cost of the Irish civil service. In July 1892, in correspondence with Lord Spencer, he referred to the need fundamentally to recast the administration in Dublin Castle.59 In Cabinet Gladstone stated as one of the principles of the home rule bill that it must achieve savings in the cost of the Irish civil service.60 Introducing the second reading of the bill he returned once again to the theme of the cost of the Irish civil service, describing it as ‘incredibly, almost immeasurably wasteful’ and asserting that ‘the civil government of Ireland costs twice as much per head as that of the greater country’.61 George Trevelyan, Scottish Secretary and son of the reforming civil servant of the 1850s Sir Charles Trevelyan, developed this theme. In answer to the opposition taunt that in creating a new parliament and a new executive the home rule bill rather than make any savings would double expenditure, Trevelyan minimised the probable cost of the new parliament. Pointing out that Ireland already had an executive, he detailed the scope for savings in the administration, where ‘very large economies’ could be made even after allowing for the cost of pensions for retired civil servants. Trevelyan insisted that ‘there is everywhere a field for economy, which will endure long after these temporary




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pensions have passed away’.62 Thus it was absolutely clear that home rule would and must mean a steep reduction in the size of the Irish civil service and therefore dismissals on a large scale. This insistence that the Irish civil service was over-staffed and due a severe reduction raised in the mind of every individual civil servant the question as to whether he would himself be retained. It was the apparent certainty of dismissals that was foremost in the minds of Irish civil servants as they began to organise a response to the second home rule bill. The 1893 bill, as first introduced into the House of Commons in February, provided that the permanent civil servants of the crown would continue to receive the same salaries, gratuities and pensions and be required to perform the same or analogous duties as before for a transitional period of three years. After the three years the officers might retire or might be required to retire by the Irish government, in accordance with the terms in the fifth schedule of the bill, which remained blank.63 Although the language of the bill might imply that those civil servants who continued in the service would retain their status and conditions, Morley made it absolutely clear that there could be no guarantee of continuance of current conditions or status beyond the transition period.64 After the transition period the Castle apparatus was on its own, and many could anticipate a clean sweep when full authority was passed to an Irish executive. The civil servants who were retained after the transition period would cease to be servants of Her Majesty and would be starting afresh with a new government, with which they would have to bargain anew.65 Although they were almost certain to face a dramatic reduction in numbers, the second division clerks of the Irish civil service had the security of being, since the Lyon Playfair reforms, the servants of the civil service commissioners of the United Kingdom and therefore entitled to re-deployment within Great Britain should they not be required by the Irish government.66 The agitation among, and on behalf of, the Irish civil service arose mainly from the relatively small number of higher civil servants, the heads of departments and senior officials, including the professional grades – about five hundred people in all.67 This represents a highly class-conscious organisation at the top levels of the Irish administrative apparatus. As a result of their campaign, the impact of the home rule bill on the Irish civil service received a much wider debate, and greater sympathy, than had been the case with the 1886 bill. With the first reading of the bill a delegate Committee of Permanent Civil Servants in Ireland was formed, numbering eighty in all, elected by and representing virtually every profession, department and office of the Irish


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administration.68 The delegate conference then elected an executive committee. Although the Treasury continued to refuse to countenance any trade union organisation within the civil service as a whole, the protection and pensions that would be offered to Irish civil servants in the proposed home rule legislation was allowed to become the key issue organising and mobilising those civil servants in a quasi-trade union. At the request of the civil service committee Morley delayed the publication of the schedule setting out the compensation terms for the Irish civil servants.69 On 1 April the civil service delegation, led by George Morris, President of the Local Government Board (LGB), and comprising some of the highest-ranking civil servants in Dublin Castle met with Morley.70 They carried a list of suggested amendments to the bill that were designed to protect the interests of the Irish civil service. It was generally assumed that an Irish government would purge the civil service, with every encouragement from the British government, and that the role of the legislation was to guarantee pension entitlements. The legislation was framed as if home rule was a standard abolition of a government department. Such abolitions had become more common within the British administration, and abolition terms offered security for pensions already earned and usually also offered additional years as compensation for loss of office. In addition to fighting for better terms for abolished offices, the committee wanted an option for civil servants to retire voluntarily with compensation. Furthermore, they wanted additional compensation for professionally qualified civil servants who had abandoned private practice to enter government service. The committee was also unhappy that the Treasury retained ultimate discretion over all decisions on pension awards. Thus the strategy adopted by the civil service committee was to accept the government view that home rule was, administratively speaking, a process of departmental abolition and to fight for the best terms possible. With the publication of the fifth schedule, it became clear that though the terms on offer to the civil service were an improvement on those of 1886, the improvements were minimal.71 The civil service committee had requested that officers forced to retire should get a pension equivalent to three-quarters of their salary if they had less than twenty-five years of service, along with a gratuity of one year’s salary. If the length of service was more than twenty-five years, the pension should be equal to their salary at the date of retirement. An officer who was not forced to retire but opted for retirement should be granted a pension of one-half to three-quarters of salary, depending on length of service. What the government offered was a pension varying from one-seventh to two-thirds of salary, with




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no gratuities, and an absolute limit of two-thirds of pay on any pension awarded. The committee also wanted a facility for calculating added years for professionally qualified civil servants who had left practices to take up government employment, but this was not granted. Nor was their request granted that those civil servants kept on by the Irish government retain the option to retire at any point in the future. The committee also wanted some guarantee from the United Kingdom government – with which, after all, they had some sort of contract of employment – for the salaries and pensions of civil servants retained under any home rule administration. At the same time the committee had a deep distrust of the Treasury and its discretionary powers in regard to pensions, all of which it retained under the legislation. What the civil servants wanted, in summary, were guarantees on status, salary and pensions, and security for any future salaries and pensions which would be dependent on the votes of an Irish legislature, which meant some form of continuing imperial guarantee. What the civil servants got was an increase in the transition period from three to five years. They also got a useful innovation in the shape of a joint committee of the Treasury and the Irish government with the power to determine claims of wrongful dismissal brought by civil servants against the Irish executive during the five years. Though the civil servants of 1893 did not yet see the potential of it, the monopoly on civil service matters enjoyed by the Treasury had been broken.72 The Committee of Permanent Civil Servants in Ireland then prepared a detailed and substantial ‘Response to the government proposals on home rule as regards the effect on civil servants’ and despatched the Chairman, T. W. Grimshaw of the RGO, and the Secretary, Arnold Graves of the Charitable Donations and Bequests Office, to London to begin political lobbying at Westminster.73 In comparing the points in the civil servants’ own response with the points made by the Conservatives during the debate and in the Conservative newspapers, it is apparent that these Irish civil servants were effective lobbyists. In addition to relentlessly pushing the demand for enhanced security, even to the extent of pensions at full pay for those compelled to retire, and arguing against the government proposals line by line, the civil service response made a general statement of the sense of grievance felt by the Irish civil service. The theme running through the statement is that it was the permanent status of the employment that induced most, if not all, civil servants into service. This was especially true of professionally qualified men who had exchanged the possibilities of advancement


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in a private career for the securities of a civil service position. With the government suggesting that large reductions would have to be made in the Irish establishment and that a large number of civil servants would be retired at the same time, most of these people could not hope to gain employment in a poor country like Ireland. Many, confident of secure lifetime employment, had taken out leases on property, insured their lives and undertaken other responsibilities which, on the terms offered, they could not afford to sustain. The civil service statement wanted better compensation for ordinary civil servants, more generous terms for the many professionals who had been recently recruited into the new posts created under the policy of constructive Unionism and better commutation terms for those who opted to capitalise their pensions and begin a new career. They also wanted the option for civil servants to transfer to analogous posts in England. The threat was implied that, faced with a choice between an inadequate but secure imperial pension if they chose to retire immediately and an unsecured future salary from an Irish government, the entire body of civil servants would choose retirement now, thus denuding the administration of all its experienced officers.74 The second stage debate opened with the fifth schedule, which detailed the terms on which civil servants would be compensated on retirement, still blank.75 By far the most effective and cynical use of the issue of the Irish civil servants was made by A. J. Balfour, who had been contemptuous of their abilities when he was Conservative Chief Secretary Ireland. During the second reading he travelled to Dublin to speak at a meeting of the Irish Unionist Alliance at the Leinster Hall. The main and best point he made was that, strictly speaking, there was no such thing as an ‘Irish’ or ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ civil servant; all were imperial civil servants in a single civil service not divided by nationalities. This was true for the mass of the second division clerks, but for the rest of the Irish civil service it was not. The Irish civil service, it had been long maintained by both Liberal and Conservative commentators, was anomalous, and the autonomous boards which were the mainstay of the Irish administration were largely an Irish device. Nonetheless, the point was well made and received with cheers. In his condemnation of the plan to hand the Irish civil service over to ‘their deadliest and most determined enemies’, many of the points he made were taken from the Irish civil servants’ statement: the betrayal of the implied exchange of low pay for security and a pension; the destruction of chances of promotion; the burden of commitments entered into in the expectation of a life-long career which would be unsustainable on




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the terms of compensation offered.76 The Times took up these points and, repeating the theme that the civil servants were officials of the imperial service, linked the ‘shameful betrayal of the landlords’ (a reference to the land purchase acts) with the ‘abandonment of the civil servants of the Crown’.77 The presence of at least one senior civil servant at the Leinster Hall meeting was raised in the House of Commons, but the cheers that Balfour’s eulogy of the Irish civil service raised indicate that a great many more were present.78 The committee stage on the civil service clause 28 and the related schedule, which the government might have hoped would be relatively uncontroversial and therefore brief, took a full three days of debate from 17 to 19 July. As the debate progressed it grew more and more factious. Morley, in introducing the clause, admitted that the terms were not acceptable to the civil servants affected. He said that, while he felt a responsibility to be fair, equitable and generous to the civil service, he was bound not to impose an unreasonable or excessive financial responsibility on the Irish government. Morley offered as guiding principles for the clause that the civil servants were to be protected from capricious dismissal or reductions in salary, while the Irish government had to be protected from sudden en masse retirement and from a sullen and inefficient service. To meet these principles the bill gave de facto control to the Treasury for five years of the number of civil servants who could resign or be required to resign. The scales for calculating compensation payments for those civil servants who were dismissed or who chose to resign within the five-year period were generous in the extent to which they exceeded the standard abolition terms on which they were based: a civil servant with twenty-five years of service could opt to retire on a pension of two-thirds of the salary he would have reached at the end of the five-year transition period even if he chose to retire immediately.79 The Unionist opposition attacked the clause from two directions. First, the Irish Unionists put the case for expanding the class of civil servants included in the clause. A strong case was put for the 12,000 national school teachers, or at least the Protestant teachers. Second, the Conservatives, taking up a theme of the Irish civil service committee, returned again and again to the implicit contract between government and civil service and the breach of faith that home rule entailed. Balfour began by refusing to accept that home rule was simply a departmental reconstruction. It was, he insisted, a great official revolution in which there would be a vengeful clearing out of the Castle under the guise of economy, and therefore the terms on offer were wholly inadequate as compensation. His amendment proposed that all civil


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servants who were dismissed or who resigned would have a right to relocate to a corresponding post in England or Scotland. Lord Randolph Churchill and T. W Russell supported the theme of a breach of the rights of civil servants, their ‘freehold’ in office. Gladstone, Morley and Fowler, of course, vehemently denied the very concept of civil servants having any such rights; nonetheless, government amendments tended to extend the security offered to the Irish civil servants, thus granting the effect while denying the fact of rights. This infuriated both Liberals and Irish Nationalists. Henry Labouchere worked himself into a fury at the thought of a legion of Irish former civil servants living lives of pensioned idleness because they happened to dislike government policy. The Nationalist MPs Luke Hayden and John Clancy exposed the contradictions in the compensation clause. The very foundation of the home rule case was that Ireland was inefficiently administered under the British regime. Since Gladstone’s 1886 bill it had been asserted without contradiction that Ireland was burdened by an expensive and bloated apparatus and that home rule addressed that problem by substituting native rule for Castle misgovernment. Logically, therefore, it was Britain that ought to pay any compensation offered to its imposed, inefficient and superfluous civil servants. The whole tendency of the government was to erode the already small Irish budgetary surplus by saddling the Irish executive with a burden of compensation created by British misgovernment. The anxiety of the government to assuage the fears of the Irish civil service did lead to one extraordinary innovation. To meet the anomalous case of model schoolteachers and petty session clerks, Morley introduced an amendment to include any officer who ‘though not in the permanent Civil Service, is in the public service of the Crown’ within the terms of compensation.80 This new category ‘the public service of the Crown’ was extremely vague and, once introduced, had the potential to expand endlessly. For instance, it was a category that could and would be successfully applied to the servants of the Congested Districts Board (CDB) and the education boards.81 It was apparent that the tendency of the debate was for the opposition to agree with the government on any amendment that enhanced civil service security or enlarged the categories entitled to compensation, much to the fury of the Irish Nationalists, who could see the meagre Irish surplus disappearing in pensions. By any measure the Irish civil service could be pleased with its progress during the home rule debate of 1893. An organisation had been formed which had lobbied a reluctant Chief Secretary and succeeded




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in making the status and security of the Irish civil service an issue of debate. Intense political lobbying by civil servants, which formerly had been considered gross insubordination at best and subversion at worst, had been recognised and accepted in the Irish case.82 The separate interests of the Irish civil servants, it had been indirectly admitted, were not guarded adequately either by the Treasury or by the government. The government had been made to offer some significant improvements in the terms of the bill, but those improvements had been mainly in extending the civil service grades covered by the terms. Civil servants might not, in strict terms, have rights, but Irish civil servants had secured protection for something that looked enough like rights to make the term not worth quarrelling over. However, a significant setback had to be recorded in their failure to make the government offer any concession on the transition period of five years. Had the 1893 home rule bill succeeded, the Irish civil service would have been faced with the choice between opting for such terms for retirement as were offered within five years or forgoing them altogether. A more permanent guarantee remained an unrealised objective. There is no doubt that the home rule debate weakened civil service loyalty to the state by introducing an element of conditionality into a relationship that had hitherto seemed as permanent as the state itself. However, with the defeat of the 1893 bill, home rule seemed to pass into history. Parnell was already dead, and his political party was tearing itself apart in the bitter divisions brought on by Parnell’s tragic final struggle. Gladstone, the sponsor of two attempts to pass a home rule measure for Ireland, retired in early 1894, and his Liberal Party moderated its commitment to Irish home rule. After the failure of the second home rule bill Morley was still convinced that the only effective reform of Irish government would be home rule and did not attempt any significant changes in the way the Irish administration functioned. He reverted to the strategy of O’Brien and Healy and concentrated on the ‘reduction of the old Protestant Ascendancy’ through the recruitment and advancement of Catholics.83 Despite the supposed operation of controlled entry to the civil service by the civil service commissioners, Morley retained the control of patronage over a great number of Irish posts.84 The 1895 general election returned the Conservatives to power. Under the Conservative policy of ‘Killing Home Rule by Kindness’ the British state in Ireland took on the task of becoming a development agency. New departments were created, such as the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) and the CDB, and a


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greatly enhanced role was conferred on the Irish Land Commission (ILC) and the LGB. In addition to an increase in the number of bureaucratic functionaries, these new departments and roles required a growing number of professional staff such as lawyers, engineers, architects, valuers, agricultural scientists and instructional experts to oversee land reform or social and agricultural development. New duties were added to an existing post where possible; otherwise a new position was created. By 1912 there were more than forty departments in an Irish administration that was run in parallel by Whitehall and by Dublin. The eleven United Kingdom departments run by Whitehall co-existed with the twenty-nine wholly Irish departments. The great development departments, the National Education Board (NEB), Intermediate Education Board (IEB), LGB, CDB and DATI, were run by civil servants but managed by unpaid boards and were therefore independent of the political head of the Irish administration, the Chief Secretary Ireland. In the fifty years between 1861 and 1911, when the Irish population declined by 32 per cent, the number of Irish civil servants grew by at least 350 per cent.85 It was suggested by Lawrence McBride that this period of expansion was also one in which an administration formerly dominated by Protestants came to be dominated by Catholics and that this ‘greening of Dublin Castle’ amounted to a comprehensive reform of the Irish civil service.86 McBride argued that the state apparatus was therefore in effect nationalist before the emergence of the national state and that this ensured the smooth transfer to independence. Recent studies have found, however, that Protestant domination in senior positions persisted right up to 1922.87 The lower ranks (almost all Catholic) of the Irish civil service certainly felt that a glass ceiling was being operated against them.88 Many of the new posts were classified as professional and therefore could be filled not by competitive examination but by nomination. The persistent complaint of those civil servants who gave evidence to the Dublin sitting of the MacDonnell commission of inquiry into the civil service was that former promotional posts were being professionalised and turned into patronage posts, the LGB under Henry Robinson being a particularly notorious example.89 The Treasury found the task of curbing the expansion of administration and expenditure, its primary task in Britain, impossible in Ireland, where the function of the state seemed to be to spend on a vast scale. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Commons was just as unsuccessful in curbing Irish expenditure. In 1902 the PAC was clearly infuriated by unauthorised and excessive expenditure in the Irish




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departments. When it was pointed out that these departments were all autonomous, that there was no single official who could answer for them and that the PAC would have to have all the separate accounting officers come to London if it wished to pursue the question, it decided to retreat. The Irish accounts became a torture that the PAC had to undergo each year and from which, it appeared, there was no relief.90 As the permanent head of the LGB and notorious dispenser of patronage, Henry Robinson, noted (with some hint of satisfaction) the Treasury mandarins ‘grew to hate the name of Ireland’.91 In the aftermath of the Gladstonian home rule proposals the character of the Irish civil service changed, with a much more professional and interventionist ethos becoming apparent. The dominance of the legal offices was weakened. The state began to seem less an apparatus of domination over Irish society and more one of service. However, the home rule debate had irrevocably broken the close identity between the Irish civil service and the state. Despite the insistence that there was a single United Kingdom civil service, no civil servant could be in doubt that Ireland was different and that the apparatus in Ireland was considered not only separate but also dispensable. Unionists such as Lord Dunraven and nationalists such as Redmond agreed that the Irish civil service was bloated, inefficient and a barrier to the better government of Ireland, whatever form that might take. Irish civil servants had nonetheless developed considerable organisational ability. The Irish civil service had very quickly learned to think of itself as a corporate body united across all ranks by the threat of dismissal implied in the rhetoric of home rule. On the eve of the third home rule crisis the civil service, though assailed on all sides, had the organisational foundations to withstand the assault. Gladstone’s influence reached beyond the grave to shape the 1912 home rule bill.92 The crisis of the British state in Ireland that unfolded between 1912 and 1922 is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it can be noted in conclusion that the Irish civil servants used the crisis and the several variations on home rule that it threw up, from the 1916 Convention to the 1920 Government of Ireland Bill, to extend their organisational and political demand for security for their status. They succeeded in having written into the constitution of the Irish Free State, in Article 10, clauses which converted their previous status as serving at the ‘pleasure of the Crown’ into a contractual relationship with constitutional status. This conferred on all civil servants legal and therefore defensible status. In a series of legal and constitutional challenges to the Irish Free State government, on the basis of the rights secured in


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Article 10, the Irish civil servants succeeded in achieving a status far more secure than any they enjoyed under the Castle regime and far in advance of that of their fellow-civil servants under the British governments of the inter-war period.93 This was a result which no doubt would have appalled Gladstone, but it was one which reflected the ability of the Irish civil service to use political influence and legal challenges to thwart any measure that proposed to make them pay the price for Gladstonian tight-fistedness.

Notes I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Humanities at Dundalk Institute of Technology for their support. I also want to thank my fellow-associates and the director, Professor Eunan O’Halpin, at the TCD Contemporary History Seminar and Professor Margaret Kelleher, Director of An Foras Feasa research centre at NUI Maynooth, where earlier versions of this chapter were developed. I also want to acknowledge the fellowship granted by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) for research into the topic of the civil service and the state in revolutionary Ireland. 1. Alan O’Day, ‘Home Rule and the Historians’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), The Making of Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996), pp. 141–62, 147. 2. A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974). 3. John Vincent, ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, the Raleigh Lecture on History 1977, Proceedings of the British Academy, 63, pp. 193–238. 4. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 466–8. 5. Ibid., p. 501. 6. Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007). 7. Ibid., pp. 34–44. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Vincent, ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, p. 193 n. 2. 10. Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 112–20. 11. H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Disraeli, Gladstone and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), pp. 615–43. 12. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, pp. 109–10. 13. Jonathan Parry, ‘Gladstone, Liberalism and the Government of 1868–1894’ in David Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 94–112. 14. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 640; John Maloney, ‘Gladstone as Chancellor’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 20 (Autumn 1998), pp. 12–16. 15. Dudley W. R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1972), vol. I, 1880–1882, pp. 89–90 (17 Dec. 1880) and p. 290 (20 June 1882) are good examples of the shock that Dublin Castle could induce. 16. See O’Day, ‘Home Rule’, pp. 141–62.




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Martin Maguire

17. Parliamentary Debates (PD), 3rd series, vol. CCCIV, cols. 1050–1, 1072–8, 1080–4 (8 Apr. 1886). 18. Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville 1876–1886, vol. II, 1883–1886 (Oxford, 1962), p. 10. 19. Ibid., p. 396, Granville to Gladstone, 11 Sept. 1885. 20. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 111. 21. Alan O’Day, Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode (Dublin, 1986), pp. 178– 200; Theodore K. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation (Oxford, 1998), pp. 673–4; Alvin Jackson, Home Rule and Irish History (London, 2003), pp. 63–4; D. George Boyce, Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Search for Stability (Dublin, 2005), p. 189. 22. Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799– 1914 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 124–35. 23. John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution 1870–1921 (Dublin, 1989), p. 75. 24. Jackson, Home Rule, pp. 82–3. 25. National Archives (NA), London, T14/38, to the Register General Ireland, 7 June 1866. 26. See the opening remarks in National Library of Ireland (NLI), Ir501b7, Charles Henry Brien, ‘An Address on Some of the Influences of Scientific Enquiry on Modern Thought Delivered before the Civil Service Literary Society 24 Nov. 1873’. 27. PD, 3rd series, vol. CCII, col. 1620 (7 July 1870). 28. Report of the Commissioners Appointed ... to Enquire into the Condition of the Civil Service in Ireland ... , Parliamentary Papers 1873, vol. XXII, col. 789, appendix VI. 29. Ibid., p. 1; PD, vol. CCXVI, cols. 1805–31 (4 July 1873). 30. NA, T14/43/473, Treasury to the Under-Secretary Ireland, 3 Jan. 1873. 31. NA, T14/44/508, Treasury to Pim esq. MP, 1 Jan. 1874; T14/45/222, 9 May 1874. 32. Report of the Commissioners Appointed ... to Enquire into the Condition of the Civil Service in Ireland ... , p. 3. 33. PD, 3rd series, vol. CCXIV, col. 154 (7 Feb. 1873); vol. CCXV, cols. 345–6 (31 Mar. 1873). 34. Ibid., vol. CCVI, cols. 1805–31 (4 July 1873). 35. Ibid., cols. 1809–10. 36. NA, T14/44/152, Lingen to the Chief Secretary Ireland, remarks upon the civil service commission fourth report, 3 May 1873. 37. PD, vol. CCXVI, cols. 1805–31 (4 July 1873) for the full debate. 38. Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 220–1. 39. PD, vol. CCXVII, cols. 149–50 (10 July 1873). 40. H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, July 1883–Dec. 1886 (Oxford, 1990), p. 524, Gladstone to Lord Herschell, 4 Apr. 1886. 41. Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, p. 395. 42. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, p. 525, Gladstone to Lord Herschell, 5 Apr. 1886. 43. Peter Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer 1835–1910 (Northampton, 1986), vol. II, p. 112, Lord Spencer to Lord Herschell, 5 Apr. 1886.


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44. Bryce Papers, NLI, MS. 11009, ‘Observations on legal points connected with the home rule bill’. 45. PD, vol. CCIV, cols. 1072–3 (8 Apr. 1886). 46. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, pp. 671–2, 31 Mar. 1886. 47. A Bill to Amend the Provision for the Future Government of Ireland [49 Vict.] (1886). 48. PD, 3rd series, vol. CCII, col. 672 (18 Feb. 1886). 49. Ibid., vol. CCCV, cols. 1826–7 (24 May 1886). 50. Ibid., vol. CCVI, col. 310 (28 May 1886). 51. J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1964), pp. 435–6. 52. Ibid., p. 350. 53. O’Day, Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode, p. 179. 54. See The Times, several editorials and letters July–Nov. 1886. 55. PD, 4th series, vol. XI, cols. 758–9 (20 Apr. 1893); Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), p. 419. 56. John Morley Papers, University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. d. 3449, notebook diary, fo. 33, July 1891; on civil service hostility to home rule see MS. Eng. d. 3450, fo. 107, 28 July 1892. 57. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998 (Oxford, 1999), p. 45. 58. John Morley Papers, MS. Eng. d. 3450, notebook diary, fos. 65–7, 12 July 1892. 59. H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XII, 1887–91 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 40–1, Gladstone to Lord Spencer, 13 July 1892; Gordon, The Red Earl, vol. II, pp. 209–10. 60. H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, vol. XIII (Oxford, 1994), p. 184, Cabinet meeting, 20 Jan. 1893. 61. PD, vol. X, cols. 1604–6 (6 Apr. 1893). 62. Ibid., cols. 1913–16 (10 Apr. 1893). 63. A Bill to Amend the Provision for the Future Government of Ireland [56 Vict.] (1893), sections 26–8. 64. PD, vol. XI, col. 903 (21 Apr. 1893). 65. Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, 214/90–94, memorandum of the Irish Land Commission, 30 May 1893. 66. PD, vol. XII, cols. 4–6 (19 July 1893). 67. Bryce Papers, NLI, MS. 11009 (4), ‘Financial scheme of the home rule bill, 13 Apr. 1893’. 68. NLI, Ir 3511 col. 11, ‘committee of permanent civil servants in Ireland’. 69. PD, 4th series, vol. X, col. 1317 (28 Mar. 1893); col. 1505 (30 Mar. 1893). 70. Ibid.; The Times, 3 Apr. 1893, p. 8. 71. Return ... of Proposed Fifth Schedule and Sixth Schedule, Part II. Government of Ireland Bill Dated 7 Apr. 1893, Parliamentary Papers 1893–95, LXXI. 72. Ibid.; NLI, Ir 3511, ‘committee of permanent civil servants in Ireland’. 73. NLI, Ir 3511, ‘committee of permanent civil servants in Ireland’. 74. Ibid., p. 12; The Times, 3 Apr. 1893, ‘letter from an Irish civil servant’, p. 8; Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, 214/90–94, memorandum of the Irish Land Commission, 30 May 1893. 75. PD, 4th series vol. X, col. 1597 (6 Apr. 1893). 76. The Times, 10 Apr. 1893.




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77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

The Times, 10 Apr. 1893. PD, 4th series, vol. X, cols. 448–9 (17 Apr. 1893). Ibid., vol. XI, cols. 1779–89 (17 July 1893). Ibid., vol. XII, col. 7 (19 July 1893). NA, TS 18/235 Treasury solicitor papers: civil service provisions under the Government of Ireland Act 1912, ‘letter 6/2/1912 Greer to Chief Secretary’. National Archives Ireland (NAI), Dublin, CSORP 1893/8082 (20 June) ‘application of officers committee’; CSORP 1893/8071 (22 June) ‘proposals of officers and men reference home rule’; CSORP 1893/9188 (18 July) ‘pensions scale prepared by officers committee’. None of these particular files survives, but they indicate the intensity of the lobbying by the civil servants’ committee. John Viscount Morley, Recollections, 2 vols. (London, 1918), vol. I, pp. 338–40. John Morley Papers, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. col. 7080, appointments book, fos. 76ff., 1892–5. Accounts and Papers (British Parliamentary Papers 1890–91, XCV) Population (Ireland) Census of Ireland 1891, part II, General Report, with illustrated maps and diagrams, tables and appendix, p. 22; Accounts and Papers (British Parliamentary Papers 1912–13, CXIV) Population (Ireland) Census of Ireland, 1911, General Report, with tables and appendix, Tables 19 and 20; W. E. Vaughan and A. J. Fitzpatrick (eds.), Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821–1971 (Dublin, 1978), p. 3. Lawrence McBride, The Greening of Dublin Castle: The Transformation of Bureaucratic and Judicial Personnel in Ireland, 1892–1922 (Washington, DC, 1991). Gerald McElroy, ‘Employment of Catholics in the Public Service in Ireland, 1859–1921: A Broad View’ in Alan O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom (New York, 1995), pp. 305–56; Fergus Campbell, ‘Who Ruled Ireland? The Irish Administration, 1879–1914’, The Historical Journal, 50, 3 (2007), pp. 623–44. Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 53–98. Royal Commission on the Civil Service: Second Appendix to the Fourth Report of the Commissioners, Minutes of Evidence 9 Jan. 1913–20 June 1913 with appendices, Parliamentary Papers 1914, XVI [Cd. 7340] 363 (MacDonnell Commission); see the evidence of John Duffy, A. E. Ashley, Patrick MacGuinness, Sam Sloan, J. M. Flood and R. E. Kent. Public Accounts Committee Reports and Minutes of Evidence, Parliamentary Papers 1902, V, 4014–37; 1903, V, 2–14; 1904, V, 2197–209; 1908, VI, 2485– 588; 1909, VI, 1266–98. Sir Henry Robinson, Memories Wise and Otherwise (London, 1923), p. 94. Alan O’Day, ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievement and Reputation’ in Bebbington and Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays, pp. 163–93, at p. 167. Martin Maguire, The Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland 1912–38: ‘Shaking the Blood-Stained Hand of Mr Collins’ (Manchester, 2008), pp. 182–95.


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Accommodation, conciliation and cooperation: a Gladstonian legacy N. C. Fleming and Alan O’Day

The period from the fall of Parnell through to the Edwardian era was once described as a ‘long gestation’. William Butler Yeats’ pithy phrase referred to the vacuum left by the fall and death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a romantic view certainly, and one that has not stood the test of historical scrutiny.1 William Ewart Gladstone’s legacy during this period, it is suggested here, is also worth re-examining. His legislative attempts at establishing Home Rule, of course, ended in failure, in the House of Commons in 1886, and in the House of Lords in 1893. But the motives behind Gladstone’s strenuous efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ and thereby reconcile Irish Nationalists to the Union with Great Britain and to unite the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland in common endeavour did not die with his Home Rule bills. And although subsequent efforts ultimately met the same fate, they did so for different reasons. Historians have considered at length Gladstone’s efforts to pacify Ireland, and his attempt to reconcile its Catholic majority to the Union, as part of a tradition in British high politics, initiated by Sir Robert Peel and carried on after Gladstone in the guise of ‘constructive unionism’. Most scholars have treated Gladstone’s belief that Protestants and Catholics could unite to make Home Rule work with circumspection and have not linked the emergence in Ireland of ‘cooperation politics’ (as distinct from ‘co-operative politics’) at the turn of the twentieth century to his legacy. This is not altogether surprising. Gladstone’s retirement from public life early in 1894 and death in 1898 meant he had no direct involvement in the subsequent phase of the Irish question. Moreover, the impetus for the later chapter had another origin. Whereas Gladstone’s vision was largely a hopeful prophecy, predicated on the enactment of Home Rule, Irish Unionist promoters of cooperation politics believed that success


10

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depended on a Dublin parliament not being an immediate prospect, although the apparent difference may not be as dramatic as it appears. Both sought the means to pacify the people and thus tame the voracious appetite of extreme nationalism. Whereas Peel, Gladstone and British constructive unionists looked upon Westminster-led initiatives as the path to conciliating Nationalists to the Union, turn-of-the-century practitioners of cooperation turned both to London and to local efforts in Ireland to promote cooperation between Nationalists and Unionists. These differences aside, two important similarities remain. First, Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule in the mid-1880s signalled his intention to cooperate actively with the majority party that represented ‘Ireland’. It was a stance that can be dated to the so-called Kilmainham Treaty of May 1882, which, to cite Alvin Jackson, provided ‘a precedent for future deals between advanced nationalism and the British government’ as well as maturating into Home Rule in 1886.2 This accorded with Gladstone’s and the Liberal view of constitutionalism and democracy. As Colin Matthew notes, an effective Home Rule party was bound to put the Liberals on the spot. Home Rule was the equivalent of the Reform League for franchise reform in the 1860s: the demands might be disliked but they were not instantly incompatible with the assumptions of contemporary policy makers, unless, that is, ‘Home Rule’ came to be seen as an aspect of Fenianism rather than as the means to its defeat. Judgement of the balance was to be a central question for the 1880s.3 The subsequent period of constructive unionism, as practised by the Balfour brothers and George Wyndham, returned to the old model of Westminster-led conciliation. It was, nevertheless, aided by the emergence in Ireland of cooperation politics, which enabled Westminster leaders to respond to specifically Irish initiatives. Gladstone’s engagement with Nationalist Ireland, therefore, prefigured similar efforts by moderate Irish Unionists such as Sir Horace Plunkett and the Earl of Dunraven. Rather than vindicate the rationale of Home Rule, these moderates hoped to reverse the unremitting decline in their influence on domestic Irish affairs within the existing constitutional apparatus. Nevertheless, by the early 1900s some had reached the conclusion, like Gladstone fifteen years before, that the dynamic of cooperation could best be sustained through a limited scheme of home government. In doing so, these moderate Unionists moved too far and too fast for the taste of their own constituency.


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Second, the failure of cooperation politics replicated Gladstone’s inability to pass Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, and it happened for a similar reason. Both were elite projects seeking to marshal the new mass democracy, but ultimately foundered because crucial sections of its base remained unconvinced – Unionists in the case of Gladstone, grassroots Unionists and Nationalists in the case of later cooperation politicians.4 Moreover, the crises galvanised opponents to reorganise and retrench – reactions that undermined proponents of cooperation and restored the Westminster-focused politics of political one-upmanship refereed by the governing party. The present purpose is to explore the direction of Gladstone’s position on Ireland from a neglected perspective and to consider its impact on key figures who sought to build politics of cooperation at the turn of the twentieth century. A compass – resistance, accommodation, conciliation and cooperation – is the explanatory framework. These designations, in terms of policy options, have specific meanings. The first, resistance, does not imply uncompromising refusal to treat Irish wants but relies heavily on the imposition and maintenance of security. This sometimes is called coercion, or the use of extraordinary legal instruments. Most governments throughout the Union relied upon some use of exceptional security powers. The second, accommodation, is a policy of recognising distinctions and justifiable needs for Ireland, creating a sub-species of pluralism. The third, conciliation, has as its prime objective to divide Irish opinion and enlist a larger segment in support of the Union. And the fourth, cooperation, aims to bring Irishmen together for common objectives and, where necessary, to form a front against British governments, though its adherents often believed that Anglo-Irish enmity would dissipate if Irish people reached accord among themselves. This is a long-standing expectation that retains its currency in contemporary attempts to bring peace to Northern Ireland. While these categories were not mutually exclusive, and while opinion-makers, including Gladstone, elided two or more together at times, it is suggested that they represented distinct approaches. Gladstone, it is argued, moved to a cooperation interpretation of Ireland’s wants, confusing many of his own supporters and a considerable section of public opinion lodged in accommodationist or conciliationist outlooks. In this light, Gladstone’s Irish perambulation has fresh implications, particularly for contesting a literature which finds his adoption of Home Rule inexplicable, abrupt or conceived for other than Irish purposes. Furthermore, it is maintained that his Irish perspective was only partially derived from Peelite ideology; Gladstone adapted the inherited


Accommodation, conciliation and cooperation


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model into a mutative and structurally distinctive approach. It was this mutative formula that was crucial to the legacy to the politics of cooperation. The schema proposed owes its foundation to Matthew, who maintains, ‘What is curious and important about Gladstone’s attitude to Parnell at this time was the Prime Minster’s transformation of the rather isolated leader with his little band of twelve or so MPs – Gladstone’s view of him in the autumn of 1881 – into a central figure in the calculations about the future of Irish politics.’5 The outcome of this reversal was, he asserts, If Ireland was to be pacified, the leaders of constitutional opinion in Ireland would have to be accommodated constitutionally within the general framework of the United Kingdom: it was therefore vital that the terms being set by those leaders should be terms [to] which the United Kingdom as a whole could reasonably assent.6 Matthew, to be sure, does not make the identical case; indeed the thrust of his study differs, in part, from the present analysis. To an extent Jackson and Paul Bew point in a similar direction. The former maintains that ‘Gladstone was certainly not intellectually enslaved to Irish nationalism but he was highly responsive to the national movement at critical moments’.7 Bew notes that Gladstone’s responsive attitude to nationalism reflected ‘flexible’ thinking and that on the land issue he was willing to contemplate a specifically Irish path of development.8 The argument offered here builds on the insights of Matthew, Jackson and Bew.

Context and theory Gladstone’s resolve to bring order to Irish affairs was not unique in nineteenth-century Britain; the unusual feature was the energy expended on Irish affairs after 1868. Before then, as Roy Jenkins observes, Gladstone ‘for the first fifty-eight years of his life had applied himself very sparingly to Hibernian problems’.9 Even after taking up his ‘mission’, according to the late editor of the diaries, Gladstone regarded Ireland as ‘a preoccupation, not an interest, an embarrassment, not an intellectual attraction’.10 Both are wide of the mark on two counts. While Gladstone may not have participated intimately in Irish policymaking earlier in his political life, he knew from experience of observation the force of Irish nationalism, poverty, agrarian discontent, the effects of emigration, Catholic dissatisfaction, Protestant counter-




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claims and, of course, Peel’s attempt to accommodate and subsequently conciliate a section of Irish Catholics. He was influenced by exposure to Daniel O’Connell’s politics and his alliance with the Whigs in the 1830s. Also, Gladstone understood countervailing British anti-Catholicism and underlying suspicion of Irish Nationalism. Thus, Gladstone did not concoct his Irish plans in a vacuum; they were conceived in the maelstrom of competing ideologies, notably the forces of nationalism, liberalism, democracy and European conservatism, and shaped by the practical difficulties in meeting then satisfying all strands of opinion. He was animated by liberal principles and as Matthew claims, the intention to ‘save Ireland for constitutionalism’.11 As a further ingredient, Gary Peatling has pointed to the impact of the ideas of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the influential French philosopher, on liberal opinion in Britain.12 More recently, Eugenio Biagini has ably discussed the subtle interplay between Liberal ideology and later Victorian Liberalism.13 The degree of difficulty involved in resolving Irish wants was never underestimated. Whatever the means by which the Union between Great Britain and Ireland came into effect on 1 January 1801, it was something much more than a mutual security pact. It gave birth to a new state which portended the integration of Ireland into a unified though not a unitary national community. Unsurprisingly, this incorporation raised problems for both partners, and it is the management of these problems that defines the Irish question of the nineteenth century. That question was multi-faceted, with economic, social, religious, political and public order dimensions. The Union, by providing Ireland with substantial representation (100–105 seats) in the House of Commons, gave Irish Catholics a means to moderate their historic grievances within the constitution and broke the bonds of the confessional state in favour of religious pluralism. However, the tensions between communities were not simply erased, for in Linda Colley’s well-known formulation, British national identity was forged out of hostility to the ‘otherness’ of Catholicism. Ireland was unable to play a full part in the British imperial state, Colley contends, because it ‘was cut off from Great Britain by the sea; but it was cut off still more effectively by the prejudices of the English, Welsh and Scots, and by the self-image of the bulk of the Irish themselves, both Protestants and Catholics’.14 Colley’s point is germane in the present context for its helps explain the relatively swift application of accommodationist and conciliationist approaches but the hesitating resort to cooperation with the leaders of Irish national feeling.




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N. C. Fleming and Alan O’Day

Colley’s argument receives support from Michael Billig’s observation that nationalism is not the preserve of the periphery but is the ideological means by which core nation-states are reproduced. For this process he coined the term ‘banal nationalism’, by which Billig means the continual ‘flagging’, or reminding, of nationhood.15 He provides a more complex interchange than Colley allows. She is not alone in identifying Ireland’s exceptionalism by viewing the Irish as an alien ingredient in the compost of Britishness. This is not something that can be turned on its head, even for Irish Protestants, who were in vital respects ‘marginal Britons’, but there was also a profound reality, pointed out by Declan Kiberd, that the Irish and British identities fed off one another.16 Irish nationalism was not just a force in opposition to the state nor Unionism simply a prostate reaction to its opposite number, but each was integral to the construction of the other’s identity. This, though, is to overlook the effort the British elite made to modify the state and amalgamate Ireland’s Catholics (and dissenters) into it during the years prior to 1868. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, dominant societies have three strategies – assimilation, domination/segregation, and an ideology of multiculturalism – which often are pursued simultaneously. Great Britain resorted to all three, and the application of these moulded Irish national responses.17 Bourgeois nation-builders, as Jim Mac Laughlin notes, were more concerned with the economic viability and geopolitical standing of large nations than with the cultural authenticity and nationalist credentials of small nations or ethnic minorities.18 Within Britain small nationalities like the Irish, Scots and Welsh were seen both as potential threats to the territorial integrity of the British nation and as building-blocks of a larger British state-system centred on England. As was true for other national minorities in Europe, the Irish had three paths open to them: to express loyalty to the dominant state, to voice specific grievances demanding redress and to seek to break the bonds with the larger community. A nuanced analysis is offered by Gerard Delanty and Patrick O’Mahony’s suggestion about the need for ‘consideration of the social context of nationalism as a movement of resistance to differentiation and to certain aspects of the modern form of integration. The social logic of the nationalist movement in Ireland was to call for a different kind of integration that in fact amounted to a certain kind of dedifferentiation.’19 Seamus Deane offers an appraisal from a different angle, writing of


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[the] final incoherence that has always characterised the relationship between the two countries, the incoherence that comes from sharing


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In reality, rather than a single nationalism, several nationalisms existed in the same vortex. The existence of competing claims had the predictable impact on British policy responses, making a single targeted approach the more difficult. Irish Nationalism and pro-state Unionism emerged from the same cauldron from which British national identity sprang to life, forming a dialectic which led to an incomplete synthesis, thereby inhibiting development of a new model of social integration in Ireland and Great Britain. Thus, it is argued that the unresolved nature of Irish Nationalism (and Unionism) created dysfunctions which continued to circumscribe development across Ireland and constrained acceptance of Gladstone’s notion of cooperation. What emerged is consistent with Mac Laughlin’s observation that there was ‘no room in the nation-building project for a “branch or model” of development which would accommodate or even tolerate the separate existence of minorities’.21 Nonetheless, there was always a struggle within Irish Nationalist culture. Tom Garvin points to an ongoing contest with a ‘green’ or rural element, representing a rural Catholic ethos, seeking to gain ascendancy over an urban, more cosmopolitan version of the nation.22 Mac Laughlin’s explanation is that the ‘hegemonic power of a rural-based Catholic Church coupled with low levels of industrialisation and urbanisation, meant that nationalism was a force for controlling the pace of modernisation which allowed new hegemonic groups to control levels of exposure to secularism and modernity ... nationalism [was] an introvertive force which impeded the “process of centralisation” ’.23 He points out that in this contested arena the chief cultural and political entrepreneurs, the clergy, with the aid of school teachers and bourgeois and petty-bourgeois interest groups, invested the entire landscape with Catholic nationalist symbolism, exerting hegemonic control over political and economic life.24 According to Mac Laughlin the priests engaged in Christianising places, claiming them for nationalist rule.25 Nationalism became a vehicle for the advancement and hegemony of an increasingly self-confident church and its secular allies – teachers, minor bureaucrats, welloff farmers and shopkeepers. Mac Laughlin contends: ‘In ethnically divided nations, nationalists and national separatists also emphasised


a common language which is based upon different presuppositions. The failure of language to accommodate experience, the failure of a name to fully indicate a place, the failure of lovers to find the opportunity to express their feelings, whether in words or deed, are all products of this political confrontation.20


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the dangers of cultural miscegenation and stressed the centrality of nation-building to the preservation and accumulation of individual aptitudes.’26 This is to take issue with the recent assertion that ‘Catholicism – although always significant – became a major part of national identity only following the Civil War of 1922–23, and was an expression of the ideological exhaustion of the predominantly Republican movement’.27 Rather, ‘from the 1880s onwards,’ Oliver Rafferty notes, ‘one can begin to regard the Church as virtually the Home Rule movement at prayer’.28 In F. S. L. Lyons’ gloomy summation, ‘the co-existence of several cultures, related yet distinct, has made it difficult, if not impossible, for Irishmen to have a coherent view of themselves in relation to each other and to the outside world’.29 Nationalists were able to override regional, economic, class and cultural distinctions despite concessions that granted the substance of their material claims, in part, for the reason articulated by Michael Hechter and Margaret Levi: ethnic solidarity arises in regions developed as internal colonies where there is a hierarchical cultural division of labour determining life chances.30 Solidarity increases when members interact within the boundaries of their own group. The movement’s durability, however, depends on the ability to deliver on its promises. They distinguish between regional and ethno-regional movements: the first couch their claims solely in terms of material demands; the second base their claims on ethnic distinctiveness. It is such circumstances, as noted by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch, which induce a congruence of socio-economic and religious–national fault lines. As Hobsbawm puts it, the linkage of social and national demands was much more effective than pure appeals to nationalism in mobilising popular opinion.31

Gladstone as conciliationist The germination of Gladstone’s thinking began when, in December 1867 at Stockport, Lancashire, Gladstone declaimed that Ireland should be governed in accordance with Irish ideas: ‘I venture to say that in all matters, except that [a separate legislature] no man ought to be able to say that anyone of these nations is governed according to the traditions, the views or the ideas of another.’32 Concerted application would take nearly another fifteen years. Gladstone’s part in post-1868 AngloIrish developments has been explored from many angles. In November 1868, on hearing that he had been summoned by Queen Victoria to




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form a government, he professed, ‘[M]y mission is to pacify Ireland.’33 This charge he retained until retiring from office and politics in 1894. It hardly needs elaboration that Gladstone’s interjection in Irish affairs has evoked continuing interest. His role has gone through cycles of appreciation and near-denigration, ranging from virtual deification by John Morley and J. L. Hammond to the opposite pole, as seen in the modern assessments of A. B. Cooke and John Vincent, who portray Gladstone using Ireland as a means to tighten his grip on the Liberal party, and the very recent account by Richard Shannon, who sees him as acting on his own against the best interests of the nation.34 Typifying the first assessment is J. C. Beckett’s estimate: He was the first major British statesman to consider seriously the implications of the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland, and to realise that if Ireland were indeed an integral part of the United Kingdom, it must be governed on the same principles as the rest; and it was this realisation that prepared him to accept the policy of home rule. His importance in the history of AngloIrish relations lies less in the measures that he actually carried, farreaching though they were, than in the immense influence that his concern for Ireland had on British public opinion. It was he, more than anyone else, who made the state of Ireland an issue in British politics.35 In contrast Shannon’s verdict is that the reality of the eventful year of 1886 in Mr Gladstone’s career was his imperious foisting upon his party without consultation of a radical policy it would never of its own initiative have undertaken; and of how he ignored those backbench Liberals who desperately tried to get him to listen to advice from the party as to how a scheme for Irish autonomy acceptable to the Irish, the Liberal party and the country at large might be achieved.36 It takes no prolonged investigation to appreciate that in the present age, as in his own epoch, Gladstone’s Irish venture has elicited wildly differing responses. Gladstone’s conciliationist approach reached its apogee in 1869 with disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. It was foreshadowed in the nearly seventy years of the Union to 1868 by a multitude of official commissions and legislation and a plethora of ideas about how to remedy




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Ireland’s problems. Between 1810 and 1833 alone there were, according to Edward Norman, 114 Royal Commissions and 60 parliamentary select committees on Irish matters.37 Important innovations came in the introduction of dispensaries for the sick, creation of lunatic asylums, state finance for emigration, establishment of the Board of Public Works and of the National Board of Education, the Tithe Composition Act, the Church Temporalities Act, legislation for a national police force, the Tithe Act, the Poor Law Act, the Municipal Corporation Act, four land acts and, under Peel, three major measures: the Charitable Donations and Bequests Act, the Maynooth College Act and the foundation of the Queen’s Colleges. These are among the better- and lesser-known interventions from which Norman claims ‘a modern nation was created’.38 The Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 were further increments in the attempt to undermine moderate Catholic opinion and decouple it from Nationalism, and notably from Fenianism. In 1881, in particular, the Land bill was proposed and carried without consultation or overly thoughtful concern for Parnellite criticism. As Matthew makes clear, it sought to ‘castrate the Land League by attracting the Irish tenants into courts and a Land Commission appointed by the Westminster Parliament, local agencies of the state to which the Irish tenantry would voluntarily apply and which would reduce their rents’.39 To the Duke of Argyll’s son, Gladstone explained that the measure ‘seems to constitute nearly the whole of our substantial resources for confronting & breaking the Land League’.40 At this juncture he ‘believed Parnell to be weak, vulnerable, and dangerous ... an enemy of the Empire’.41 Writing to Lord Granville, Gladstone declared that the objective was to sever Parnell ‘altogether from the Irish people and the mass of the Irish members’.42 Thus, he had the Irish leader imprisoned in October. But, at the same time (something which Parnell grasped), the subversive radicalism of Gladstone’s land legislation was profound.43 The Land War and the attempt to isolate Parnell and his followers were educative. From May 1882 Gladstone moved, as noted above, towards accepting Parnell as the legitimate voice of national Irish opinion. By the beginning of June, Gladstone was relieved by the failure of efforts to dislodge Parnell from the leadership, and soon afterwards he began a long series of indirect exchanges with Parnell via the medium of Mrs O’Shea, his ‘spokeswoman or speaking trumpet’.44 By 19 September he had adopted the view ‘that since his liberation he has acted ... with as much consistence as he could, and has endeavoured to influence his friends in the same sense’.45 This view was reinforced rather than diminished during the ensuing years of parliamentary warfare, sometimes in


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the face of the contrary view held by his senior colleagues. In June 1883 Gladstone thought Parnell ‘a sphinx, the most probable reading of him is that he works for & with the law, as far as he dare. I have even doubt whether he hates the Government.’46 By October 1885 his private secretary, Edward Hamilton, recorded Gladstone’s ‘sneaky likeness’ for the Irish leader, and in July 1885 that ‘Mr G has always pinned his faith too much to Parnell’.47 Jackson perceptively sees the meeting between Parnell, John Morley and Gladstone on 5 April 1886 as signalling ‘the extent and swiftness with which the Irish Home Rule movement had been accommodated by the British political establishment’.48 Gladstone’s estimate, for self-evident reasons, did not shift before the divorce crisis but was extended to other members of the Irish party. Other Liberals, with varying degrees of speed and completeness, came to adopt cooperation. At the beginning of January 1887 Spencer, who had thought in 1884 ‘any concession to conciliate the Parliamentary party is futile, and is looked upon as an act of fear or weakness’, nonetheless wrote to John Dillon: ‘I feel that it is an excellent thing to be brought into contact with you Irish leaders. The want of this has done much harm in the past.’49 The real legacy which Gladstone bequeathed to Liberals and, as it transpired, to a section of Irish Unionists was not a concrete set of proposals, important as those were, but a different mechanism for action.

Cooperation politics after Gladstone Unlike other political ideas more usually associated with the era, cooperation was not peripheral to the major political cleavage but instrumental in reconfiguring the two blocs of organised Nationalism and Unionism. In contrast to the high-flown rhetoric of some ideologues – to bring together Catholic, Protestant and dissenter – Irish cooperation politics actually did so. In the aftermath of the report of the Commission on the Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland in 1896, it prompted leading Nationalists and Unionists to demand from the British government recompense for Ireland; and on another momentous occasion, in 1903, to frame an agreement on landownership widely hailed as the solution of a decades-old (if not centuries-old) grievance. In the aftermath of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 cooperationists formed the Irish Reform Association to build upon recent success. But it was these very accomplishments, and the possibility of further victories, that contributed significantly to the retrenchment of Irish politics into familiar antagonistic postures, replays of the reactions




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to Gladstone’s efforts to deal with Ireland’s grievances. Deep-rooted Nationalist–Unionist animosity was, of course, a significant factor. But the internal fractures that bedevilled both Nationalism and Unionism, which had created space and a fertile soil for a moment of cooperation between the two political movements, were also the cause of its downfall. For it was the attempts to heal internal wounds in the early 1900s, in both Nationalism and Unionism, coupled with a strong determination to avoid future fractures, that ensured not only that cooperation became passé, but that it was necessary for both parties to repudiate it actively. There were other reasons, of course. The Nationalists and Unionists chiefly associated with cooperation were not the most representative of either tradition, and therefore lacked the political strength to face down critics. Also significant were external critics of each party and rival groups that presented the electorate with unwavering critiques of mainstream politicians. The need for Nationalist and Unionist party leaders to arrest and even reverse the growth of these rivals and, more worryingly, to dampen dissent within their own ranks, often emanating from powerful grassroots organisations, obliged these political leaders to put clear blue water between the mainstream parties and the minority within them who championed cooperation. That the natural reflex of many Nationalists and Unionists was to oppose cooperation reflects an underlying reason for its ultimate demise. Ireland’s political culture, at the turn of the century, underwent a marked shift toward articulating essentialist identities. This was manifested in a religious, cultural and political chauvinism that precluded, to the point of paranoia, any gesture by ‘their own’ reaching out to the rival tradition. The following three sections dissect this outcome; they can be summarised in terms of the internal fractures in the Nationalist and Unionist parties, the evolution of cooperation and an examination of how this led the two parties to retrench.

Fractured parties If both the Nationalist and Unionist parties suffered from internal divisions in the 1890s, it was among Nationalists that the fractures were most cancerous. The fall of Parnell in 1890−1 deprived the Nationalist movement of its lynchpin and consequently divided Irish MPs on strategy. The majority, the anti-Parnellites, believed that only through a continued working relationship with the British Liberals could further reforms, including Home Rule, be secured. But even within this faction


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strongly felt divisions emerged, between those favouring localised and church-dominated party organisation and the larger strand, led by John Dillon, who preferred the maintenance of a centralised, mainly secular, party structure. Dillon’s determination to rebuild the alliance of Nationalist interests Parnell once led, married with his belief that Irish MPs could work only with the Liberals, won out over those favouring localism, and it would in the longer run significantly damage cooperation politics. The Liberals’ inability to deliver Home Rule in 1893 to some extent vindicated the Parnellite stance of the minority of Irish MPs, led by John Redmond, who opposed the harnessing of Irish Nationalism to British Liberalism. However, their proud boast of being ‘independent’ of any British political party was tempered by the reality of achieving little at Westminster without such an alliance. If such posturing endeared them to some Irish separatists, particularly in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, then the Parnellites’ continued commitment to constitutionalist politics prevented any meaningful engagement between the two. Stymied by their own position at Westminster, it was the Parnellite wing of Nationalist MPs who first indicated a susceptibility to the politics of cooperation – joining in 1895 the parliamentary Recess Committee, considered below. Divisions among Unionists in the 1890s lacked the bitterness and depth of the contemporaneous factiousness besetting Nationalism, but they were no less significant in explaining the origins of cooperation in the mid-1890s and its ultimate eclipse by the mid-1900s. Irish Unionism was a broad social alliance: of landowners, businessmen, professionals, skilled and unskilled urban workers, tenant farmers and farm labourers. Politically, it was an uneasy coalition of Irish Conservatives and Ulster Liberals, mirroring denominational differences between Anglican and Presbyterian, landlords, commercial interests and Protestant tenant farmers. This broad support was both Irish Unionism’s cement and its weakness. Unionist divisions in the 1890s were not necessarily geographic (that is, between southern Irish Unionists and their Ulster counterparts) but manifested in tensions between Unionist tenant farmers, mostly in the north, and their Unionist landlords. The close link in the 1880s between the Land League, Home Rule and Catholicism ensured that Protestant tenant farmers expressed their grievances with landlordism by voting Liberal and, after 1886, Unionist. Unionist MPs included a number sympathetic to tenant farmers, including even landlord MPs, but most of this latter cohort struggled to deny their selfish economic




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interests for the sake of the party. No one exemplified this problem more than its leader, Colonel Edward Saunderson.50 That such tensions were contained within Unionism owed much, at least in the early 1890s, to a shared fear of the Liberals’ second Home Rule bill (1893). The prospect of a Conservative government in late 1895 therefore allowed internal Unionist dissension to re-emerge, with the imminent creation of a Tory government effectively acting as a safety net. Progressive Unionist MPs, weary with the intransigence of their landlord leaders, used the opportunity to reach the hand of friendship across to Nationalist MPs: a gesture that led soon after to the establishment of the Recess Committee.

Evolution of cooperation politics The originator of the 1895 Recess Committee, and a guiding light of subsequent cooperation politics, was the landowner and Unionist MP Sir Horace Plunkett. His experience in the American west helped motivate a passion for agricultural improvement and promotion of the late nineteenth-century co-operative movement. Plunkett’s discomfort with the reactionary politics of his Unionist colleagues led him to explore alternative means of advancing his pet causes.51 Using the recess between parliamentary sessions in the autumn of 1895, Plunkett offered Irish politicians an opportunity to sit on an informal committee to discuss areas of non-contentious reform agreeable to both Nationalists and Unionists.52 He offered agriculture and technical instruction as examples. The anti-Parnellite Nationalists declined to join. Keeping faith with the Liberals, they were, like many Nationalists, wary of an initiative, particularly one emanating from a Unionist, that risked undermining the cause of Home Rule by making the Union appear to work successfully. Redmond’s faction accepted; the Recess Committee provided them with an opportunity to compensate for small parliamentary numbers. Not surprisingly, the Unionist leader, Saunderson, declined Plunkett’s invitation. But other Unionists, representing the industrialists of Belfast, all too readily accepted an opportunity to improve technical education. Even at this stage it was evident that not all divisions in Ireland were vertical; some ran horizontally. The Recess Committee produced a report in August 1896 recommending to the Conservative government that its Irish administration should have a separate Department of Agriculture and Industries.53 The timing of the report proved fortuitous, for around the same time the Royal Commission on Financial Relations between Ireland and Britain


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published its own report indicating that Ireland was overtaxed by almost £3 million annually. Plunkett harnessed the subsequent outcry in Ireland to form in early 1897 the All-Ireland Committee. Not only did he attract those who had participated in his Recess Committee; he had the additional support of some anti-Parnellite Nationalists and the leader of the Irish Unionists, Saunderson. The ball was placed firmly in the court of the Conservative government. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Gerald Balfour, who had recently demonstrated his commitment to land reform, now responded to Plunkett’s two committees. As a consequence, Balfour oversaw legislation in 1898 establishing Irish county councils: a measure welcomed by most Nationalists and Unionists. And the following year, in 1899, a bill was passed establishing a separate Irish Department for Agriculture and Technical Instruction.54 Plunkett had established a new method of political engagement, with marked Gladstonian antecedents, that had proven successful not only in garnering cooperation in Ireland but also in wringing reforms from Westminster. It inspired others to follow. In 1902 the landowner Captain William Shaw-Taylor mooted the idea of a Land Convention to resolve remaining grievances to the satisfaction of all interested parties.55 He appealed, in particular, to veterans of the Recess Committee and AllIreland Committee. But Shaw-Taylor achieved the additional support of William O’Brien, an anti-Parnellite MP and leader of a recent wave of land agitation.56 Convening in December 1902, this convention of landlords and land reformers – both Nationalist, such as O’Brien, and Unionist, such as T. W. Russell – speedily agreed a generous scheme of land purchase that all participants hoped would mark the end to decades of agitation. Their report was taken up enthusiastically by George Wyndham, the new Tory Chief Secretary for Ireland. In an outlook reminiscent of Gladstone and Parnell, Wyndham believed tranquillity might be brought to Ireland through the creation of a landowning peasantry – a scenario, he was convinced, that would restore good and proper relations between the lowest and highest in the land.57 Despite later criticisms of its generosity to landlords, the 1903 Land Act provided an unprecedented £12 million to facilitate the transfer of land to occupiers. By 1920 this achieved the transfer of more than nine million acres, though the task was unevenly pursued and incomplete. Key figures in the 1902 Land Convention, Nationalist and Unionist, believed they had ushered in a new era in consensus politics. William O’Brien stated that ‘conference plus business’ had replaced ‘confrontation plus stalemate’. Allied with O’Brien, the Earl of Dunraven established




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the Irish Reform Association to further the cause of cooperation. In an echo of Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule twenty years before, Dunraven in August 1904 drafted a plan for a devolved Irish assembly in close consultation with the administration at Dublin Castle. Having once declared, like all Irish Unionists, that Ireland could not have Home Rule until it resolved its economic and social problems, Dunraven now declared that only through a scheme of limited devolution could these problems be properly tackled. The cooperationist approach – of Irish people discussing Irish problems, a clear form of the elusive idea of governing according to ‘Irish ideas’ – had a similar effect on Plunkett, who also abandoned his Unionism in favour of Home Rule. Not surprisingly, the majority of Unionists were horrified and certainly dumb-struck. So too were a majority of Nationalists, fearful of being short-changed on their longheld dream of a Dublin parliament. The fearful realisation of both parties ensured that cooperation was dead in the water. But to understand why it elicited such a reaction, it is necessary to retrace events back to the late 1890s.

Party retrenchment In the years immediately either side of the turn of the twentieth century, the two main Irish political parties adopted markedly more aggressive rhetoric. This reflected a number of developments concurrent with the rise of cooperation: first, a shift in how the two traditions came to define themselves; second, the enhanced role of grassroots organisations espousing a sectarian creed; and third, the threat posed to mainstream party unity by the presence of independent and rival movements. These combined to ensure the phenomenon of political cooperation was repudiated all round by the mainstream aggregations. Nationalism and Unionism had long been associated with Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively, and historic religious tensions were reflected in the politics and attitudes of each party. In the 1890s, however, these tensions were augmented by an emphasis on ethnic distinctions, a point explored by Mac Laughlin. This development was not unique to Ireland. Nor was it entirely novel. But its presence in popular political rhetoric was certainly more marked from late 1890s. It was very much related to the two causes of retrenchment outlined above, that is, the enhanced role of sectarian grassroots organisations and the existence of rival Nationalist and Unionist movements. In Nationalism, it led to a conflation of Gael and Catholic.58 In Unionism, the conflation


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was of Anglo-Saxon, or Ulster-Scot, depending on individual preference, and Protestant.59 The Gael was, of course, a distinct race from the Anglo-Saxon, and the Anglo-Saxon in Ireland, or Ulster-Scot, clearly belonged to a larger race, and one distinct from the native Irish. It is important not to overstate the relevance of these ideas to most ordinary Irish people. They were essentially elite constructions, especially among Unionists, for whom such ethnic identifications never came easily.60 Indeed, the organisations in the early 1900s that were the main cause of retrenchment remained attached to older religious identifications: the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and the Loyal Orange Institution. In the early to mid-1900s the AOH emerged as the main grassroots political organisation for Ulster Catholics, boasting a membership of 10,000. This secret society, resembling the Orange Order in its parades, regalia and emphasis on secrecy and self-help, spread south, its offer of a Catholic freemasonry appealing to all classes of men. In some areas Hibernians even replaced the pre-existing Nationalist constituency organisation, which often suffered prolonged atrophy, and by 1909 the AOH achieved a membership of 60,000.61 Not all Nationalists welcomed the rise of an overtly sectarian grassroots organisation. Criticisms followed that the AOH had introduced a tone of violence to Nationalist party gatherings. Others, particularly in separatist organisations, accused the Nationalist party, in embracing the AOH, of abandoning the patriotic ideal of uniting Protestant, Catholic and dissenter. The character of the Hibernians owed much to the AOH’s recent development in Ulster. There, the overtly sectarian Orange Order, which had enjoyed enormous growth in the early 1880s and late 1890s, attracted the support of around 150,000 members. Landlords and businessmen had long cultivated the Order for political purposes, but its largely plebeian membership was by the early 1900s proving difficult to control.62 Tensions emerged between the Orangemen and their leaders over a range of issues, the charge often led by evangelical Protestants, trade unionists and assorted others who expressed concern that an effete and distant leadership might abandon the Orangemen to their fate. From being an emblem of Protestant unity, these discordant voices were by the early 1900s publicly advertising class divisions that had long simmered beneath the surface. The need to arrest this development led many Orange and Unionist leaders to adopt a more aggressive espousal of populist Protestantism. The Hibernians and Orangemen were as much a liability as an asset for the leaders of mainstream Nationalism and Unionism. On the one hand, the narrow creed of these secret societies, their disposition to violent




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confrontation and their reinforcement of Ireland’s sectarian division acted to constrain political strategy. On the other hand, the Hibernians and Orangemen furnished Nationalism and Unionism with organisations that were undeniably popular. This to some extent repudiated the charges of rival Nationalist and Unionist organisations that mainstream politicians were out of touch and increasingly irrelevant. Such accusations had become more pronounced in the early 1900s and contributed to the emergence of rival Nationalist and Unionist parties.63 Various shades of Nationalists had come together in 1898 to celebrate the anniversary of the United Irishmen’s 1798 rebellion.64 This led within two years to the reunification of the Nationalist party at Westminster. But a minority of younger Nationalists, representing radical, cultural and separatist societies, remained outside its formal structures. Although they remained marginal, their youth, unambiguous commitment to Irish independence and disproportionate influence on political thinking placed the mainstream Nationalist party in an unflattering light. Anti-British sentiment during and after the Boer War provided these ‘advanced Nationalists’ with increased prominence, even posing a serious challenge to the Nationalist party at two by-elections in 1901.65 Therefore, just as Nationalist MPs acquiesced with Hibernian rhetoric, they also had to acknowledge the growth of advanced Nationalism. If Nationalism was to be maintained as a broad alliance then it had to be seen to represent all types of Nationalist and be responsive to the strongly localist culture. Redmond was charged with this task. But his role in the early development of cooperation politics and the fact of the reunited party’s dominance by former anti-Parnellites, rendered it necessary for Redmond to distance himself from cooperation politicians of all shades. In particular, he was obliged to abandon William O’Brien. Although many farmers had embraced the 1903 Land Act, the belief was widespread that it was too generous to landlords. Dillon and Michael Davitt were active in promoting this interpretation. Many leading Nationalists feared the Act, and the cooperation politics that spawned it, in case it convinced sufficient numbers of Irish people they could achieve material and political advancement within the current constitutional arrangement rather than in a separate Irish parliament. For the sake of maintaining a broad church, Redmond stood with Dillon, leading O’Brien to resign from the party towards the end of 1903. Unfettered by O’Brien, the Nationalist party drifted further into the politics of antagonism.66 Even this proved insufficient for advanced Nationalists, who in 1905 formed their own party, Sinn Fein, though the impetus for its advance had several roots.




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Unionists during this period also struggled to maintain a united front and similarly attacked cooperation as a means of repositioning their movement. The class tensions within Unionism and the Orange Order came into sharp focus in 1902. A section of working-class Orangemen publicly and directly rebuked the Unionist leader, Saunderson, denouncing his refusal to take a tougher anti-Catholic line at Westminster and accusing him of secretly conniving with the government to prevent controversial Orange parades. Later that year, their leading spokesman, Tom Sloan, successfully beat the official Unionist candidate at a Belfast by-election, and in 1903 he went on to form the Independent Orange Order. Never a serious rival to mainstream Unionism, its very existence nevertheless demonstrated Unionism was not united even in its heartland of industrial Belfast. Moreover, the city’s highly active trade union movement highlighted the potential for further Unionist dissension, and even the possibility of Catholic–Protestant working-class solidarity.67 A younger generation of aspiring Unionist leaders, mainly Ulster businessmen and professionals, blamed their ill-equipped landlord leaders for recent problems.68 But they wanted to avoid another open rebellion. The latest scheme produced by the cooperation politicians – Lord Dunraven’s 1904 devolution proposal – provided them with an ideal opportunity to go onto the attack.69 Accusing the British Conservative government of secretly plotting to establish a Home Rule parliament in Dublin, and pointing the finger at southern Irish landlords, a new generation of Unionists seized the moment to establish a fresh organisation to represent mainstream Unionism: the Ulster Unionist Council. Intended to represent all Unionists, it was considerably more successful in this endeavour than contemporaneous efforts by mainstream Nationalists. Within a few years it had almost completely erased its rivals, but at the cost of retrenching even further, so in 1913 the Ulster Unionist Council found itself at the head of an armed militia pledged to resist Home Rule at all costs.

Conclusion It took a lengthy gestation for Gladstone to move from accommodation to conciliation and then to cooperation, and when he made the final leap it proved incomprehensible to many even in his own ranks. He himself did not grasp fully the demands he placed on followers and the country. But his efforts did not prove wholly in vain, for he spawned an approach to Anglo-Irish affairs that survived, albeit as a




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minority view, and influenced not just his own party but a section of the opposition as well. Cooperation politics in turn-of-the-century Ireland was not a marginal development, even if its adherents and underlying rationale were ultimately marginalised. Indeed, it was the very success of cooperation politics, and the risk that it might achieve further success, that led to its demise first under Gladstone and then in the early twentieth century. Mainstream Nationalist and Unionist parties had been badly shaken by internal divisions and by outside challengers. As a result, both came under considerable pressure to adopt overtly antagonist postures. Still wedded to relying on allies at Westminster, Nationalists and Unionists attacked the only alternative that had proven its utility and success: cooperation. Its fragility made it an easy target. Its proponents were clearly out of touch with the shifting mentalities of their respective creeds and the populist priorities of mass politics. In the end, their Damascene conversion was too sudden to carry many with them, and insufficiently grounded in either political tradition to meet a direct challenge. Nevertheless, the Gladstonian ideal would live to fight another day. It is perhaps this rather than any specific reform or policy that continues to give Gladstone salience in Anglo-Irish relations.

Notes 1. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London, 1955), p. 559; see Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999). 2. Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000 (London, 2003), p. 46. 3. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford and New York, 1997), p. 437. 4. Alan O’Day, ‘Ireland and the United Kingdom’ in D. George Boyce and Roger Swift (eds.), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800: Essays in Honour of Patrick Buckland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 13–31. 5. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 456. 6. Ibid., p. 457. 7. Jackson, Home Rule, p. 51. 8. Paul Bew, The Politics of Enmity 1789–2000 (Oxford, 2007), p. 343; Paul Bew, ‘William Ewart Gladstone’ in Myles Dungan (ed.), Speaking Ill of the Dead (Dublin, 2007), p. 33. 9. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1995), p. 279. 10. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 194. 11. Ibid., p. 506. 12. Gary Peatling, British Opinion and Irish Self-Government, 1865–1925: From Unionism to Liberal Commonwealth (Dublin, 2001), p. 10 and passim. 13. Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007). 14. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1995), pp. 8–9. 15. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), pp. 5–9.




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16. D. George Boyce, ‘ “The Marginal Britons”: The Irish’ in Robert Collis and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London, 1986), pp. 230–53; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London, 1995), p. 2. 17. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London, 1993), pp. 123–4. 18. Jim Mac Laughlin, Reimagining the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building (London, 2001), p. 43. 19. Gerard Delanty and Patrick O’Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory (London, 2002), p. 80, n. 3. 20. Seamus Deane, Brian Friel: Plays One (London, 1996), p. 22. 21. Mac Laughlin, Reimagining the Nation-State, p. 29. 22. Tom Garvin, Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin, 1981), pp. 2–5; see also Patrick O’Mahony and Gerard Delanty, Rethinking Irish History: Nationalism, Identity and Ideology (Basingstoke, 1998). 23. Mac Laughlin, Reimagining the Nation-State, p. 103. 24. Ibid., pp. 8–9, 270. 25. Ibid., p. 250. 26. Ibid., pp. 253–4. 27. Delanty and O’Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory, p. 131. 28. Oliver P. Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 1861–75 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. xiii. 29. F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 (Oxford, 1979), p. 2. 30. See Michael Hechter and Margaret Levi, ‘Ethno-regional Movements in the West’ in John Hutchinson and A. D. Smith (eds.), Nationalism (Oxford, 1994), pp. 184–95. 31. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992), p. 125; Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford, 1994), p. 198; Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 185–6. 32. J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938), p. 80. 33. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903), vol. II, p. 252. 34. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903), vol. III; Hammond, Irish Nation; A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent, The Governing Passion (Brighton, 1974); Richard T. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007). 35. J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland 1603–1923 (new edition, London, 1981), p. 412. 36. Shannon, Gladstone, p. xviii. 37. Edward Norman, A History of Ireland (London, 1971), p. 14. 38. Ibid., p. 51. 39. Matthew, Gladstone, p. 447. 40. Quoted in ibid. 41. Quoted in ibid., p. 456. 42. Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville, vol. I, 1876–1886 (Oxford, 1962), p. 293 (16 Sept. 1881). 43. Bew, The Politics of Enmity, p. 327. 44. D. W. R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1885–1906 (Hull, 1993), p. 2 (7 Aug. 1885).




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45. Gladstone to Earl Spencer in Peter Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer, vol. II, 1835–1910 (Northampton, 1986), pp. 221–2. 46. Quoted in Matthew, Gladstone, p. 458. 47. D. W. R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1880–5 (Oxford, 1972), p. 701 (7 Oct. 1884); Bahlman, Hamilton, 1885–1906, p. 1 (21 July 1885). 48. Jackson, Home Rule, p. 38. 49. Spencer to Gladstone, 12 Nov. 1884; Spencer to Dillon, 1 Jan. 1887, in Gordon (ed.), Red Earl, vol. I, p. 280; vol. II, p. 140. 50. Alvin Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson: Land and Loyalty in Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1995). 51. Carla King, ‘Co-operation and Rural Development: Plunkett’s Approach’ in John Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast, 1999), pp. 45–57; Carla King, ‘Defenders of the Union: Sir Horace Plunkett’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), pp. 137–58. 52. Carla King, ‘The Recess Committee, 1895–6’, Studia Hibernica, 30 (1998–9), pp. 21–46. 53. Recess Committee, Report on the Establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Industries for Ireland (Dublin, 1896). 54. Frederick H. A. Aalen, ‘Constructive Unionism and the Shaping of Rural Ireland, c. 1880–1921’, Rural History, 4 (1993), pp. 137–64. 55. Andrew Gailey, Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism, 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987), pp. 189–90. 56. Fergus Campbell, ‘Irish Popular Politics and the Making of the Wyndham Land Act, 1901–1903’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 755–73. 57. Ibid., p. 759. 58. Patrick McDevitt, ‘Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916’, Gender and History, 9 (1997), pp. 262–84. 59. Cathal McCall, ‘Arise Ulster Therefore Ulster-Scot: Ulster Unionist Identity and the Reconfiguration of the Isles’ in Liam Kennedy and R. J. Morris (eds.), Ireland and Scotland: Order and Disorder, 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 113–25. 60. Biagini, British Democracy, p. 250. 61. A. C. Hepburn, Catholic Belfast and Nationalist Ireland in the Era of Joe Devlin, 1871–1934 (Oxford, 2008), chapter 4. 62. N. C. Fleming, ‘The Landed Elite, Power, and Ulster Unionism’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), The Ulster Crisis, 1885–1921 (London, 2006), pp. 86–104. 63. Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionism and the Russellite Threat, 1894–1906’, Irish Historical Studies, 25 (1987), pp. 376–404; Matthew Kelly, ‘The End of Parnellism and the Ideological Dilemmas of Sinn Fein’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), Ireland in Transition, 1867–1921 (London, 2004), pp. 142–58. 64. Timothy O’Keefe, ‘The 1898 Efforts to Celebrate the United Irishman: The ‘98 Centennial’, Éire-Ireland, 23 (1988), pp. 51–73. 65. Kelly, ‘Sinn Fein’, pp. 142–58. 66. Maume, Long Gestation, pp. 65–77.




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67. Henry Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement 1868–1920 (Belfast, 1980), chapter 3. 68. N. C. Fleming, ‘Leadership, the Middle-Classes and Ulster Unionism since the Late Nineteenth Century’ in Fintan Lane (ed.), Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland (London, 2009), pp. 212–29. 69. Alvin Jackson, ‘Unionist Politics and Protestant Society in Edwardian Ireland’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 839–66.




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11 D. George Boyce

When Gladstone adopted Irish Home Rule as the great Liberal cause he opened up a debate that transcended Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations. Ireland had attracted his attention long before 1886. In 1869 Gladstone disestablished the Church of Ireland; in 1870 he intervened in the contractual relationship between landlord and tenant; Irish political violence in the early 1880s demanded, and got, a response from his Government. All these issues involved public opinion in Great Britain, sometimes in specific ways: Welsh Nonconformists saw in the Irish Church question a reflection of their own subordinate position under the Anglican Church of Wales; tenant farmers in Wales, at odds with their landlords, responded enthusiastically to the demands, if not the methods, used by the Land League in Ireland; Scottish tenant farmers benefited from the notion that there had been, in the distant, but legitimising, past, a Celtic system of landholding that might in some degree be restored.

A multi-national regime Seventeen years before Gladstone adopted Home Rule he had written that it was ‘the office of law and of institutions to reflect the wants and wishes of the country’ and that the country’s wishes must ever be a considerable elements in its wants.1 But Gladstone would decide whether the wishes of the people of any country merited his granting of what he defined as their wants. In December 1885, when his conversion to Irish Home Rule was disclosed by his son, Gladstone explained that he could not support the early Home Government Association’s demands because at that time (when Isaac Butt was leader) ‘it was not a national movement. I had no evidence that Ireland was behind it. Parnell’s movement


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was different.’ It was different, he insisted, because ‘when the people express their determination in that decisive way (the 85 Parnellite MPs elected from Ireland in 1885) you must give them what they ask’.2 This conclusion applied to Ireland, but what affected Ireland must affect Great Britain also. Irish Home Rule – indeed any Irish wishes – was subject to the verdict of the British people. The recognition of Ireland as a nation, entitled to its own parliament and executive, must have an impact on the constitution of the United Kingdom. Moreover, if Ireland were recognised as a nation, and not merely a geographical fragment, then perhaps the two other Celtic regions of the British Isles, Wales and Scotland, might reasonably expect the same status to be conferred on them.3 Even if this were to meet objections, particularly objections from the wealthiest and most numerous people of the Kingdom, the English, then it remained an issue that would at least have to be discussed. There might be important and lasting implications for the future of the United Kingdom and the place in that kingdom of what Victorian England saw as those almost half-alien peoples: the Celtic races of the British nation. It was the greatest Liberal philosopher of the age, John Stuart Mill, who, in 1861, when speaking of France, argued that nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power – than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applied, he continued, ‘to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander, as members of the British nation’.4 If there was at the beginning of the nineteenth century a British nation, there was no desire to ask what essential characteristics constituted its identity. Yet what was a haphazard and in many ways fortuitous series of events, beginning with the Acts of Union between England and Wales in the sixteenth century, followed by the Union between England and Scotland in 1707 and finally the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, suggested (for those who bothered to contemplate such arcane matters) that there had been a kind of natural


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history of the British Isles that created unity out of diversity. It is right to describe the people who inhabited this polity as in reality constituting a ‘Union of multiple identities’,5 and indeed there was institutional variation in the way in which they were governed, with Wales being the most fully integrated into the English system of government, and with Scotland and Ireland enjoying special status: the former in terms of its religious and legal settlement; the latter in terms of its separate machinery of government, with a Chief Secretary and a Viceroy in Dublin Castle. But it seemed that Scotland (after a period of friction in the first half of the eighteenth century) was by 1800 a contented and loyal member of the United Kingdom – to some a place that could, without irony, be described as ‘North Britain’ – that Wales was resting in unreflective contentment with its lot, and that Ireland, though fascinating to middle-class Englishmen attracted by its primitive but noble society, would at any rate cease to trouble. There was the legacy of the Catholic question – the campaign since the latter part of the eighteenth century by Catholics in England and Ireland for the removal of disabilities on their rights as British subjects to sit in the British Parliament – but this was an internal problem, not one necessarily associated with any kind of nationalist or separatist desire to break up the new United Kingdom. Yet, as Theo Hoppen has put it, Ireland was barely integrated into the Union and was seen by the governing classes as ‘half-alien’, though this attitude was to change by between the 1830s and 1860s as strenuous efforts were made to govern Ireland as an integral part of the Kingdom.6 The institutions that held together the British nation were Parliament and the Monarchy. All the subjects of the Crown were represented in Westminster, and the Crown claimed the loyalty of those subjects and their allegiance to its place in the constitution. The remarkable result of these institutions was that potentially fragmenting divisions in the British Isles were downgraded and contained. That there were deep divisions, religious, cultural and linguistic, was undeniable, at least to the historian: there was an Anglican Establishment in England, Wales and Ireland; a strong Nonconformist presence in Wales and England (and in the province of Ulster); a Presbyterian Establishment in Scotland; a large Catholic majority in Ireland. It has been argued that the Protestant parts of the nation defined the British nation against the Catholic parts, especially in Ireland. This was seen in the political storm over the desire by the Holy See in 1851 to re-create the diocesan pattern in England. But it was usually (except in the case of Ireland between 1828 and 1847) unnecessary to play the anti-Catholic card. Language variety was also


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undeniable: Wales and Ireland had majorities that spoke a Celtic language, but English confidence that the English language stood for civilisation and progress was supreme, though it raised a storm over the ‘treason of the Blue Books’ in Wales in 1847, when a Royal Commission on education in Wales, appointed in 1846, declared itself appalled by the backwardness of the Welsh language and associated this with the alarming lack of civility among the population.7 This provoked a furious response, in which Welsh Nonconformists (and even some moderate Anglican churchmen) denounced the report as an attack on their religion and on Wales, but it did not in any way damage the confidence of the British political and educational elites that English must be the language of instruction in Welsh – and Irish – schools. Perhaps the greatest diversity in the make-up of the United Kingdom peoples was an economic one. There was successful industrial development, an integrating force, in the west of Scotland, the eastern part of Ulster and south Wales, but agrarian stagnation and the grievances of the tenant farmers were burdensome legacies, and British politicians looked for some means of creating, in the Celtic lands, the kind of settled rural society that (they believed) existed in England. The one glaring but as yet (with the exception of Ireland) politically inert aspect of the United Kingdom, of the British nation, was the continuation of the tradition of the ‘four nations’: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales remained stubbornly drawn on the maps of the British Isles, despite internal social and economic regionalism. This was illustrated in a stereotypical character in maps (which seem to have been popular during the 1870s) in which the four nations were depicted in the shape of what might be called ‘national types’ (as popularly conceived): Wales, for example, was drawn in the shape of an old woman wearing ‘traditional’ Welsh costume, while Scotland was embodied by a bearded highlander. South Wales miners and Clyde–Forth industrial workers did not qualify as national types.8 Gladstone’s early excursions outside what the Earl of Rosebery called in March 1894 the ‘predominant Member of the partnership of the Three Kingdoms’9 – England – were inspired not by any recognition of the ‘Union of multiple identities’ but by his concept of the proper, indeed essential, place of morality and religion in politics (tempered by a strong dash of pragmatism). He declared himself a supporter of Catholic emancipation, a campaign which drew its greatest strength from Ireland, but he did not do so on exclusively Irish grounds. ‘Justice and expediency united their powers to demand at our hands reparation to an injured people ... Then shall our Church give a noble instance of




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the first and greatest Christian virtue, charity.’ Gladstone acknowledged that Catholic priests were bigoted and superstitious, and that many were ‘adverse’ to ‘our Church’. But God grant that Catholic Emancipation would be given before it was extorted.10 His preoccupation with the central place of Anglicanism in the making of a Christian people was expressed in 1845 when he resigned from the Cabinet over Sir Robert Peel’s proposal to increase the state’s annual grant to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where the Irish Catholic secular priesthood was trained. In 1838 he strongly defended the concept of a church establishment in his book The State in Its Relations with the Church, admitting that the Church of Ireland attracted only a minority of the people of Ireland as its congregation and that it was maintained side by side with a ‘system of partial and abusive government’. But the duty of the state was to sustain that church for two reasons. The paramount reason was that it was in the spiritual interest of even the Catholic majority; the second was a ‘political consideration’: ‘A common faith binds the Irish Protestants to ourselves, while they, upon the other hand, are fast linked to Ireland; and thus they supply the more national bond of connection between the two countries.’ If England, by outlawing their church, ‘should weaken their moral position, they would be no longer able, perhaps no longer willing, to counteract the desires of the majority tending ... to what is termed national independence’.11 Gladstone could scarcely avoid commenting on the catastrophe that befell Ireland in 1845, when the Great Famine began its emphatic and irreversible transformation of Irish society. He uttered a striking moral verdict on its implications for the relations between England and its half-alien dependency: the state of Ireland was the result of ‘cruel, inveterate, and but half-atoned injustice on the part of Great Britain’.12 He offered no remedy for these sins, but he did show what most English politicians failed to appreciate: an awareness that England governed a multi-national kingdom. In 1854 he wrote to the Marquis of Dragonetti in Italy about an international question that attracted the attention of the British government and public opinion for nearly two decades: Italian unification. Gladstone agreed that Naples had a government ‘as bad as anarchy’; Rome ‘unites the evils of the worst government and the most entire anarchy.’ In those countries he could ‘hardly imagine any change that would not be for the better’. But ‘in the wild opinions of some of your political sectaries,’ he warned, ‘I see the best and most available defence of the existing system with its hideous mischiefs.’ Every Italian who desired the removal of the evils which his country suffered through some of its governments adopted Italian union and


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national independence for his watchwords. But Gladstone warned that the English could not ‘bring our minds to this mode of looking at the Italian question. All our habits, all our instincts, all our history lead us in another direction.’ The English mind was ‘not shocked in limine at the notion of people belonging to one race and language, yet politically incorporated or associated with another’.13 Gladstone was here defending discreetly the concept of the British United Kingdom with its different nations incorporated or associated with each other. He added that, on Italian unification, ‘we shall be glad if it proves to be feasible, but the condition of it must be gradually matured by a course of improvement in the several states, and by the political education of the people’.14 It would be some time before Gladstone convinced himself that the Irish people were mature enough and sufficiently politically educated for any form of self-government. Later commentators, excited (or appalled) by Gladstone’s Irish policies and his warm remarks on the other Celtic nations, sought explanation in Gladstone’s own family history. There was real evidence of a mixed inheritance that might account for his deviation from the Anglo-Saxon path. He was the son of what his descendant William Gladstone described in 1991 as ‘intensely evangelical Scottish Presbyterian parents who had become high church Anglican’.15 His mother’s parents were Episcopalians of Jacobite ancestry, but otherwise little is known about her religious beliefs.16 Gladstone was born in Liverpool, but he was rightly described by his later great adversary on the Home Rule issue as ‘by descent a Scotchman’. This, A.V. Dicey alleged, was one of the reasons Gladstone was hated in England. Dicey claimed that ‘no one could have heard the speeches or “sermons” by which he aroused all the enthusiasm of the Midlothian electors without perceiving that Mr Gladstone’s character of oratory and of feeling was as Scotch as his blood’. He was, Dicey concluded, ‘in substance a Scotchman who has to address an English public’.17 Gladstone’s Celtic connections extended to Wales: through marriage to a Welsh woman, Catherine Glynne, and his residence in Hawarden. Justin McCarthy, an Irish Home Ruler and journalist who worked mainly in England, claimed with satisfaction that ‘W.E. Gladstone is an Englishman only by birth’.18 In the 1870s, Gladstone extolled ‘Scottish superiority in everyday living’ of which the finest example was rural Aberdeenshire.19 But when he fought his electoral campaign in Midlothian in 1879 he spoke of coming among the voters as a ‘stranger’ by ‘residence, by property, by constant intercourse’.20 His popularity there was derived from his career and success as a British statesman whose moral fervour had been demonstrated in his celebrated campaign against the ‘Bulgarian




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atrocities’ and the question of the East. And he spoke without inhibition of the ‘nation’ when explaining that ‘the name of England has been discredited and lowered from the lofty standard which it ought to exhibit to the whole world’.21 Welsh culture did not initially attract him. In September 1855 he attended an evening service in which the sermon was delivered in Welsh: ‘I saw some irreverence of the kind that does not occur in England,’ he confided to his diary; ‘the language does not make favourable impressions.’22 When advocating the virtues of Forster’s Education Act of 1870 ‘to provide for public elementary education in England and Wales’ he had to contend with the hostility of Welsh Nonconformists. He reminded one of his foremost Liberal critics, Edward Miall, who accused him of leading a section of his supporters ‘through the valley of humiliation’, that he looked ‘too much to the section of the country he adorns, and too little to the interests of the people at large’. It was the duty of government, on the other hand, to ‘endeavour to forget the parts in the whole’, and to ‘purpose to themselves no meaner or narrower object – no other object than the welfare of the Empire at large’.23 The ‘welfare of the Empire at large’ in this case involved passing an education act in which English was the medium of instruction in schools, and in which children were punished for speaking Welsh among themselves.24 Gladstone’s Britishness was that of the English politician who, while acknowledging the existence and even the complaints of a component part of the nation, must submerge these in the interests of the ‘Empire’ – in this case, the United Kingdom. And it was an aspect of this principle that (paradoxically) caused him to take up the cause of the part of the Empire that most of his fellow politicians preferred to retain at the back of their minds: Ireland. Gladstone’s decision in 1868 to move for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was not without its pragmatic political dimension: such a move would be a fine rallying call for the Liberal Party, which had its roots firmly placed in Nonconformity. But disestablishment, like Irish Home Rule, was a means of binding Ireland more closely to the rest of the Kingdom. Gladstone recognised that the Catholics were the majority in Ireland and would remain so – despite predictions made after the Great Famine that the Catholic population would shrink, perhaps even to minority status. Gladstone later declared that one of the guiding principles of his political career was to recognise the moment when public opinion was ripe for him to undertake a significant policy decision, and he claimed that his decision over the Church of Ireland was just such an event. Justin McCarthy demonstrated considerable shrewdness in his explanation of Gladstone’s forays


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into Irish affairs: ‘Gladstone changed his political opinions many times during his long parliamentary career. But he changed his opinions only in deference to the force of a growing conviction, and to the recognition of facts and conditions which he could no longer conscientiously dispute.’25 Irish Home Rule was another such decision. The General Election of November–December 1885 returned 86 Irish Home Rule MPs, under the formidable leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. There could be no doubt that the voice of nationalist Ireland had been heard loud and clear. Home Rule would create a ‘Union of Hearts’ and remove the greatest obstacle to the working of British parliamentary government. It would make of the Irish what the policy of Union had made of the Scots: a loyal and contented people, living under laws of their own manufacture. The Liberal espousal of Irish Home Rule created the Liberal–Home Ruler alliance that lasted until 1918. The longevity of the controversy, the furious reaction from English – specifically English – public opinion, the immense difficulty in gathering broad support for the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, not to mention the bill of 1912, suggest that Gladstone could not have been more mistaken about the consequences of his great political adventure. But the impact of Home Rule was felt outside Ireland. Wales and Scotland remained firm for Liberalism and Irish Home Rule. Wales – often described as the most Protestant part of the United Kingdom – was a particularly significant ally of the Catholic Irish political aspiration. And the interest went beyond the policy of Home Rule, which, after all, must fall into abeyance once it was rejected by Parliament. Gladstone had in 1870 addressed the issue of Irish land law, and he, and the Conservative Party, were obliged to return to what was after all a real and tangible issue for tenant farmers. Tenant farmers in Wales and Scotland welcomed the Land Leaguer Michael Davitt, listening enthusiastically to his explanation for the land crisis that gripped Ireland in 1879–82 and which mobilised the Irish tenant farmers and pushed Parnell into his role as saviour of the nation, but there was no desire in either country to emulate the illegal acts of the League and the violence that characterised its darker side.26 And certainly there was no desire on Gladstone’s part to see the kind of land agitation in Wales that Davitt had helped arouse in Ireland.27 The importance of Welsh and Scottish public opinion in the Irish Home Rule crises, and the strength of Liberalism in those countries, had an impact on political discussion in the United Kingdom. Gladstone insisted that Ireland was a special case, that the issues there were not the same as those in Wales and Scotland. Welsh and Scottish




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people lived under laws which they found congenial, not oppressive. Irish history, Gladstone discovered when he advocated Irish Home Rule, was a story of tragedy, bloodshed and English misgovernment. Neither Wales nor Scotland had undergone such dark episodes in their history, hence their secure place in the Kingdom. Ireland could be made secure through the Union of Hearts that Home Rule would create. The Union of Hearts was already firmly fastened to the Welsh and Scottish experience. There was no need to re-cast the whole constitution of the United Kingdom to accommodate them. In 1886 Gladstone wrote to James Bryce that he had ‘not as yet seen any facts to lead me to suppose the Home Rule movement in Scotland likely to take any dangerous shape ... I think we have solid ground under our feet in declining to admit as a postulate that there is to be equal treatment throughout for the three countries.’28 The Liberal Party had a place in Ireland, most strongly in the Presbyterian north, where, until the final success of the Home Rulers in 1885, Presbyterian MPs represented the bulk of the Catholic voters. But Gladstone again saw Ireland as different. Home Rule had carried the day, and Gladstone reflected with satisfaction on the collapse of Liberalism in Ulster: its annihilation was ‘a political opportunity’. For it was strongest in Protestant-dominated Ulster, and its place as constituting merely the ‘fragment of a nation’ cleared the way for a straight fight between Home Rulers and Irish Conservatives. ‘Perhaps had we large or cordial Ulster support, it might have abridged our freedom more than it would have enlarged our votes.’29 Despite Gladstone’s insistence that Ireland was a special case and that her predicament in no way resembled those of the other nations in the Kingdom, his attention to Irish grievances aroused interest in Wales and Scotland. This interest was most deeply felt in Wales, despite its history as the country which had experienced the longest period of union with England and which was so closely identified with the predominant partner that an early edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica advised its readers: ‘for Wales see England’.30 This was because Wales had, like Ireland, its own religious character. Nonconformists were the most numerous religious community, yet they lived under an established church. Their landlords were English-speaking and English-oriented. Davitt’s tour of Wales, though only a qualified triumph, was nonetheless ominous. And disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 provoked the newly elected Liberal MP Watkin Williams (Denbigh District) in May 1870 to bring forward a motion calling for the same treatment to be meted out to the church in Wales. Gladstone opposed this, insisting that the Irish case was not a precedent for a similar campaign elsewhere: the Welsh


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established church possessed ‘a complete constitutional, legal ... and historical identity’ with the Church of England, and therefore could not be treated on a separate basis31 – thus conveniently ignoring the fact that the Act of Union had made the same claim for the Irish and English churches. There were soon signs, however, that a kind of seepage was undermining Gladstone’s certainty. He intervened to secure a Welsh-speaking successor to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1870.32 He abstained on a motion for Welsh (and Scottish) disestablishment in 1886. In February 1887 he wrote a letter in response to the newspaper The Baptist’s call for Welsh disestablishment, warning that he could not deal in ‘abstract resolutions’ and for the present saw no opportunity of time for a bill,33 but he recognised Nonconformist sensibilities when in May 1881 he supported a bill for Welsh Sunday closing on its second reading, using language not unlike that he deployed when justifying his conversion to Irish Home Rule: that a ‘distinctly formed’ public opinion existed ‘upon a given subject which affects Wales alone ... I know of no reason why a respectful regard should not be paid to that opinion.’ The bill passed and marked the first occasion when Parliament sanctioned separate legislative treatment for Wales.34 Gladstone was on this occasion making the same point that he used about Irish Home Rule – that it was a response to Irish public opinion on a specific Irish issue: the ‘given subject’ of Sunday closing affected Wales ‘alone’. But it was hard to persuade eager Welsh patriots that Irish Home Rule was relevant to Ireland alone. Welsh radicals saw Gladstone as at least reflecting, if not yet implementing, their demand for more national recognition. As the general election results were being declared, the Welsh Liberal MP Thomas Ellis noted with excitement on 1 December 1885 that Home Rule for Ireland, Wales and Scotland ‘is writ large across each day’s results’.35 A few years hence would see a great change in Wales’ relations with the English political parties. Ellis even anticipated the possibility that, should Wales be disappointed in her desire for the English parties to address the issue of the church, the land and the schools to her satisfaction, then the day would come when a Welsh party would hold the balance of parties and obtain the power to legislate for itself on its own soil.36 Why did a Welsh Nonconformist Liberal, a representative of the most Protestant country in the Kingdom, strongly support a measure that would hand power over to a Catholic majority in Ireland? Why did he see in the Irish predicament a mirror for Wales? Wales was securely ensconced in the United Kingdom. But there were reasonable grounds for Welsh farmers and Welsh quarrymen to sympathise with downtrodden Irish ‘peasants’, once they lost the fear




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that Irish Protestants would not be ground under the heel of Popery: the law of the land and the manifestation of the ‘law-abiding character’ of the Irish people would guarantee this.37 But Wales could recall her own past (as did the Irish nationalists, and as Gladstone did on behalf of the Irish nationalists). Ellis denounced the way in which ‘both the Welsh and the Irish have suffered from centuries of arrogance and what is more, Saxon arrogance’. The Welsh were at last about to reclaim their own kingdom. He lumped together the plights of Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highland crofters. Their interests were ‘almost identical. All three have a similar past.’ The immediate need was ‘the riddance of landlordism’. Wales ‘would benefit incalculably, not only from knowing her own past, but also the glorious past of the Highlands, and the partly sad, partly noble history of Ireland’.38 Tom Ellis welcomed the Irish Home Rule Bill with ecstasy: ‘O glorious day for Celtic peoples.’39 He predicted that ‘the next nationalist party in the House [of Commons] will be a Welsh one’. This was over-optimistic. Gladstone’s involvement with Welsh political issues was more ambiguous than his admirers allowed, though he did recognise the diversity of religious belief in the Kingdom and understood its political consequences. Indeed, he went so far as to agree with what Henry Richard wrote in 1866: that the Nonconformists of Wales were the people of Wales. Wales, like Ireland, expressed her nationality in religious terms.40 However, Henry Richard was at pains to point out that the Welsh must remember that ‘while they were Nonconformists they were also members of the great British community, interested in everything that concerned its peace, prosperity and power’.41 Gladstone shared this perspective. He was careful not to encourage any notion that the Nonconformist nation might follow the same path as the Catholic nation. When Gladstone made a kind of royal progress to Swansea in 1887 he stopped at Newtown, Powys, to affirm to a crowd of two to three thousand that ‘the cause of Ireland is the cause of Wales’. In Swansea he wore a large leek in his right lapel, declaring, ‘Wales is not only a nationality, it has grievances.’42 But there was no promise of Home Rule for Wales; Welsh national sentiment was to be mobilised for Irish Home Rule. A sense of nationality and grievances could, of course, be addressed without recourse to transforming the unified constitution of the United Kingdom. At a National Liberal Federation meeting in 1887 in Nottingham (nicknamed ‘a conference of nationalities’) Welsh disestablishment was accepted, and disestablishment of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) was adopted – the latter to the disapproval of many left-wing English Liberals.43 The terms ‘nationality’, ‘nationalist’ and


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‘nationhood’ were, in the eyes of many, no longer the prerogative of the Irish Home Rulers. But the terms as deployed outside the Irish predicament more closely resembled the early nineteenth-century European nationalism, with its strong affinities to liberal values, than the harderedged variety of post-1870 Europe which followed the Franco-Prussian War. Thomas Ellis characterised the nationalism of the Liberal Party and what might be called the British Celtic nations in 1888: ‘Now Liberalism is being educated and widened by Mr Gladstone through his struggle for the recognition of nationality as ennobling and fructifying elements not in Ireland alone but in Wales and Scotland likewise. This struggle is the master-current of the politics of the United Kingdom.’44 Gladstone was cast by Wales as the statesman who rediscovered the heart of Welsh nationality and made it beat again (to a Nonconformist drum). In 1892 he enacted a magnificent piece of political theatre (or theatricality) at the behest of Thomas Ellis. Ellis wrote to Gladstone’s son Herbert on 3 September suggesting that there was a place ‘well situated for a mountain meeting at which Gladstone might not only open and dedicate a road, but also point out the road to the tops of other hills which the Welsh people have long been climbing’. A gathering on Snowdon’s side ‘would be a unique mingling of Welsh welcome, romance and music’.45 Gladstone agreed, and he stood on Snowdon’s stage to make a speech denouncing Welsh landlords to an audience which climbed to hear him hold forth, Old-Testament-like, in that remote but romantic region. The landlords in England had reduced rent by 24 per cent, whereas those in Wales had done so by only 7 per cent. There were even four counties where rents had been raised, and one of these was Caernarvon. Gladstone referred to this in order to ‘render a tribute to Mr. Ellis ... who took upon himself the labour of bringing it before Parliament, and for the purpose of assuring you that such a question as that cannot fail to receive the serious attention and consideration of the government which has just taken office’. But for Gladstone the Welsh land issue was not one of ‘alien’ landlords in any cultural of national sense; it was one of legislating to create a fairer balance between the interests of landlord and tenant. The occasion revealed that Gladstone had won another point in his ambiguous relationship with Wales. When Bryn Roberts proposed a resolution cordially welcoming Gladstone ‘to the heart of Eryri’ (Snowdonia), he said that the Welshmen of Gwynedd recognised in Gladstone ‘the champion of the spirit of freedom which dwells among our hills, and one who is destined by Providence to bring to a triumphant issue that struggle for religious freedom and self-government which has been waged in these




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glens so long and so tenaciously’. However, the primary place in the struggle was not for Wales; it was still reserved for Ireland: ‘they most heartily wish him Godspeed in his heroic efforts to confer the blessing of self-government upon our Celtic brethren in Ireland’.46 In an obituary which he wrote for Gladstone, published in Young Wales in June 1898, Ellis, who had dedicated much of his political career to guiding the great man towards a better appreciation of Wales and its hopes and fears, described Gladstone as the greatest nationalist of the century because of his passion for helping the renaissance and recognition of countries such as Italy, Montenegro, Ireland and Wales. He was ‘more Celtic than the Celts, more Cymric than the Welsh themselves’.47 But how did England respond to the emergence of a discourse of nationalism and nationhood in the United Kingdom? The controversy over Irish Home Rule, and to a lesser extent the opening up of the (admittedly very remote) possibility of a similar fate for Wales and Scotland, sent a thrill of excitement, but also apprehension, through England. Gladstone’s conversion to Irish self-government came as a shock to English public opinion, which had accepted ecclesiastical and land reform in Ireland in the hope that these would diminish the threat from violent Irish republicanism in the 1860s, with its bombing campaign and plots to raise rebellion. The general election results of July 1886 revealed that Wales and Scotland stood by the Liberals and their Irish initiative, but that England did not: Gladstone’s electoral agent in Scotland lamented that ‘the reports from the English Burghs & counties are heartrending. It is evident that it is to be Scotland, Wales, & Ireland against the prejudices & slow power of understanding political truth & justice of England & above all of London’.48 This might seem surprising, since British governments were willing to grant responsible government to, for example, Canada, where, as in Ireland, it could be said that there were two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: French (Catholic) and British (mostly Protestant). But Ireland was different. A.V. Dicey, Vinerian Professor of Law in the University of Oxford, put the rational case – what he called England’s case – against Home Rule for the best part of the next forty years. His work was free of polemic, and he insisted that his objections to Irish self-government were not derived from anti-Irish prejudice but based on the flawed character of the Home Rule proposals. In particular, he warned that if (as Gladstone proposed in his 1886 Bill) Irish MPs were removed from the Westminster Parliament, this would make the Bill a separatist measure, especially if, as Dicey believed, the Irish Home Rulers, whatever their talk of a Union of Hearts, were really determined to escape from the United Kingdom.


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If Irish MPs were retained at Westminster for any purpose, this would be unfair to the rest of the British nation, whose component parts did not enjoy the benefits of devolved government. Dicey believed that the threat to the constitution was so great that England would be justified in using force to retain the recalcitrant Irish nation within its borders. This was an ‘obligation’ which, however, he admitted England might not be able to fulfil. If it did indeed fail, then separation of Ireland from England was preferable to the deeply flawed and muddled proposals of the Liberal Party and its leader.49

The debate on nationality There were those in England who were more inclined to let anti-Irish Nationalist sentiment rule their hearts rather than their heads. Cartoons in the press depicted Gladstone hobnobbing with bloodied Fenian monsters whose only goal was the destruction not only of the United Kingdom but of civilisation. The Home Rule crisis revealed that it had become axiomatic, as far as English opinion was concerned, that the Celtic peoples were better off as integral members of the Kingdom, and that English power and prestige would be fatally undermined if Ireland were to set the example of secession. But the crisis flushed out another, and even more alarming, dimension of the multi-national regime that was the United Kingdom: the recognition that it was a multi-national regime in the first place. Of course, no one could fail to see that there were parts of the ‘island’ English nation that were not English, but this had no political or moral significance. And it was easy, indeed natural, for English people to assume – without any ill intention – that the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ were synonymous, and even that England was an island, a jewel set in a silver sea. An even greater contradiction – this time linguistic rather then geographical – was brushed aside by the historian J.R. Seeley in a series of influential lectures delivered in Cambridge University in 1883. Seeley referred to the ‘utterly unintelligible languages of the Welsh, Scots and Irish’ but insisted that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was ‘for all purposes, one nation’.50 The possibility that this was not so, and, more important, that significant political consequences might flow from recognising this diversity, raised anxiety, anger and dismay. And there was confusion over just what nationality or nationalism meant, or did not mean, in English political discourse. The unfamiliarity of the idea of the United Kingdom as a multinational regime, whose English island encompassed two other nations,




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and whose state included Ireland as well, was illustrated in a small, but important, controversy in the correspondence columns of The Times in March and April 1887. Sir John Lubbock, Liberal MP for London University, but an anti-Home Ruler, queried the argument of supporters of the Bill of 1886 that ‘we have within the compass of the United Kingdom no less than four small nationalities’. Lubbock did not suppose ‘that allusion is meant to the modern and, so to say, accidental divisions between England and Scotland in the first place, England and Wales in the second, or to the silver streak between Britain and Ireland, for we are hardly so degenerate as to reverse our old boast and allow the waves to rule Britannia’. Lubbock took the word ‘real’ to emphasise that there were four distinct races in the Kingdom and that therefore one of them should have a separate legislature and executive. He pointed out that there were many racial mixtures in the Kingdom: Wales and Cornwall were, for example, predominantly Celtic; the south and east were predominantly Anglo-Saxon ‘with a considerable Norman intermixture’; certain districts were mainly Scandinavian. In Ireland the population of the east and north was ‘mainly Saxon’; in the north-west, Celtic; in the south-west, ‘the basis is Iberian, akin to the population of parts of Spain’. In Scotland there was again a mixture: Saxons entered Caledonia, if not before then at about the same time as the Scots, who were themselves an Irish tribe. Scotsmen were found in the north of Scotland, the Orkneys and the Shetlands. The east of Scotland was mainly Teutonic; the west mainly Celtic. Thus the defence of Home Rule, Lubbock concluded, on the grounds that there were four ‘main nationalities’ in ‘our islands’ was ‘entirely without foundation’. If ‘we are to be divided at all according to blood, the divisions would not be into England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The main division in Great Britain would not be from east to west, but from north to south.’ The Saxon division would include the greater portion of the east of England, the east of Ireland, and Scotland; the Celtic division would comprise most of the rest of Ireland and west of Scotland, with Wales and Cornwall; the Scandinavian would be the north of Scotland, several maritime districts on the east, Westmoreland, Cumberland and Pembroke. The extreme south-west of Ireland and part of Wales would be Iberian. ‘The exact limits’, he maintained, ‘would give rise to an endless number of bitter disputes.’ Any argument in favour of Home Rule based on the existence of distinct nationalities fell to the ground, ‘while the effect of rousing race antagonisms, from which we have suffered so terribly in the past, and which are now happily latent, can only add to our political difficulties and tend to weaken the British Empire’. The


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English, Irish and Scotch were ‘all composed of the same elements, and in not very dissimilar proportions’; recognising this ‘undeniable ethnological fact’ would do much to mitigate ‘our unfortunate divisions’ and strengthen the common country.51 James Bryce replied on behalf of Gladstone’s assertion that there were indeed four nationalities in the United Kingdom. He argued that Lubbock was confusing races with nationalities: ‘A nationality may be made up of any number of races, because race is only one of several elements which go to create a nationality.’ Everyone knew that, from the fifth to the tenth century, ‘Scotus’ meant an Irishman; everybody knew that the Scottish people consisted of four or five races: Picts, Scots, Angles, Northmen, Strathclyde Britons. But that did not make the Scots any less a nation, because history had ‘slowly fused these various races into a cohesive whole’. The Swiss were both a nationality and a nation, although they sprang from several races and four languages were spoken within their borders. ‘The same may be said of the French and the Germans.’ Bryce then identified what he saw as the erroneous facts in Lubbock’s history of the peoples of the British Isles, but he returned to the point of Gladstone’s remarks: that in a question involving national sentiment the opinion of each of the nationalities surviving in our islands is worth regarding; and that the people of Scotland and Wales, still cherishing a distinct national feeling of their own, though one happily compatible with attachment to the greater nationality of the United Kingdom, have shown that they can extend their sympathy to the sentiment of nationality among the Irish, and that they do not deem it dangerous to Imperial unity. An Englishman, he concluded, has but one patriotism, because England and the United Kingdom are to him practically the same thing. A Scotchman has two, but he is sensible of no opposition between them. He is none the less loyal to the United Kingdom because he is also loyal to Scotland. And he believes the day may come when the same will be true of an Irishman.52



The correspondence on this subject became more decidedly ‘ethnological’, to use Lubbock’s expression, as the question of the origins of the peoples of the British Isles was investigated further. But Lubbock


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selected Bryce’s claim that history ‘may slowly fuse various races into a cohesive whole’ for particular criticism. He queried whether history had done so in the case of Ireland. ‘Does he really maintain that Ulster is fused into a cohesive whole with the rest of the island?’53 Bryce – himself an Ulsterman – replied in terms that were of the greatest significance for the Gladstonian project. He knew of no person, he claimed, who had ever argued for ‘separate legislatures for England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales on the basis of four distinct races occupying these four geographic regions’. The idea was ‘fantastic’. Gladstone had not meant that race and nationality were synonymous; they were entirely different. ‘You may have different nationalities of a race practically the same. You may have a nationality composed of several races.’ Bryce denied that Gladstone or any supporter of Home Rule for Ireland had ever said that Ireland was a ‘cohesive whole’. ‘What we do say, and what the history of the last 110 years amply proves, is that there exists a passionate feeling of nationality among the great bulk of the Irish people, a feeling which has resisted all the attempts of England to ignore or extinguish it.’ Bryce cited, following Gladstone, the patriotism of the Protestants of 1782 and of the Protestant insurgents of Ulster in 1798. This patriotism was not a matter of race or religion only, ‘for it is now shared by many Protestants and many descendants of Englishmen and Scotchmen’. Had Scotland been dealt with as had Ireland, then the ‘national sentiment of Scotland might have been driven into the same hostility’. Scotland had not parted with her nationality or become merged in England; Scotland was contented because she had achieved justice and equality, and had ‘practically been allowed to manage her own affairs’. She was now what she had not been in 1748, a united country, cherishing a local patriotism which did not clash with her imperial patriotism.54 The importance of Bryce’s rejoinder was not so much what he said, but what he did not say: the words ‘nationality’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ were debated, but not the word ‘nationalism’. Patriotism, though not unrelated to nationalism, did not insist that there was a historical, Godgiven, destiny-bound people whose land was theirs and their alone. One of the greatest scientists of the time, T.H. Huxley, a strong supported of Darwinian theories, joined in the controversy. He wrote to Lubbock fully supporting, as scientifically proved, the proposition that there were four ‘geographical regions’, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and that the people who lived in them ‘call themselves and are called by others the English, Scotch, Welsh and Irish nations’. It was also true that the inhabitants of the Isle of Man called themselves Manxmen, ‘and are just as proud of their nationality as any other “nationalities.” ’


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‘And there is,’ he added, ‘at any rate, one Hebridian isle whose pastor used to pray for “the people of the adjacent island of Great Britain,” and who therefore would seem to have considered his own people a distinct “nationality.” ’ Huxley concluded that ‘we may admit the existence of all these nationalities or groups of people, more or less individualised by geographical or historical circumstances’, but ‘if we mean no more than this by “nationalities,” the term has no practical significance. If we do mean more, then we must ascribe to such nationalities either ethnological or historical individuality.’ Such ‘nationality’ was ‘no more an ethnological individuality than the English or the Scotch’. Moreover, as to the historical individuality, Ireland had unhappily, been a house divided against itself, from the earliest ages to the present day. When the inhabitants of Ireland constitute a ‘nationality’ in the sense that the term applies to England, Scotland and Wales, it will be possible to speak of the ‘four nationalities’ of our common country, without deluding ourselves and others.55 The contemporary absorption in the notion of races, their relationship to nations, and the relationship of different races, groups and communities to each other within nations could scarcely avoid having an impact on what seemed, at first sight, a straightforward division of the Kingdom into four nations or, to use the most favoured phrase, ‘four nationalities’. Bryce called on Protestant patriotism and United Irishman radicalism as witness to the existence of an Irish nation whose reasonable demands must and could be satisfied by Home Rule. He ignored the powerful local objections of the Protestants of Ulster to Home Rule, and those of the other three Irish provinces, who descendants were overwhelmingly hostile to Parnellism. But privately he was less sure of his ground and was anxious about the outcome of a Home Rule policy that excluded any consideration of minority views. In March 1886, before Gladstone introduced his bill, Bryce warned that Ulster Liberals, for their part, were ‘practically unanimous in their hostility’ to measures that might leave them subject to a Nationalist-dominated assembly, predicting too that moderates would join with what he called Tories and Orangemen to oppose Home Rule. He recommended that the forthcoming bill should restrict the power exercised by a Dublin parliament over Protestant-dominated regions of Ulster, which should in turn be provided with local self-government.56 Bryce had at last used, though privately, the word he had avoided using in the public press: ‘nationalism’. But Gladstone gazed not only with equanimity but with genuine




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pleasure on the potential annihilation of the Liberals in Ireland (who were strongest in Ulster) as a fine political advantage. Were there, he demanded of the Irish Nationalist R. Barry O’Brien in November 1885, ‘any Liberals in Ireland? Where are they? I must confess (with a magnificent roll of the voice) that I feel a good deal of difficulty in recognising these Irish Liberals you talk about: and (in delightfully scoffing accents) I think Ireland would have a great deal of difficulty in recognising them either.’57 When they were destroyed by the Gladstonian project he mused on the fact that ‘perhaps had we large and cordial Ulster support, it might have abridged our freedom more than it would have enlarged our votes’.58 Gladstone likened the Protestants of Ulster to the highlanders of Scotland. Whereas Ireland possessed what he called the elements of nationality (‘collective or corporate individuality tinted by reason and sufficiently confirmed by history’), Ulster Protestants did not, though they might, ‘at first glance, be mistaken for signs of an historic nationality’, such as that possessed by the Basques of Spain. The Ulster Protestants were on the same footing as Scottish highlanders ‘before the assimilating measures of the reign of George III’. ‘The highlanders enjoyed a separate language, traditions, usages and social habits’, yet the ‘candid observer will feel that they belong to the integral nationality of Scotland’.59 The ‘candid observer’ might be forgiven for concluding that Gladstone’s list of the separate experiences of the Scottish highlanders admitted them not only to the status of ‘nationality’ but to that of a people with a comprehensive, indeed complete, set of the characteristics that entitled them to claim to be a nation imbued with the ideology of nationalism. This served to illustrate the arbitrary nature of nationalism, since any group which constituted itself a nation, and could set out its stall of individual history, social patterns, language and the like, or could, like the Ulster Protestants, claim to be an integral part of the British nation must have special consideration (at least). But this would be to undermine the whole Gladstonian concept of the four nations that could – if Home Rule were granted – live together in amity, with Wales and Scotland, contented by good government, falling into line to make a truly united Kingdom.60 Gladstone did not exclude the possibility of special treatment for the Ulster Protestants, but he claimed that he must first be convinced that this was necessary, and that so far no realistic scheme had been proposed.61 It was hard, indeed impossible, for the Home Rule project, however primarily aimed at adjusting Ireland’s space in the United Kingdom, to


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Scotland and Wales A Scottish Liberal, Sir Robert Hamilton, feared that the 1886 Home Rule Bill proposal to exclude Irish MPs from Westminster might have an adverse effect on this happy union of patriotism and imperialism: ‘It is clear,’ he wrote to Lord Spencer on 11 April 1886, that the Scottish Liberal who looks forward to a measure of Home Rule for Scotland dreads the precedent which the exclusion of Irish members from the House of Commons will set for Scotland. This is not an idle fear. I do not think that such exclusions could ever take place against the unanimous wishes of the Scotch members to remain in Westminster, but I have heard Conservatives say that if they could only get the Scotch as well as the Irish members out of the House of Commons they would be pretty sure of getting their own way.63 This raises the question of the impact of Gladstonian policy towards Ireland on the four nations of the United Kingdom. It is persuasive to see Gladstone, as many contemporaries did see him, as the true friend of the Celtic nations, giving or presiding over legislation that recognised their special place in the history of the British Isles. This was not confined to the issue of Home Rule, central though that was. In an important article published in 1974 Clive Dewey traced the development of ‘Celtic agrarian legislation’ between 1870 and 1888, pointing out the significance of Gladstone’s land acts of those years, which pushed the British Government away from the laissez faire principles of free trade in land to the concession of comprehensive tenant rights for the mass of crofters and cottiers in Ireland and Scotland. Dewey argued that this was based on a cultural shift, one deeply influenced by historicist thinking, which subverted current ideas about how economic progress could be maintained, condemning ‘free trade in land’ as socially damaging and rehabilitating peasant agricultural and customary law. Thus in Ireland tenant right was presented not as a revolutionary measure but as a return to an older, more Celtic way or organising agrarian life.64


avoid affecting the consideration of the two other Celtic nations. In the House of Commons on 8 April 1886, at the start of the debate on his bill, Gladstone conceded that ‘the principle that I am laying down, I am not laying down exceptionally for Ireland’. It could be applied to Scotland, where local and imperial patriotism happily merged together.62


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Gladstone approached this historicist mentality with caution. In his Midlothian campaign he insisted that in the case of Scotland it was ‘not for me, to offer instruction, perhaps not even to offer a suggestion to you’, though he did go on to suggest some alteration of terms of leases to bring Scotland into line with certain practices in England, and he referred to the unscriptural aspects of the land laws, especially the law of entail.65 This was a significant concession, for in Scotland agrarian and religious grievances were fused to mount a powerful campaign against the evils of landlordism. The Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland, which had split from the Established Church in 1843, called for the application to Scotland of the reforms given to Ireland in Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act.66 In March 1883 the Government appointed a Royal Commission to ‘enquire into the condition of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands of Scotland’ (the Napier Commission). Its report argued for the protection of the crofter population, but it recommended that ‘Highland townships’ be resurrected, based on communal organisation and free from the individualism of occupancy rights.67 This was to push the historicist argument a golden age too far. The Professor of Greek in Edinburgh University, John Stuart Blackie, condemned the sacrifice of rural life in the Highlands in the interests of ‘economic theories alike inhuman and impolitic’.68 Gladstone responded to Blackie’s views in a letter to the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, in September 1885. In discussing the place of Highland chiefs in the land he acknowledged that a land bill for crofters’ parishes was ‘just as well as politic,’ though he did not think that this need be a cause for altering the land system for the rest of the country. ‘A vast mass of money-values has been created on lieu of the flesh and blood values which were formerly in vogue,’ he acknowledged, ‘and the representatives of the old flesh and blood, still largely on the ground, cannot I think be ousted from their title to some legislative consideration.’69 The Government fell back upon more familiar ground. In June 1886 the Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act copied the legislation of 1881 that had contributed to the decline of the Land League in Ireland. The Scottish Act offered security of tenure to all crofters, a commission to adjudicate on fair rents and arrears, compensation for improvements and the right to assign tenancy at death to a lawful heir. It applied to what were identified as seven crofter counties: Argyllshire, Invernessshire, Ross and Cromarty, Caithness, Sutherland, Orkney and Shetland. It did not end rural discontent; the aim of the Highland Land League remained the emotional one of restoring ‘to the Highland people their inherent rights in their native soil’. The Government’s purpose was to


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preserve a legitimate role for landlords – one rendered more legitimate by reform. The Act was passed on the last day of the parliamentary session, 25 June 1886. Disturbances continued in some areas until 1888, and it now fell to the experienced A.J. Balfour to take military measures and embark upon coercion.70 Gladstone was even more careful about the prospect of applying land legislation to Wales. In Swansea in 1887 he spoke against a background of rural unrest and riots in Wales, but he would go no further than to declare, ‘I am not going to enter this question, but what I have to say is this: it is extremely urgent and should be discussed.’71 Landlords in Wales were vulnerable to the charge that they were divided from their tenants by language, politics and religion. They were criticised not only by their tenants, and by an influential local newspaper press, but by the strong (though not universal) condemnation of the land system by local Nonconformist clergy, who linked grievances about the lack of compensation for improvements with the rural community’s duty to pay tithes to the Established Anglican Church in Wales.72 When Gladstone formed his fourth administration in August 1892 it was only ‘with some reluctance’ that he appointed a Royal Commission on the land question rather than a mere committee. By the time it reported in 1896 Gladstone had finally retired. The Commission achieved little. Its Liberal majority called for a Land Court, but the return of a Conservative Government ended any prospect of this being implemented.73 This provoked David Lloyd George, one of the rising men of Welsh radicalism and nationalism, to claim in October 1894 that a survey of the previous twenty-five years would show that Wales had had but scant success. This was not only because of Conservative obstruction, for England had always had her wants attended to without delay, whereas Wales could ask in vain for anything contrary to English prejudices. ‘The main factor is British legislation’, he complained, ‘is therefore so much what Ministry is in office as what is required by England at the hands of the Ministry.’74 Cynics – and not only cynics – might allege that this characterised Gladstone’s attitude to two of the three Celtic nations, that he raised questions but never answered them fully, that he shied away from adopting radical solutions to these questions and that English interests were in any case consulted first. Yet he was regarded as a hero by large sections of the Celtic nations; he is perhaps the only non-Welsh British Prime Minister ever to have enjoyed the accolade of having his biography written in the Welsh language.75 This was a reciprocal process. Gladstone was the first British Prime Minister to acknowledge, which he did in 1873 at a National Eisteddfod in Mold, ‘the prejudices which




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prevail to some extent in England and among Englishmen, with respect to the Welsh language and antiquity, and I have come here to tell you how and why I have changed my opinion’.76 At the Eisteddfod in 1888 in Wrexham he reiterated his praise of ‘a Welsh national institution’, described the song ‘Men of Harlech’ as ‘perhaps the finest national air in the world’ and declared that it was once the custom to ‘deplore the maintenance of the Welsh language and say, “let us have one language, one speech, and one communication.” ’ But he modified his ringing appeal by noting that he had not heard or found ‘that Welshmen, when they go to England, ever lose their attachment to their native land; and I have not found that they are placed at any undue disadvantage in consequence of the attachment, although it embraces and regards as the centre of Welsh life the tongue that is spoken by the people’.77 Gladstone’s role in the awakening of Scottish politics was complex. He helped place Scotland nearer the forefront of the Celtic dimension of British politics. Irish Nationalist MPs co-operated with the Scottish crofter MPs in an unsuccessful attempt to radicalise the 1886 Scottish Land Bill, and Parnell by 1889 was ‘a Highland hero’.78 In the same year he received the freedom of the city of Edinburgh (though not without opposition in the City Council). But Gladstone’s insistence on Irish Home Rule as the prior issue of British politics caused unease in Scotland. Gladstone’s undivided attention to Ireland during 1885–6 evoked some consternation among the Scottish political elite; Scotland, too, had her sense of exclusion from the centre of British politics, despite the resilience of the Liberal Party there. Gladstone reiterated his confident claim that Scotland was a model for the rest of the Celtic nations, but his second important argument for Irish Home Rule – that Scotland was a distinct ‘nationality’ and yet comfortable with the Union with England – ignored the possibility that Scotland, too, had a political dynamic, that Scottish politics were not necessarily set in that mould for ever. ‘I am a Liberal because I am a Scotsman,’ remarked one Scottish MP,79 but the equation was less straightforward than this implied. Scotland was a distinct country with a continuous history of its own monarchy until the reign of James VI/I; it retained a powerful Scottish identity in civil society, in education, in law and in culture. One authority has described nationalism as ‘always ... immanent in Scottish society’.80 From the mid- to late nineteenth century Scottish nationalism derived its strength from business and professional men who considered London remote and inaccessible, from literary and cultural groups and from radicals who perceived it as an instrument for reform.81 The Scottish Liberal Association called for Scottish Home


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Rule as early as June 1887.82 The question asked in the 1880s was why therefore Scotland should allow herself to fall behind Ireland in matters of governance. Lord Rosebery described Scotland as ‘munching the remainder biscuit of Irish legislation’, and even before the Home Rule crisis he warned Gladstone that Scotland was the backbone of the Liberal Party and was experiencing ‘some discontent as to her treatment’.83 Scottish pique was to some extent assuaged by the appointment of a Scottish Secretary in 1885, who happened to be a Conservative because the Liberal Government fell before a candidate was chosen.84 Although this moved Scotland away from the margins of British administration it did not end Scottish disaffection: the Scottish Home Rule Association (established in 1886) complained that to give Ireland Home Rule but deny it to Scotland was to reward terrorism while acting unjustly to a ‘loyal, industrious and intelligent people’.85 In 1893 Dr Robert Wallace, a Scottish Liberal MP, spoke feelingly of the fact that ‘under Irish Home Rule, unlucky Scotland, so long snubbed by England, is next going to be oppressed by Ireland’.86 Gladstone was haunted by his promise, made in 1871 when the Irish Home Government Association (as it was then called) began to make its case for a federal arrangement between Britain and Ireland, that ‘if the doctrine of home rule is to be established in Ireland, I protest on your behalf, that you will be entitled to it in Scotland, I protest on behalf of Wales, that it will be entitled to home rule also’.87 But in the same year he warned that if the Home Government Association’s call for federalism were to be granted, it would ‘disintegrate the capital institutions of the country, for the purpose of making ourselves a laughing-stock in the eyes of Europe’.88 In Midlothian in 1879 Gladstone advocated reform of local government in Scotland and Ireland, but added that he would not tolerate – nor would any ‘right minded Briton’ tolerate – an extension of local government that would compromise the authority of the imperial parliament, which was supreme ‘in these three Kingdoms’.89 This was, or appeared to be, a safe promise when Gladstone, like all other British politicians, had set his face firmly against Irish self-government. Now the promise might prove distracting, but Gladstone held the line against any Home Rule measures for the rest of the United Kingdom. Home Rule and land reform were not the only issues that drove Scottish and Welsh politics in new directions: disestablishment in Wales (and to a lesser degree in Scotland) was never far from political debate. In May 1870 Gladstone was careful to deny any significant resemblance between the Church of Ireland and the Anglican church in Wales. The Welsh sees were ‘simply four sees held by the suffragans of the




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Archbishop of Canterbury and form a portion of that province as much as any four English sees in that province’. He appealed to the history of the Welsh church to support his argument: it would be necessary to go back 1,300 years to prove that ‘distinct and separate existence, and 1,300 years from a period in which the waves of time effectually efface any footprints that may have been made in the sands’. There was a ‘complete ecclesiastical, constitutional, legal and, I may add for every practical purpose – historical identity between the Church in Wales and the rest of the Church of England’.90 Gladstone took the issue of Scottish disestablishment more seriously than that of Welsh disestablishment,91 though he played it down in the 1885 general election campaign, using the same language that he had adopted in the case of Wales: that he would not vote for an abstract resolution on Scottish disestablishment, adding that it would have to be ‘in a long vista’ and therefore not in the next parliament.92 But he did not expect the Church of Scotland to remain established for long, because ‘a Scotch question ... ought to be decided by the people of Scotland i.e. Parliament ought to accept their sense’.93 In the House of Commons in May 1890 Gladstone set out carefully four ‘grounds’ on which a religious establishment could be defended, insisting that these had not applied to the Church of Ireland, but leaving the question of the Scottish case open to the desire of the Scottish people themselves. In July 1892 he wrote out the heads of a bill, ‘Secret: Scottish Established Church’, to come into force on 1 January 1894.94 His valedictory message was that the question was ‘simple’ and that he did not believe that there was a country ‘where it could be introduced “so entirely without shock or serious trouble” ’.95 Ireland still enjoyed precedence in United Kingdom legislation; England, Scotland and Wales must wait.96 But in July 1892 Gladstone, reviewing the Liberal Party’s narrow majority in the House of Commons, acknowledged that ‘if we had thrown British questions into the shade we should have no majority at all’.97 In 1893 Liberals were belatedly considering ‘what satisfaction we can give to other wants, English, Welsh and Scotch’.98 Welsh Liberals, for their part, complained that the campaign for Scottish disestablishment would delay rather than forward the cause of Wales. On 30 October 1892 Stuart Rendel accused Gladstone of being ‘a little playfully perverse on this point’ in claiming a special interest in Scottish disestablishment and deploying this to stop Welsh disestablishment.99 It was no easy task to ensure fair play all round, let alone Home Rule all round, for the Celtic nations. Nevertheless, Gladstone did at last concede the case for Wales, presiding over the drafting of a disestablishment bill in


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The Gladstonian legacy Nevertheless, Gladstone’s Celtic adventures helped alter the nature of British political debate. He predicted that the defeat of his Home Rule Bill in 1886 would mean that the ‘nationalities would in their present position be a powerful radical contingent’, adding that ‘England overrides Wales and Scotland. This will bring forward Scotch & Welsh questions on national grounds.’101 On 30 May 1889 he spoke on ‘Scotch nationality’, warning that ‘the Scotch are a dangerous people, and that majority so dolefully recited, will be greatly aggravated unless the Scotch people are treated with prudence and consideration’.102 His Irish Home Rule policy was not, in his own mind, a prelude to a ‘Home Rule all round’ reorganisation of the four nations. But the notion, once introduced into British political debate, did not die out, and indeed gained momentum in the crisis over the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912–14 (as a means of meeting Ulster Unionist objections that Irish nationalists were gaining special recognition through a bill applied exclusively to Ireland) and even resurfaced in 1919–20, when the debate over congestion in British parliamentary business and the governance of the United Kingdom produced a Speaker’s Commission on Devolved Government (which came to nothing).103 A larger measure of United Kingdom devolution for Wales and Scotland (though not for England or her regions) had to wait until the last years of the twentieth century. Where was the fourth, the largest, the most powerful and the richest nation in the British Isles – England – in Gladstone’s reorientation of British politics? In his volume of the Oxford History of England, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (first published in 1938), E.L. Woodward noted in his bibliography that ‘the Irish point of view is generally stated more explicitly in contemporary polemical works than the English standpoint, though the assumptions of English nationalism are not less strong’.104 The Irish Home Rule crisis did indeed stir a kind of English nationalism because the widely held assumption that England and Britain were the same, that to be English was to be British without qualification, was challenged. There was also the fear that to concede Home Rule would initiate the disintegration of the United Kingdom at a time when


the late Autumn of 1893 and explaining his change of front by appealing to the principle he had used when accepting the case for Irish Home Rule in 1885–6: that he had ‘an old Parliamentary habit ... of looking to the constitutional representation of a country as the proper and legitimate organ of the expression of public opinion’.100


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European states such as Germany and Italy were consolidating their territories. And there was the determination that any group of people, nations, nationalities or whatever name they were called must be kept, by force if need be, within British borders. The Conservatives were the primary exponents of English patriotic ideas. During Gladstone’s Bulgarian atrocities campaign of 1876 they described the Liberals as ‘un-English’. Gladstone responded indignantly that the Conservatives were trying to ‘propagate the suspicion that the Liberal party of this country have entirely foresworn and forgotten the land of their births – that they are a sort of monsters in nature who are willing to lift their hand against the parents from whose womb they sprang’.105 It was England’s duty to redress Irish and, to a lesser extent, Welsh and Scottish grievances. These were the means by which England’s role as what Lord Rosebery in 1894 called the ‘predominant member’ of the Kingdom would be best fulfilled. Gladstone held that this was an essential part of England’s destiny; as he put it in a speech in Dublin in 1877, the Three Kingdoms of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland ‘should be one nation to the face of the world’.106 If he fell short of allowing Celtic demands to be pressed to the utmost (and after all Home Rule was a means of preventing Irish nationalists from pressing on to more extreme claims for self-government); if he prevaricated about the social and economic demands of the Welsh and Scots (land reform, disestablishment); if he is open to the charge of hypocrisy in his dealings with all three non-English nations, yet his ventures into these barely chartered waters were met with extraordinary enthusiasm even in decidedly Protestant Wales, which waited in vain for equal treatment with Ireland. It might be said that, in the eyes of Scottish and Welsh Liberalism, Ireland stood for causes more universal than the Irish by themselves could ever have represented. This is because nations that perceived themselves as having declined in the order of political, social, cultural and religious priorities responded, and indeed over-responded, to the ministrations of one of the greatest statesmen of the age. As Henry Richard put it (with some exaggeration), ‘Liberals and Nonconformists may well feel that they are under deep and lasting obligations to the illustrious Prime Minister who placed his all-powerful influence at their service.’107 This ‘service’ was as much moral as it was legislative – indeed, more so. When Gladstone visited the Eisteddfod at Wrexham in September 1888 he turned to Shakespeare’s plays for inspiration in analysing the English attitude to the Celtic nations. Shakespeare, he said, ‘disposed’ of the Irish very quickly and in a manner far from agreeable to them. To


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the Scots he was ‘slightly more respectful’. Then he turned to the Welsh, admitting that in The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare had Falstaff get the better of Sir Hugh Evans (‘I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel’). Yet, Gladstone remarked, it was curious that Shakespeare placed a Welsh clergyman in Windsor; this showed ‘the strong predilection of Queen Elizabeth for Wales’, and the ‘prior sovereigns of the Tudor race had a friendly feeling towards Wales’. In Henry V Shakespeare created the Welsh Fluellen as not only a very gallant soldier but a wise captain: ‘There is much care and valour in that Welshman,’ remarked King Henry. And there were other examples: ‘trusty’ Welshman, ‘loving’ Welshman, ‘hardy’ Welshman. ‘What else’, demanded Gladstone of his audience, ‘do you desire?’108 This exegesis was appropriate. For it summed up Gladstone’s engagement with the Celtic nations, and with the English. Gladstone entertained no doubts about the ‘nationality’ of the English: that was taken as read. In 1887 he proclaimed in Swansea that ‘Welsh nationality is as great a reality as English nationality’,109 thus setting up England as the benchmark against which other nationalities should be assessed and valued. The English were the people who attributed certain traits to the Celts, who in a very real sense defined them and the ‘national’ characters. When Gladstone used Shakespearean texts to illustrate the English attitude to the other three nations he carefully omitted certain less than flattering remarks about the Welsh (the ‘beastly shameless transformation’ by the Welshwomen on the English dead in Henry IV Part I) and the Scots (‘still a giddy neighbour to us’ in Henry V). His purpose was to reconcile the Celts to the English and thereby the English to the Celts. To the Scots Gladstone, like Shakespeare, was indeed ‘respectful’, and he regarded their nationality as indisputable;110 thus it was unnecessary to permit the Scots to bask in the shameless flattery that he endowed upon the Welsh. If he did not say, as did Henry V, ‘for I am Welsh, you know good countrymen’, he was in some way an honorary Welshman, a surrogate Welshman. He was at pains to express his hope that the Welsh nation would flourish long after he had gone, and ‘the youngest here gone’.111 But he showed most fervour for righting what he perceived to be the wrongs inflicted on the Irish nation by his own, English nation. In Henry V Shakespeare had the Irish Captain Macmorris reacting furiously to what he perceived to be a slur upon the Irish: ‘What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?’ Gladstone convinced himself that the key to ending the Irish wars that bedevilled England historically was to answer the question posed by Macmorris: ‘What ish my nation?’




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Gladstone’s engagement with the politics, religion and society of the peripheral peoples of the British Isles can be assessed on several levels. At its most political, it can be plausibly presented as a response to the strength of the Liberal Party after 1868 in Wales and Scotland, and to the need to placate Irish nationalists and retain the Liberal–Irish parliamentary party alliance. It can also be regarded, equally plausibly, as an attempt to strengthen the United Kingdom in an age when European states such as Germany and Italy were consolidating their national territory. Lord Salisbury warned in 1887 that ‘consolidation is inevitable’,112 but the Union of Hearts between England and Ireland was another road to this consolidation. There is also a deeper historical level. When the English kingdom in the later middle ages and early modern age was attempting to incorporate Wales, Scotland and Ireland into the ‘English nation’ it used a combination of force, legal reform, cultural hegemony and, eventually, electoral and party political integration. In the nineteenth century the metropolitan establishment had to respond to new pressures and demands: political, religious, social and economic. The means by which England established her hegemony over the other peoples of the British Isles left behind a certain edge, or tension – a variety of tensions, because this process was neither uniform nor applied simultaneously – which surfaced in times of crisis, and also in an era when new opportunities for change and reform were emerging and assuming a popular character. Gladstone believed that the British state had to reassert itself as an organic and a moral being. This is the significance of his incursion into the history and politics of the ‘four nations’.

Notes 1. Sir Thomas Erskine May, The Constitutional History of England since the Accession of George III (London, 1912), vol. III, pp. 168–9. 2. Ibid., pp. 168–9; H. G. C. Matthew, Gladstone, 1875–98 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 212–13. 3. For James Bryce’s fears for just such an outcome see John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870–1921 (Kingston and Montreal, 1989), p. 63. 4. J. S. Mill, Representative Government (London, 1861; London, 1975 edition), chapter 16, p. 385. 5. Lawrence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–1850 (Manchester, 1997). 6. K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘Nationalist Mobilisation and Governmental Attitudes: Geography, Politics and Nineteenth Century Ireland’ in Brockliss and Eastwood, A Union of Multiple Identities, pp. 162–78.


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7. Gareth Elwyn Jones, A History of Education in Wales (Cardiff, 2003), pp. 58–60. 8. For a review of the ‘Four Nations’ theory see Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 1–9. 9. House of Lords Debates, series 4, vol. XXII, col. 32. 10. Peter J. Jagger, Gladstone: The Making of a Christian Politician (Allison Park, PA, 1991), pp. 78–9. 11. Lewis Apjohn, W.E. Gladstone: His Life and Times (London, 1880 edition), pp. 50–1. 12. J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London, 1966), p. 364. 13. John Morley, The Life of Gladstone (London, 1908 edition), vol. I , p. 482. 14. Ibid., p. 483. 15. Jagger, Gladstone: The Making of a Christian Politician, p. ix. 16. Ibid., p. 1. 17. Robert S. Rait (ed.), Memorials of Albert Venn Dicey, Being Chiefly Letters and Diaries (London, 1925), pp. 82–3. 18. Justin McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone’s Life (London, 1898), p. 2. 19. Simon People and John Vincent, ‘Gladstone and the Working Man’ in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone (London. 1998), pp. 71–83, at p. 73. 20. M. R. D. Foot (ed.), W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 1879 (Leicester, 1971), p. 26. 21. Ibid., p. 57. 22. H. G. C. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. V, 1855–1860 (Oxford, 1978), p. 76 (entry for 23 Sep. 1855). 23. Apjohn, Gladstone, pp. 190–1. 24. Jones, History of Education in Wales, p. 84. 25. McCarthy, Story of Gladstone’s Life, p. 150. 26. David Howell (ed.), Roots of Rural Ethnic Mobilisation: Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, vol. VII, 1850–1940 (Aldershot, UK, 1993), pp. 71–7. 27. K. O. Morgan, ‘Gladstone, Wales and the New Radicalism’ in Jagger, Gladstone, pp. 123–35, at p. 129. 28. H. G. C. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, 1883–1886 (Oxford, 1990), p. 634 (entry for 30 Nov. 1886). 29. Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell, 1884–1887 (Royal Historical Society Camden Series, vol. 73) (London, 2008), p. 61; for the Ulster Liberal reaction to Gladstone’s desertion of their cause see The Ulster Liberal Association: A Sketch of Its History, 1885–1914 (Belfast, 1914), pp. 14–18. 30. K. O. Morgan, ‘Welsh Nationalism: The Historical Background’, Journal of Contemporary History, 6 (1971), pp. 153–71, at p. 153. 31. K. O. Morgan, ‘Gladstone and Wales’, Welsh History Review, 1, 1 (1960), pp. 65–82, at p. 67. 32. Ibid. 33. H. G. C. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. XII, 1887–1891 (Oxford, 1994), p. 13, fn. 6. 34. Morgan, ‘Gladstone and Wales’, p. 74. 35. Neville Masterman, The Forerunner: The Dilemmas of Tom Ellis, 1859–1899 (Llandybie, 1982), p. 73.




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36. Ibid., p. 74. 37. Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 73, 75–80. For an analysis of early nineteenth-century Welsh attitudes see Paul O’Leary, ‘A Tolerant Nation? Anti-Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Wales’ in R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins (eds.), From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 197–213. 38. Masterman, The Forerunner, p. 74. 39. Ibid., p. 76. 40. Prys Morgan, ‘Early Victorian Wales and Its Crisis of Identity’ in Brockliss and Eastwood, A Union of Multiple Identities, pp. 93–109, at pp. 106–7. 41. S. Miall, Henry Richard MP: A Biography (London, 1889), p. 320. 42. Richard Shannon, Mr Gladstone and Swansea (Swansea, 1982), pp. 2, 4, 10. 43. Masterman, The Forerunner, p. 99. 44. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 45. Ibid., pp. 189–90. 46. Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald, 16 Sept. 1892. A transcript of the speech was kindly given to me by Professor Emeritus David Howell, University of Swansea. 47. Masterman, The Forerunner, pp. 264–5. 48. W. C. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988), p. 235. See also Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, pp. 95–6 for the Scottish results. 49. D. G. Boyce, ‘Moral Force Unionism: A. V. Dicey and Ireland, 1885–1922’ in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to Twentieth Century Unionism: A Festschrift for A.T.Q. Stewart (Dublin, 2004), pp. 97–110. 50. Quoted in D. G. Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1977 (London, 1999), p. 6. 51. The Races of the British Isles: Mr Gladstone and the Nationalities of the United Kingdom: A Series of Letters to The Times by Sir John Lubbock ... (London, 1887) (letter of 18 Mar.). 52. Ibid., pp. 13–15 (letter of 21 Mar.). 53. Ibid., pp. 15–21 (letter of 25 Mar.). 54. Ibid., pp. 22–8 (letter of 28 Mar.). 55. Ibid., pp. 42–5 (letter of 2 May). 56. Ball, Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis, pp. 61–2. 57. D. G. Boyce, ‘Gladstone and the Unionists of Ireland, 1868–1893’ in David Bebbington and Roger Swift (eds.), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 184–201, at p. 190. 58. Ball, Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis, p. 61. 59. Boyce, ‘Gladstone and the Unionists’, pp. 194–5; for a full discussion of Gladstone and Ulster see James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question (Dublin, 1886). 60. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, p. 103. 61. Boyce, ‘Gladstone and the Unionists’, p. 197. 62. Alan O’Day, ‘Defending the Union: Parliamentary Opinions 1869 and 1886’ in D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), pp. 90–111, at p. 102. 63. Ball, Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis, pp. 316–17.


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64. Clive Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish Land Acts, 1870–1888’, Past & Present, 64 (1974), pp. 30–70, passim. 65. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, p. 81; Allan W. MacColl, Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–93 (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 96. 66. MacColl, Land, Faith and the Crofting Community, pp. 20–46. 67. Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation’, pp. 64–8. 68. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis, pp. 81–2. 69. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XI, pp. 277–8 (Gladstone to Harcourt, 19 Jan. 1885). 70. T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994), pp. 230–1. 71. Shannon, Mr Gladstone and Swansea, p. 10. 72. David Howell, ‘A “Less Obstrusive and Exacting” Nationality: Welsh Ethnic Mobilisation in Rural Communities, 1850–1920’ in Howell (ed.), Roots of Rural Mobilisation: Comparative Studies on Government and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, vol. VII, 1850–1940 (Dartmouth, 1993), pp. 50–97, at p. 65. 73. Morgan, ‘Gladstone, Wales and the New Radicalism’, pp. 123–35, at pp. 130–1. 74. Howell, ‘Welsh Ethnic Mobilisation’, pp. 87–8. 75. Griffith Ellis, W.E. Gladstone: ei fywyd a’I waith (Wrexham, 1898). 76. Miall, Henry Richard, p. 145. 77. A. W. Hutton and H. J. Cohen (eds.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, 1888–1891 (London, 1902), pp. 55, 56, 58. 78. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, pp. 115–16. 79. Paul Wood, ‘Nationalism and National Identity in British Politics, c.1880s to 1914’ in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds.), History, Nationalism and the Question of Britain (London, 2004), pp. 213–23, at p. 129. 80. D. N. McIver, ‘The Paradox of Nationalism in Scotland’ in Colin H. Williams (ed.), National Separatism (Cardiff, 1982), pp. 105–44, at p. 132. 81. McIver, ‘Paradox of Nationalism’, pp. 116–17. 82. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, p. 98. 83. Richard Finlay, ‘Scotland and Devolution, 1880–1945’ in Duncan Tanner et al., Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1939: Perspectives from the Four Nations (Manchester, 2006), pp. 27–44, at pp. 30–1. 84. Ibid., pp. 31–2. 85. Ibid., p. 32. 86. David Brooks, ‘Gladstone’s Fourth Administration, 1892–1894’ in Bebbington and Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays, pp. 225–42, at p. 235. 87. Finlay, ‘Scotland and Devolution’, p. 32. 88. Thomas Raleigh, Irish Politics (London, 1890), p. 28. 89. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, pp. 86–7. 90. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, vol. cci, cols. 1291–7 (May 1870). 91. Richard Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London and New York, 2007), p. 412. 92. H. G. C. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, vol. X, 1881–1883 (Oxford, 1990), pp. cxxviii–cxxix.




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93. Ibid., p. cxxviii. 94. H. G. C. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, vol. XIII, 1892–1896 (Oxford, 1994), p. 46, fn. 2. 95. Hutton and Cohen, Speeches of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, p. 198. 96. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics, p. 423. 97. Gladstone to Lord Spencer, 13 July, 1892 in Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, vol. XIII, p. 41. 98. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics, p. 441. 99. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, p. 103. 100. P. M. H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969), p. 266. 101. Matthew, Gladstone Diaries, Vol. XI, pp. 587–8. 102. Ibid., Vol. XII, p. 208, fn. 6. 103. Duncan Tanner, ‘How Devolution Died: The British Labour Party’s Constitutional Agenda’ in Tanner et al., Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, pp. 233–62, at pp. 246–7. 104. E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1938), p. 623. 105. Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Conservative Party and Patriotism’ in Robert Colls and Philip Dodds (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London, s1986), pp. 283–307, at p. 295. 106. Dublin Daily Express, 8 Nov. 1877. 107. Miall, Henry Richard, p. 157. 108. Hutton and Cohen, Speeches of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, pp. 61–3. 109. John Vincent, ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 63 (1977), p. 231. 110. Ibid., p. 231. 111. Hutton and Cohen, Speeches of the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone, p. 67. 112. The Times, 20 Dec. 1887.


288


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Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, Earl of, 166 accommodation notion, 235 Acton, John Emerich Edward DalbergActon, Baron, 3, 170 critique of Gladstone, 56–7 on MacKnight’s Burke biography, 183n. 35 Adair, Shafto, Sir, 166 adaptation Aristotle’s theory, 18 advanced Nationalism, 250 The Age of Reform (Woodward), 281 Alexander, Cecil Frances, 58 Alexander, William, Archbishop, 58 Allen, David, 176 All-Ireland Committee, 247 ‘Alofus’, 97 ‘Alternative Policies in Ireland’ (Bryce), 137n. 43 Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), 249–50 Anglican Church in South Africa, 48 Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), 6 anti-Gladstonianism, 65, 84n. 55 Chamberlain’s, 65, 75–81 Hartington’s, 66–75, 81, 81n. 3 Liberals’, 69–71 Anti-Maynooth Committee, 15, 20, 31 AOH, see Ancient Order of Hibernians Apostolicae Curae (Leo XIII), 57 Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, 59 Arch, Joseph, 92–3 on class and cause of reform, 98 defeat in Norfolk North West, 99–100 Aristotle, 19, 27, 36n. 67 adaptation theory, 18 Armour, J. B., Reverend, 154–5 Arnold, Matthew, 44

Arnold, Thomas, 44 ‘Arraigned’ (cartoon), 195–6 Arthur, William, Reverend, 90 ‘Articles on Ireland’, 128, 132 Ashworth, Jesse, Reverend, 91 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 2 Atherley-Jones, L. A., 89 Augustine, St., 165 Autobiography (Tone), 120 Balfour, A. J., 180, 200, 234 on Irish civil servants, 223–4 on Irish civil servants’ rights, 224–5 political cartoons, 200, 201 Balfour, Gerald, 180, 234, 247 Ball, G. M., 104 banal nationalism, 238 The Baptist (newspaper), 265 on clericalism in Ireland, 90 on Gladstone, 104 Beaumont, Gustave de influence on Gladstone, 26 Bebbington, David, 24, 27 on ‘High Politics’ historians, 6 Beckett, J. C. on Gladstone’s Irish policy, 241 Bedell, William, Bishop, 25 Belfast Chamber of Commerce, 156, 180 Belfast Newsletter, 151, 172 MacKnight obituary, 181 Belfast Telegraph (newspaper), 163 Bentley, Michael, 6 Beresford, John George de la Poer, Primate, 58 Bew, John on civic Unionism, 162–3 Bew, Paul, 163 on civic Unionism, 162–3 critique of Home Rule Bill, 10–11 on Gladstone’s Irish engagement, 236


Index

289

10.1057/9780230292451 - Gladstone and Ireland, Edited by D. George Boyce and Alan O'Day 9780230_221949_14_ind.indd 289

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Biagini, Eugenio, 7, 17, 87, 237 on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 113–14 on Gladstone’s Home Rule policy, 209 on MacKnight as the ‘great Ulster chronicler’, 163 on ‘politics of humanitarianism’, 112 on Radical Unionism, 163 on renewal of interest in Gladstone, 4 Billig, Michael banal nationalism, 238 Birmingham Daily Post (newspaper) support for Home Rule, 102–3 Bismarck, Otto von, 181 Blackburn, Samuel, 20 Blackie, John Stuart, 276 Blair, Anthony (Tony), 4 on law of succession to British throne, 60 Bodkin, Matthias acting editor of United Ireland, 189–90, 205, 206 admiration for Gladstone, 189–90 on Chamberlain, 195–6 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 164 MacKnight’s biography on, 170, 171 MacKnight’s critique of, 165, 166 Boulter, Hugh, 25 Bradley, Ian, 59 Brett, Reginald, 72, 73 Bridges, J. H., 131 Bright, John, 50, 51, 77, 102, 105, 116 critique of Gladstone, 148 O’Brien’s appeal to, on land question, 119–20 The Bristol Mercury (newspaper), 103–4 on Parnell’s 1885 election manifesto, 89 Britannia (symbolic character) in political cartoons, 200–3 British Anti-State-Church, 46 ‘British nation’ Celtic races, 257 language variety, 258–9 political institutions, 258 question of, 6, 257–8

tradition of ‘four nations’, 12, 259, 261, 273, 284 see also United Kingdom Brown, Callum, 59 Bruen, Henry, 214 Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount, 110, 115, 118, 119, 125–6, 130, 137n. 43, 148, 150, 158 dislike of social politics, 112 on Home Rule Bill provisions for Irish civil service, 215 on Irish nation, 273 on nationalities in UK, 271–2 on safeguards for Ulster, 273–4 supervision of Liberal literary campaign for Home Rule, 129–32 Bull, John (symbolic character), 118 in political cartoons, 200, 203, 204 Bull, Philip, 188 Bunce, J. T., 102 Burdett-Coutts, Angela Georgina, 48 Burke, Edmund, 26, 27, 179 influence on Gladstone, 114 legacy, 162–4 MacKnight’s admiration for, 165 MacKnight’s biography on, 168–71, 183n. 35 MacKnight’s defence of, 166–7, 170–1, 181 Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 27 influence on Gladstone, 114 Butler, Perry, 16 Butt, Isaac, 256 ‘The Cabinet Trick’ (cartoon), 191–2 Cambrian News (newspaper), 98 Campbell, Alastair, 60 Canada, 177 constitutional reforms, 158 disestablishment of Anglican Church, 43–4 Canning, Charles John Canning, Earl, 25 Carlyle, Thomas, 165 Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, Earl of, 10, 146 cartoons, see political cartoons Carty, James, 5


290 Index


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‘The Case of the Ulster Protestants’ (Bryce), 148 Catholicism England and, 258 Gladstone’s views, 25–7, 259–60 national identity and, 239–40 reservations against, 90–1 Ulster Presbyterians’ fear of increasing influence of, 143 Cavendish, Frederick, Lord, 74, 91 Cavendish, Spencer Compton, Lord, see Devonshire, Spencer Compton Cavendish, Duke of CDB, see Congested Districts Board Celtic races Victorian England’s views, 257 Chadwick, Owen, Reverend, 45, 64n. 80 Chamberlain, Joseph, 67, 98, 102, 152–3, 154 April 1886 Birmingham address, 87 campaigns to oust Gladstone, 65, 79–80 contrasted with Hartington, 75 elective ‘central board’ for Ireland, 147 Gladstone and, 65, 75–81, 147 and Hartington partnership, 76–7 on Irish nationalism, 100 on Irish representation, 102–3 on Land Purchase Bill, 96 manifesto, 100 political cartoons, 195–6, 197–8, 200 resignation, 80 resignation threat, 78, 147 Ulster question and, 146–7, 158 Unauthorised Programme 1885, 78 Channing, Francis, 96–7 A Chapter of Autobiography (Gladstone), 55–6 Chester Castle, 52 Childers, H. C. E., 211 chromolithography, 190 Church Assembly, 59 Churchill, Randolph, Lord, 225 Churchill, Winston, 1, 42 Church in Wales, 277 disestablishment, 58–9, 264–5, 266, 279–81

291

Church of England, 45, 265 20th century reforms, 59 disestablishment issue, 59 disestablishment issue in 1990s–2000s, 41 Gladstone on status of, 41–2 Gladstone’s critique of ritualism of, 43 internal problems, 60 Church of Ireland, 3, 7–8, 260 disestablishment, 8, 11, 49–58, 142–3, 262–3, 266 disestablishment aftermath, 58–61 disestablishment campaign by Liberation Society, 46 Church of Scotland, 26, 37n. 84 1843 split, 46 disestablishment, 266, 280 Church Principles Considered in Their Results (Gladstone), 28, 42, 47 on Catholicism, 25 critique of O’Connell’s sectarian slogans, 25 Maynooth grant arguments, 23 church-state relations, 41 1830s, 43 1840s–50s, 46–8 disestablishment in North America, 43–4 disestablishment of Church of Ireland aftermath, 58–61 disestablishment of Church of Ireland and, 8, 11, 49–58 Gladstone and, 56–8, 35n. 55, 39n. 115 Gladstone’s defence of traditional status of, 44–6 Gladstone’s historical analysis, 15, 18–19, 27–31 Church Temporalities (Ireland) Act (1833), 43 civic Unionism, 162–3 civil service of minimal state, 210 Morley’s definition of civil servants, 217 civil service, Irish 1886 Home Rule Bill provisions, 211–12, 215–17


Index


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civil service, Irish – continued 1886 Home Rule Bill provisions, responses of, 217–18 1893 Home Rule Bill provisions, 220, 224 1893 Home Rule Bill provisions, responses of, 220–6 ambiguity of the term ‘Irish’ civil service, 213 breach of rights of, 224–5 campaign for equality with London salaries (1866–73), 212–15 cost, 210–11, 219–20 expansion between 1861–1911, 226–8 implications of Home Rule for, 12, 228–9 ineffective administration, 210–11 permanent civil servants, 220–3, 225 professionalised and patronage posts, 227 under Irish Free State, 228–9 see also Dublin Castle Clancy, John, 225 Clarendon, George William Frederick Villiers, Earl of, 66 class(es) Home Rule Bill and, 96–100 A Class-Book of Irish History (Carty), 5 Clayton, Ruth, see Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton Clerkenwell Prison, 52 coercion, 6, 9, 11, 92–3, 112, 176 depiction in political cartoons, 200, 202 notion, 235 Colenso affair, 48–9 Colenso, John William, 48–9 Colley, Linda on Irish exceptionalism, 237–8 Collings, Jesse, 76, 79–80, 99 Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 48 comic journals, 186–7 Committee of Permanent Civil Servants in Ireland demand for guarantees on status, salary, pensions, and security, 220–3

Comte, Auguste, 237 conciliation, 234 Disraeli’s policy of, 53 Gladstone’s policy of, 240–3 notion, 235 confessionalism, Anglican, 17 Congested Districts Board (CDB) (Ireland), 225, 226–7 Congregationalist (newspaper), 104 Conlin, Jonathan on Gladstone’s analysis of Europe’s artistic history, 18–19 Conservative Party (UK) on Irish civil servants’ rights, 224 Irish policy in later 1880s, 199–200 ‘Killing Home Rule by Kindness’ policy, 226–7 MacKnight on, 176, 177 Parnellite party’s support, 88–9 rejection of Home Rule in its entirety, 154 stand on Irish Church reform, critique of, 50 Ulster question and, 154, 157 constructive Unionism, 223, 233, 234 Cooke, A. B., 2, 66, 241 on high politics of Home Rule, 86, 87, 141, 208 cooperation politics, 233–4, 236, 252 after Gladstone, 243–4 evolution, 246–8 failure, 235 fractured parties, 244–6 notion, 235 party retrenchment, 248–51 Corneille, Pierre, 164–5 Corrigan, Dominic, 214 Cosgrove, Richard A., 114 Cowen, Joseph, 90 Cowling, Maurice, 16, 44 Cranbrook, Gathorne GathorneHardy, Earl of, 77, 116 Crawford, Sharman, 128, 175 Crimean War, 167 Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act (1886), 276–7 Crosskey, Henry, 103 Cruikshank, George, 186, 187 Cullen, Paul, Cardinal, 52–3


292 Index


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Daily News (newspaper) loyalty to Gladstone, 93 report on Welsh nationalism, 99 Dale, R. W., 92, 102 DATI, see Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction Davitt, Michael, 250, 263, 264 Delanty, Gerard on social context of nationalism, 238–9 democracy depiction in political cartoons, 195–9 majoritarian, 21–2 Démocratie en Amerique (Tocqueville), 24 Denison, George, 47, 59 Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) (Ireland), 226–7, 246–7 Derby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Earl of, 30, 51, 53, 74 Derry Journal, 145 devolution Dunraven’s proposal, 248, 251 of Scotland and Wales, 6, 281 Devonshire, Spencer Compton Cavendish, Duke of, 10, 101, 120, 149, 172, 211 1868 election defeat, 82n. 6 and Chamberlain partnership, 76–7 Chamberlain vs., 75 demotions, 67–9 Gladstone and, 66–75, 79, 81, 81n. 3 as intermediary between Queen and Gladstone, 84n. 47 MacKnight’s praise of, 178 party leadership, 69–72 political cartoons, 197–8, 200 premiership/leadership crisis, 71–3, 83n. 37 Devonshire, William Cavendish, Duke of, 67, 68, 72 Dewey, Clive on Celtic agrarian legislation, 275 Dicey, A. V., 110, 114, 129, 130, 134n. 1, 261 objections to Irish Home Rule, 268–9 Dickens, Charles, 165

Dickson, T. A., 151, 152, 154 Dilke, Charles, 76, 83n. 28 Dillon, John, 243, 245, 250 Dillwyn, Lewis Llewelyn on endowments for religious purposes, 49–50, 51 disestablishment in Canada and US, 43–4 Church in Wales, 58–9, 266, 279–81 Church of Ireland, 8, 11, 49–58, 142–3, 262–3 Church of Ireland, aftermath, 58–61 Church of Ireland, campaign for, 46 Church of Scotland, 266, 280 Gladstone’s suspect position, 46–7 MacKnight’s opposition, 172 Disraeli, Benjamin, 51, 55, 77, 164 Irish policy, 53 MacKnight on, 170, 175, 176 MacKnight’s biography on, 165–6 Palmerston vs., 166 resignation, 56 Dissenters’ Chapels Bill, 45 Döllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von, 57 Downing, McCarthy, 214 Dragonetti de Torres, Marquis, 260 Drummond, Thomas promotion of bureaucratic efficiency, 219 Dublin Castle, 149, 152, 258 influence on Gladstone’s Irish policy, 141–2, 144–6, 158 O’Brien and, 188 see also civil service, Irish Dublin Daily Express (newspaper), 175 Dublin University Magazine, 26 Dufferin, Frederick Hamilton-TempleBlackwood, Marquess of, 177 Duffin, Adam, 150–1, 156 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 123 Dunraven, Windham WyndhamQuin, Earl of, 228, 234, 247–8, 251


Index 293

Eastern question, 70 Ebrington, Lord, see Fortescue, Hugh Fortescue, 4th Earl Ecclesiastical Titles Act (1851) (UK), 47


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Eden, Emily, 66 education Irish University question, 173–4 reforms in England and Wales, 262 Wales, inquiry report, 259 elections, see general election(s) Elementary Education Act (1870), 262 Ellis, Thomas, 98, 265–6, 267 Gladstone obituary, 268 England, 259 Catholic question, 258 discourse of nationalism/ nationhood in UK and, 268–9 Gladstone on English attitude to Celtic nations, 282–3 in Gladstone’s reorientation of British politics, 281–2 nationality debate, 269–75 view on Celtic races, 257 see also United Kingdom English Labourers’ Chronicle (newspaper), 104 English language as medium of instruction, 262 superiority, 259 Episcopal Church (US), 43 Erastianism, 29, 47 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland on strategies of dominant societies, 238 Erin (symbolic character) in political cartoons, 198–9, 200–1, 203, 204 Esprit des Loix (Montesquieu), 24 Ethics (Aristotle), 19 ethics in politics, see moral politics ethnic distinction, 248–9 ethnic solidarity, 240 Evening Memories (O’Brien), 189 Fawcett, Henry, 174 ‘A Federal Union with Ireland’ (O’Brien), 124 Fenians/Fenianism, see Irish Republican Brotherhood Feuchtwanger, E. J. on Gladstone’s pluralism, 16–17 Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland (O’Brien), 117, 118, 120, 123, 126, 127

First Irish Land Act (1870), see Land Act (1870) Fitzmaurice, Edmond Fitzmaurice, Baron, 131 Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 186 Fitzwilliam, William WentworthFitzwilliam, Earl, 5 Flag of Ireland (newspaper), 187 see also United Ireland (newspaper) ‘A Flag of Truce’ (cartoon), 192–3 Foot, M. R. D., 2 Forster’s Education Act (1870), 262 Forster, William, 69, 72, 120, 176 Fortescue, Hugh Fortescue, 4th Earl on Liberal 1885 election addresses, 89 Fortnight Review (magazine), 74 Foster, R. F., 113 Fox, Charles James, 164, 166, 171 franchise reforms (1884), 196 Fraser’s Magazine articles on Burke, 164 Free Church of Scotland, 46 Freeman’s Journal, 187–8, 189 Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 276 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 50 Garvin, Tom, 239 Gellner, Ernest, 240 general election(s) 1868, 56, 143 1874, 69, 174 1880, 77 1885, 9–10, 88–9, 144, 196, 257, 263 1886, 196–7, 198–9, 268 1892, 203, 280 1895, 226 general election campaigns 1868, Gladstone, 55 1885, Gladstone, 123 1885, main themes, 89–90 Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, 72, 261–2, 276, 279 General Register Offices (Dublin and London), 212 General Synod, 59 Geological Service in Ireland (GSI), 213 George III, King of the United Kingdom, 170, 171


294 Index


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Gillray, James, 186, 187 Gladstone, Catherine, 173 Gladstone, Herbert, 65, 74, 79, 80, 103, 178, 256, 267 On first Home Rule Bill, 88 Gladstone, Mary, 56, 57 Gladstone, William Ewart analysis of Europe’s artistic history, 18 Celtic engagement, 12, 281–4 as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 209–10 as conciliationist, 240–3 decline in House of Commons, 69–71 doctrinal conservatism, 48–9 family ancestry, 261 formative influences, 142–4 influencing sources of his reading of Irish history, 12, 113, 115, 120–2, 125–8, 133–4 Irish historical writings on, 5–6 Irish policy, 236–7, 251–2, 256, see also Home Rule (Ireland); Home Rule Bill entries Irish policy, contentious interpretations, 1–4, 233–6 Irish policy, impact on Scotland and Wales, 275–81 on Italian unification, 260–1 legacy, 4, 12, 233–4, 251–2, 281–4 Liberal rank and file’s special regard for, 104–5 Maynooth resignation, 16, 20, 22, 27, 45–6, 260 moralistic crusade, 30, 87–8, 104–5, 111–12, 126–7, 259–60, 264 as novel and distinctive leader, 87–8 obituary by Ellis, 268 obituary by MacKnight, 167, 173, 180 other Prime Ministers vs., 1–2 on Parnell, 236, 242–3 on political cartoons, 186 Queen Victoria and, 84n. 47 renewal of interest in, 4–6 retirement, 226, 233 use of Shakespeare’s texts, 282–3 view of Ireland as special case, 262–8 see also anti-Gladstonianism

295

Gladstone Centenary Essays (Bebbington and Swift), 6, 36n. 67 Gladstone Diaries (Matthew), 2, 3, 87, 208 ‘Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics’ (Matthew), 87 ‘Gladstone’s Golden Wedding’ (cartoon), 203–4 Globe (newspaper) MacKnight obituary, 181 Glynne, Catherine, 261 Godkin, E. L., 130 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 165 Gorham case (1850), 47–8 The Governing Passion (Cooke and Vincent), 86, 87, 141 Government of Ireland Bill (1886), see Home Rule Bill (1886) ‘The Grand Old Man and His Puny Calumniators’ (cartoon), 200–1 Granville, Granville Leveson-Gower, Earl, 66–7, 68, 69, 70–1, 72, 83n. 37, 242 Grattan, Henry, 194 ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, 112–13, 114, 125, 126, 131, 132–3 Graves, Arnold, 222 Gray, John, Sir, 51 Gray, Robert, 48 Gray, William, 102 Green, F. E., 99 Griffiths, P. C. on Liberal Party machine, 100–1 Grimshaw, T. W., 222 GSI, see Geological Service in Ireland Guizot, François, 8 Gurdon, R. T., 101 ‘Hail to the Chief!’ (cartoon), 205 Haldane, Richard Haldane, Viscount, 59 Hamer, D. A., 96 Hamilton, Edward, 243 Hamilton, Robert, Sir, 146, 217, 275 transfer to Tasmania, 218 Hammond, J. L., 1, 157, 241 Handbook of Home Rule (Bryce), 112, 130, 133 Harbour Commissioners, 156


Index


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Harcourt, William, Sir, 77, 79, 147, 276 Hardy, Gathorne, 51 Harrison, Robert T., 113 Hartington, Lord, see Devonshire, Spencer Compton Cavendish, Duke of Harvie, Christopher, 87, 119 Hastings, Warren, 171 Havelock-Allan, Henry, Sir, 101 Hawarden Kite, 147, 178, 191 Hayden, Luke, 225 Healy, T. M., 218–19 Hechter, Michael on ethnic solidarity, 240 Helmstadter, Richard, 17 on Gladstone’s approach to churchstate relations, 19 Heneage, Edward, 97 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 283 Henry V (Shakespeare), 283 Herschell, Farrer Herschell, Baron, 215 Hilton, Boyd, 17, 27 historians on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 112–16 historians, Irish on Gladstone’s Irish policies, 5–6 ‘High Politics’ school, 6, 7 ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 110–12 historians’ reactions to, 112–16 O’Brien’s contribution, 125–34 ‘The Historical Plays of Shakespeare’ (MacKnight), 164–5 historical scholarship, Gladstone’s readings of, 16–19 history, Irish O’Brien’s use of, 116–20 sources influencing Gladstone’s reading of, 12, 113, 115, 120–2, 125–8, 133–4 under the Union, 3, 111–12, 126–7, 264 see also ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule History of England (Lingard), 26–7 History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II, with a Preliminary discourse on the Ancient State of That Kingdom (Leland), 26

Hobsbawm, Eric J., 240 Holland, Henry Vassall-Fox, Baron, 167, 170–1 Home Government Association, 256, 279 see also Irish Parliamentary Party Home Rule (Ireland), 11–12 advocates, 92–3 after 1893, 226–7 Conservative policy, 154, 226–7 Gladstone and, 1–5, 9–10, 120–1, 235–6 Gladstone’s analogy between Canadian constitutional reforms and, 158 Gladstone’s conversion to the cause of, 11–12, 120–1, 127, 144, 147, 178, 191, 234, 256–7, 263 Gladstone’s conversion to the cause of, interpretations on, 208–9 Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for, 110–12, 125–34 Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for, critique of, 112–16 high and low politics and, 86–8, 141 impact outside Ireland, 257, 263–4 implications for Irish civil service, 12, 228–9 MacKnight’s opposition, 177–8 moral politics, 3, 104–5, 111–12, 126–8, 259–60, 264 O’Brien’s assistance in laying the ground for, 122–5 O’Brien’s justification, 118 Home Rule (Scotland) demands, 278–9 Home Rule (Wales), 279 Home Rule Bill (1886), 1, 4 and 1893 Bill compared, 211 Bew’s critique, 10–11 civil service provisions, 211–12, 215–17 civil service responses, 217–18 class, privilege and cause of reform, 96–100 executive and legislative provisions, 211, 216–17, 268–9 failure, 210 failure, Gladstone’s role, 140–1


296 Index


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Home Rule Bill (1886) – continued financial clauses, 212 Gladstone’s introductory speech, 127, 152, 189, 210 Liberal rank and file party loyalty and, 100–5 Liberal rank and file responses to, 88–91, 96–9 press responses, 89, 90–2, 93, 102–5 religious dimension, 90–1 twenty-fourth clause, 93–6 Ulster Liberals’ responses, 150–6 Home Rule Bill (1893), 153, 180–1, 203 and 1886 Bill compared, 211 civil service provisions, 220, 224 civil service provisions, responses, 220–6 executive and legislative provisions, 211 failure, 156–7, 226 fifth schedule, 221, 223–4 scope of savings in administration, 219–20 Home Rule Bill (1914), 281 Home Rule League/Party (Ireland), see Irish Parliamentary Party The Home Ruler’s Manual (O’Brien), 117, 128 Hone, George, 187 Hooker, Richard Gladstone’s critique of, 28, 31, 39n. 115 Hoppen, Theodore K., 258 House of Commons. Public Accounts Committee (PAC), 227–8 Hroch, Miroslav, 240 Hume, David, 165 Hurst, Michael, 87, 102 Huxley, T. H. nationality debate, 272–3 IEB, see Intermediate Education Board ILC, see Irish Land Commission inculturation, 48 Inglis, Robert, Sir, 31 Intermediate Education Board (IEB) (Ireland), 227 Ireland 1810–33, 242 civic Unionism, 162–3

297

Disraeli’s conciliatory policy, 53 Gladstone on mistreatment of, 3, 111–12, 126–8, 264 Gladstone’s engagement with, 11, 49, 262–8 in Gladstone’s writings, 25 influence of clericalism, 90 Irish University question, 173–4 landlordism, 117–18, 119–20 ‘long gestation’ period, 233 nationalism, 52, 91–2, 98, 100 public spending, 210–11, 219–20, 227–8 question of competency for Home Rule, 91–2 similarities of predicament with Wales, 265–6 special status, 258 suffrage reforms, 196 union between Great Britain and, 237 and Wales compared, 98 see also Home Rule (Ireland); Home Rule Bill entries Ireland: Social, Political and Religious (Beaumont), 26 Irish Church Act (1869) (UK), 8, 56 Irish Government Bill (1893), see Home Rule Bill (1893) Irish Home Rule, see Home Rule (Ireland) Irish Land Commission (ILC), 226–7 The Irish Land Question and English Public Opinion (O’Brien), 117–18, 119–20 The Irishman (newspaper), 187 see also United Ireland (newspaper) Irish National Land League, 91, 92, 93, 242, 276 1879–81 campaign, 9 coverage in United Ireland, 187 Irish News (newspaper) MacKnight obituary, 181 Irish Parliamentary Party, 9, 10 1885 election(s), 196, 257, 263 1885 election manifesto, 89 internal divisions, 203–4, 205, 244–5 support for Conservatives, 88–9, 176, 177 see also United Ireland (newspaper)


Index


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The Irish Question (Gladstone), 153 Irish Reform Association, 243, 247–8 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 8, 49, 116, 142–3, 234, 245 revival of armed struggle approach, 52 Irish Unionist Alliance, 223 ‘Irish Wrongs and English Remedies’ (O’Brien), 117, 123, 126 ‘Is Home Rule a Class Question?’, 100 Italian unification, 260–1 Jackson, Alvin, 234 on Gladstone Diaries, 2 on Gladstone’s Irish engagement, 236 James V, King of Scotland, 278 James VI, King of Scotland, 278 Jenkinson, Edward G., 144–6, 217 Jenkins, Roy, 5, 52, 236 Jenkins, Terry, 86 Jews, 166 Johnston, William, 143, 172 Jones, Thomas, 2 Kane, R. R., Reverend, 155 Keble, John, 43, 45, 57 reading of Gladstone’s views on church-state relations, 28–9 Kerr, Dónal, 20 ‘The Key to the Position’ (cartoon), 200 Kilmainham Treaty (1882), 9, 234 Kimberly, John Wodehouse, Earl of critique of Gladstone, 69 Knowles, James, 122–3, 124, 137n. 27 Labouchere, Henry, 84n. 55, 144, 225 Land Act (1870), 8, 114, 143, 242 Land Act (1881), 9, 114, 122, 143, 242, 276 Land Act (1903), 247, 250 Land Convention, 247–8 Land League, see Irish National Land League landlordism depiction in political cartoons, 192–4 Ireland, 117–18, 119–20

press coverage of agitation against, 187, 188 Wales, 267, 277 Land Purchase Bill, 93, 96 land reforms Barry O’Brien on need of, 117–18, 119–20 Irish tenant farmers’ concerns of 1870 Land Bill, 173 Scotland, 275–7 Wales, 277 William O’Brien’s concerns, 188 see also Land Act entries languages English, 259, 262 variety in UK, 258–9 Welsh, 259, 262, 277–8 ‘The Last of the Wolves’ (cartoon), 200 Lecky, W. E. H. critique of, 130, 132–3 defection to the Unionists, 129 on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 112–13 impartial treatment of history, 119 influence on Gladstone, 113, 115, 125, 127 Leeds Mercury (newspaper) on Irish representation, 95 on Land Purchase Bill, 93 references to association of violence with Irish Nationalists, 91–2 Lefevre, Shaw, 129–30 Leicester, Joseph, 92–3, 99 Leland, Thomas, 37n. 79, 37n. 81 influence on Gladstone, 26 Leo XIII, Pope, 57 The Lepracaun (newspaper), 186 ‘Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century’ (Gladstone), 112, 130 Letter to the Duke of Bedford (Burke), 171 Levi, Margaret on ethnic solidarity, 240 LGB, see Local Government Board


298 Index


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Liberal Party (UK) 1868 elections, 56 1874 elections, 69, 174 1880 elections, 77 1885 elections, 88–90, 144 1886 elections, 198–9, 268 1892 elections, 203, 280 anti-Gladstonianism, 69–71 anti-Home Rule numbers, 81n. 1 demand for safeguards for Ulster, 12, 146–9 disestablishment of Church of Ireland and, 8 Hartington’s leadership, 69–72 Home Rule and, 87 Home Rule as inherent policy, 124–5 Home Rule, disagreement over, 65 Home Rule literary campaign, 128–34 Home Rule, rank and file’s party loyalty and, 88, 100–5 Home Rule, rank and file’s response, 88–91, 96–9 Irish Church policy, 55 Irish Nationalists and, 1880–85, 88–9 Irish representation question, 93–5 premiership/leadership crisis, 71–3, 83n. 37 rift, 65–6, 80–1 Liberal Unionist Party (UK) 1886 elections, 198–9 anti-Gladstonianism, 65, 66 campaign against Home Rule, 152–3 on Irish representation, 94 MacKnight’s support, 178–9 rise of, 80–1, 101–2 Liberation Society, 46, 53 Lichfield House Compact, 128 The Life and Times of Edmund Burke (MacKnight), 168–71, 183n. 35 Life of Gladstone (Morley), 134 Life of Lord Bolingbroke (MacKnight), 170, 171 Linen Merchants’ Association, 156 Lingard, John influence on Gladstone, 26–7

299

Lingen, Ralph Lingen, Baron, 218 Literary and Political Biography of Benjamin Disraeli (MacKnight), 165–6, 167 ‘The Literature of the Age’ (MacKnight), 164, 165 Lloyd George, David on British legislation, 277 and Gladstone compared, 1–2 Lloyd George, William, 2 Local Government Board (LGB) (Ireland), 226–7, 228 Locke, John, 17 Loughlin, James on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 113 Louis-Philippe, King of the French, 167 Lowe, Robert, 214 Loyal Orange Institution, 249–50, 251 see also Orangeism Lubbock, John, Sir on racial mixtures in UK, 270–2 Lubenow, W. C. on ‘High Politics’ historians, 7 on Liberals’ voting patterns and responses to Home Rule, 87 Lucas, Alderman, 102 Lucy, Henry, 71 Lynch, M. J., 43 Lyon Playfair reforms, 220 Mac—, see also Mc— Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 29, 31, 45 MacKnight’s critique, 165, 170–1 MacDonagh, Michael, 118 MacDonnell Commission, 227 MacDonnell, G. P., 131 MacDonnell, J. C., 58 MacKnight, Thomas, 12, 154, 163–4 on 1874 Liberal defeat, 174 admiration of Gladstone, 164, 166, 169–70 biographical works of, 168–71, 183n. 35 on Bolingbroke, 165, 166 on Burke, 166–7, 170–1, 179, 181 Catholic Liberals and, 174


Index


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MacKnight, Thomas – continued on Crimean War, 167 death, 181 on Disraeli, 165–6, 170, 175, 176 early works, 164–5 editor of Northern Whig, 171–5, 179 and Gladstone, cordial relations, 167–70, 172–8 and Gladstone, estranged relations, 177–9 and Gladstone, last years, 179–81 Gladstone obituary, 167, 173, 180 on Home Rule, 177–8 on Macaulay, 165, 170–1 support for Liberal Unionists, 178–9 Mac Laughlin, Jim on Irish nationalism, 239–40 on nation-building, 238, 239, 248 Magee, William Connor, Archbishop, 50, 54, 58, 60, 63n. 4 Maguire, John, 53 majoritarian democracy Gladstone’s understanding of, 21–2 Manchester Guardian (newspaper) on Irish representation, 95–6 Manchester martyrs, 52 Manning, Henry Edward, Cardinal, 21, 46, 53, 57 Marriage Act (1857) (UK), 48 Marsh, Peter, 75 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) (UK), 48 Matthew, H. C. G. , 5–6, 16, 17, 27 on date of Gladstone’s personal acceptance of Maynooth grant, 23 on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 113–14 on Gladstone’s Irish engagement, 49, 208–9, 236 on Gladstone’s term of Chancellor, 209 on Home Rule, 111, 234 on Land Act (1881), 242 Maurice, F. D., 164, 172 ‘socialism’, 164, 181 Maynooth College grant, see St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth grant

Mc—, see also Mac— McBride, Lawrence on domination of Catholics in Irish civil service, 227 McCarter, Thomas, 145 McCarthy, Justin, 189, 205, 261 on Gladstone’s Irish engagement, 262–3 McClure, Thomas, 172, 173 Melbourne, Henry William Lamb, Viscount, 124 The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 283 Miller, David, 179 Mill, John Stuart, 181, 257 M’Ilroy, Samuel, 175 Milton, John, 181 modern state Gladstone’s characterisation, 21, 24 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 24 moral politics, 7–11, 30, 87–8, 104–5, 111–12, 124–5, 126–7, 163–4, 209, 259–60 Burke as the touchstone of, 165 inappropriateness of, 209–10 Morgan, J. V., Reverend, 99 Morgan, Kenneth, 98 Morley, John, 1, 5, 16, 52, 89, 129–30, 134, 163, 179, 194, 225, 243 introduction of clause 28 of 1893 Home Rule Bill, 224 on Irish civil service status beyond transition period, 220 on Irish civil service transfer, 216–17 meeting with Irish permanent civil service delegates, 221 notion of civil servants, 217 promotion of Irish Catholic civil servants, 218–19, 226 view of Gladstone’s Irish policy, 241 Morris, George, 221 ‘Mr Lecky on Home Rule’ (O’Brien), 132–3 Mundella, A. J., 70 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) (UK), 43


300 Index


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Napier Commission, 276 Napoleon, Louis (Napoleon III), 167, 171 National Association of Ireland, 52–3 National Conference on the Eastern Question, 70 National Education Board (NEB) (Ireland), 227 nationalism, 266–7 context and theory, 238–9 in UK, England’s response, 268–9 nationalism, English, 281–2 nationalism, Irish, 237–8 association with violence, 52, 91–2 British Conservatives and, 1885–86, 88–9 British Liberals and, 1880–85, 88–9 British national identity and, 239 Catholicism and, 239–40 Chamberlain on, 100 O’Brien’s advancement of, 116–20 political utility of history, 111 and Welsh nationalism compared, 98 nationalism, Welsh, 98–9 Nationalist Party (Ireland) cooperation with Irish Unionists, 243–4, 246–8 emphasis on ethnic distinctions, 248–9 grassroots organisations, 249–51 internal divisions, 244–5 see also Irish Parliamentary Party; Irish Republican Brotherhood nationality debate, 269–75 National Liberal Federation, 77, 266 NEB, see National Education Board Newdegate, F. W., 175 New Ireland (Sullivan), 179 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 21, 22, 42, 45, 46 on Tractarian movement, 43 Nineteenth Century (magazine) O’Brien’s articles 1885–86, 122–5, 128 Nockles, Peter, 17 The Nonconformist and Independent (newspaper)

301

on religious dimension of Home Rule issue, 90–1 Rogers’ call for compromise on Irish representation issue, 103 Nonconformists, 43, 46, 282 of Wales, 98, 259, 262, 264, 266 Norman, Edward, 45, 59, 242 Northampton Mercury (newspaper), 92 Northern Counties Liberal Unionist Association, 101–2 Northern Ireland, 6 ‘Northern Ireland’ Parliament, 157 see also Ulster; Ulster question Northern Whig (newspaper), 153, 154, 155, 163, 179 Gladstone obituary, 167, 173, 180 loyalty to Gladstonian Liberalism, 171–5, 177–8 MacKnight obituary, 181 O’Brien, R. Barry, 149, 180 appeal to Gladstone and Bright, on land question, 119–20 assistance in laying the ground for Home Rule, 122–5 historicist approach to Irish nationalism, 117–20 influence of Gladstone on, 116–17 influence on Gladstone, 114–16, 120–2, 125–8 Liberal literary campaign and, 128–32 literary style and intellectual principles, 118–19, 120–1, 123 political identity, 115–16, 134 rebuttal of Lecky, 132–3 O’Brien, William, 178, 247 editorship of United Ireland, 187–9, 206 on Gladstone, 188–9, 196 on landlordism, 188 Plan of Campaign, 189 promotion of Irish Catholic civil servants, 218–19 resignation from party, 250 O’Connell, Daniel, 19, 36n. 68, 45, 111 Gladstone’s critique, 25, 26 influence on Gladstone, 237


Index


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O’Day, Alan on British politicians’ stand on Irish Home Rule, 89–90 on Irish historical writings on Gladstone, 5 on relations between British Liberals and Irish Nationalists, 88–9 Oecumenical Council (20th), 57 O’Hagan, Thomas O’Hagan, Baron, 174 O’Hea, John F., 186 O’Mahony, Patrick on social context of nationalism, 238–9 Orangeism, 142–3, 145–6, 155 see also Loyal Orange Institution O’Shea divorce case, 12, 203 O’Shea, Katharine, 242 Oxbridge academics, 119 Oxford movement, 43 PAC, see House of Commons. Public Accounts Committee Paine, Thomas, 171 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper) on Liberals’ views on Irish representation, 94, 95 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Viscount, 51, 166 Palmer, William Patrick influence on Gladstone, 26 papal infallibility, 57, 175 Parliament (UK), 258 Irish representation, 93–6, 102–3, 185n. 97, 211, 237, 268–9 The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, 1829–69 (O’Brien), 117, 118, 120, 122–3, 126 impact on Gladstone, 120, 127–8 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 9, 12, 74, 111, 117, 137n. 27, 151, 194, 203–5, 226, 256–7, 263 1885 election manifesto, 89 adultery, 12, 203 Barry O’Brien’s support, 134 charges of association with violence, 91–2 Gladstone’s views, 236, 242

‘Highland Hero’, 278 political cartoons, 190, 192–3, 194, 200, 205 William O’Brien’s support, 188 Parry, Jonathan, 88 ‘The Parting of the Ways’ (cartoon), 200–3 party politics Gladstone’s proposal of Irish Home Rule and, 11–12, 88, 100–5 Pat (symbolic character) depiction in political cartoons, 193–4, 200, 203 The Patriot King (Bolingbroke), 170 Patten, G. V., 175 Paulin, Tom, 5 Peatling, Gary, 237 Peel, Robert, Sir, 19, 31, 35n. 47, 35n. 50, 124 curb of Orangeism, 142 Gladstone’s defence of, 45 Irish policy, 233, 234, 237 Maynooth grant, 8, 15, 20, 22 pensions, 219–20 1886 Home Rule Bill provisions, 216, 218 1893 Home Rule Bill provisions, 220, 224 Irish permanent civil servants’ demands, 221–2 Perceval, Spencer, 21, 23–4 Pigott, Richard, 187 Pim, Jonathan, 214 Pius IX, Pope, 57 Playfair, Lyon, Sir, 101 Plunkett, David campaign for Irish civil servants’ salaries, 212–15 Plunkett, Horace, Sir, 234, 247 Recess Committee, 246–7 pluralism, Gladstone’s, 16–19 political cartoons Gladstone in English press, 269 history, 186–7 role, 187 political cartoons of United Ireland, 190–1, 205–6 Chamberlain, 195–6, 197–8, 200 Gladstone, 12, 186, 190, 205–6


302 Index


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Index

O’Brien’s assistance in shaping, 122–5 Punch (newspaper), 186 Queen’s University of Ireland, 174 race(s) Celtic, 257 in UK, 270–2, 273 Racine, Jean, 164–5 Radical Liberalism, 75–8 advocacy of Home Rule, 92–3 Biagini’s critique, 112 in Wales, 98 Rafferty, Oliver, 240 Ramm, Agatha on Gladstone’s attraction to Aristotelian pragmatism, 17–18, 27 Recess Committee, 245 demands, 246–7 establishment, 246 Recollections (O’Brien), 188–9 Redmond, John, 245, 246, 250 Registrar General’s Office (RGO) (Ireland), 214 Regium Donum, 54, 55 Reid, T. W., 79 Reigh, John D., 190 political cartoons by, 190–205, 206 religion Home Rule Bill of 1886 and, 90–1 position of Irish Church, 7–8 see also Catholicism; disestablishment religious nationality, 25, 28 representation, Irish, 211, 237, 268–9 Chamberlain’s views, 102–3 question of, 93–6, 185n. 97 Representation of the People Act (1884), 196 resistance, see coercion ‘Response to the government proposals on home rule as regards the effect on civil servants’ (Committee of Permanent Civil Servants in Ireland), 222–3 RGO, see Registrar General’s Office Richard, Henry, 266, 282 Rio, François, 18


political cartoons of United Ireland – continued Gladstone as defender of Irish, 195–9 Gladstone as dictatorial and untrustworthy, 205 Gladstone glorification, 199–205 Gladstone’s prominence, 191–5 Hartington, 197–8, 200 Parnell as hero, 190, 192–3, 194, 200, 205 Spencer as villain, 190–1 The Political House that Jack Built (Hone), 187 politics ethics in, see moral politics UK, over the past 30 years, 6–7 Politics (Aristotle), 19, 36n. 67 Ponsonby, Henry, Sir, 72 Porter, Andrew, 144 press comic journals, 186–7 on Home Rule Bill, 89, 90–2, 93, 102–5 on MacKnight, 181 on Parnell’s 1885 election manifesto, 89 politicians’ reach to electorate through, 87 references to association of anarchy with Irish Nationalists, 91–2 reports on responses to Irish representation, 94–6 see also political cartoons; specific newspapers Primitive Methodist (journal), 92, 97, 105 Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review, 92 Principles of Church Reform (Thomas Arnold), 44 Public Accounts Committee, see House of Commons. Public Accounts Committee public expenditure Gladstone’s views, 209–10 Ireland, 210–11, 219–20, 227–8 public opinion Gladstone’s views, 24–5, 36n. 65 impact of public speaking through daily press on, 87

303


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The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (Parry), 88 Roberts, Bryn, 267–8 Robbins, Keith, 11, 59 Robinson, Henry, 227, 228 Roden, Robert Jocelyn, 3rd Earl of, 142 Rogers, J. Guinness call for compromise on Irish representation issue, 103 Rogers, Thorold, 129 Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl of, 57, 66–7, 80, 144, 259, 279, 282 Rose, Hugh James, 57 Rothschild, Lionel, 165 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Conditions of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands of Scotland, 276 Royal Commission on Education in Wales, 259 Royal Commission on Financial Services between Ireland and Britain, 246–7 Royal Commission on the Civil Service, 227 Royal Commission on the Irish Church, 54 Russell, Charles, Sir, 178 objections to special status for Ulster, 148–9 Russell, John Russell, Earl, 2–3, 52, 170–1 Russell, T. W., 154, 225, 247 Rutson, Albert, 92 Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of, 199–200, 284 political cartoons, 197–8, 200, 201, 202 Salis-Schwabe, George, 147–8 Saunderson, Edward, Colonel, 157, 246, 247, 251 objections to Home Rule, 216 political cartoons, 193–4 Sayers, E. M., 163

Scotland, 272 devolution, 6, 281 disestablishment of Church of Scotland, 266, 280 Highlanders, 274 land legislation, 275–7 language, 259 political disaffection, 278–9 special status, 258 Scottish Home Rule Association, 279 Scottish Liberal Association, 278–9 Scottish Presbyterian Church, see Church of Scotland Second Irish Land Act, see Land Act (1881) Seely, J. R., 269 Selborne, Roundell Palmer, Earl of critique of Gladstone, 69 self-government, see Home Rule Shakespeare, William Gladstone’s use of texts of, 282–3 MacKnight on, 164–5, 181 Shamrock (newspaper), 190 Shannon, Richard, 5, 16, 110 on Gladstone’s doctrinal conservatism, 49 on Gladstone’s ‘historical argument’ for Home Rule, 113, 114–15 on Gladstone’s Home Rule policy, 1, 3, 241 on Matthew’s reading of Gladstonian proposals, 3 Shaw-Lefevre, George, 103 Shaw-Taylor, William, 247 Sheil, Richard Lalor, 45 Sidgwick, Henry, 119 Sigerson, George, 131 Sinclair, Thomas, 152–3, 156 Sinn Fein, 250 Skinner, Simon, 17 Sloan, Tom, 251 Smith, Goldwin, 130 Smith, Samuel, 97 Smythe, George, 165 social politics, 112 Society for the Liberation of Religion from State-Patronage and Control, see Liberation Society


304 Index


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Speaker (newspaper), 134 Spencer, John Poyntz Spencer, Earl, 68, 176–7, 188, 243, 275 on Home Rule Bill’s civil service provisions, 215 political cartoons, 190–1 Spurgeon, C. H., 90 Stanley, Edward, Lord, see Derby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Earl of state-church relations, see churchstate relations The State in Its Relations with the Church (Gladstone), 15, 42, 136n. 17, 270 on Aristotelian pragmatism, 17–18 on Catholicism, 25 on church-state relations, 18–19, 27–30, 44–5 critique of O’Connell, 26 Keble’s critique, 28–9 Maynooth College grant arguments, 16–17, 23 move away from Oxonian Aristotelianism, 24 Stopford, Edward A., Archdeacon, 58 St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth grant, 8, 11, 15, 35n. 50, 54, 55 Gladstone and, 15–16, 27, 45–60, 270 Gladstone and, historiography, 16–19 Gladstone’s opposition, 19–20, 23, 260 Gladstone’s support, 20–4 succession, law of (British throne), 60–1 Sullivan, A. M., 179 Sullivan, W. K., 131 Swift, Jonathan, 190 Swift, Roger, 6 ‘Taking the Landlords at Their Word’ (cartoon), 193–4 Talbot, C. R. M., 101 Taylor, Francis, 101 Thatcher, Margaret, 6 Third Reform Act (1884), 196 Thirlwall, Connop, Bishop, 58

305

Thirty Years of Foreign Policy (MacKnight), 166–7, 168 Thomas Drummond, His Life and Letters (O’Brien), 128 Thompson, Frank, 144 Thorne, Sarah, 167, 171 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (Burke), 163, 170 ‘Three Attempts to Rule Ireland Justly’ (O’Brien), 124–5, 126 ‘Thrown Over Board’ (cartoon), 200 Thursfield, J. R., 131 The Times (newspaper), 54, 56, 74, 155 campaign against Hamilton, 218 Collings’ address to the agricultural labourers, 99 on Irish civil service, 224 publication of Labouchere’s letter, 144 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 165 Tocqueville, Alexis de influence on Gladstone, 24 Tod, Isabela, 153 Tone, Wolfe, 120 Tractarian movement, 43 Tracts for the Times (Newman), 43 Tragedy of Count Alarcos (Disraeli), 165 ‘Treason of the Blue Books’, 259 Treasury (UK), 93, 221, 228 1893 Home Rule Bill provisions and, 222 ambiguity of the term ‘Irish’ civil service and, 213 Irish civil service’s equality with London salaries campaign and, 212–15 strict control of public spending, 210 Trench, Richard Chenevix, Archbishop, 57 Trevelyan, Charles, Sir, 219 Trevelyan, George Otto, 179 on scope for savings in Irish administration, 219–20 Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), 174 Two Centuries of Irish History (Bryce and O’Brien), 131–2 Tyneside Echo (newspaper), 97, 104


Index


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UK, see United Kingdom Ulster collapse of Liberalism in, 264 Gladstone’s failure to include safeguards for, 12, 146–9, 273–4 tenant farmers’ concerns of 1870 Land Bill, 173 tenant-right agitation, 175 see also Northern Ireland Ulster As It Is (MacKnight), 163, 166, 172, 175, 178 as political autobiography, 179–80 Ulster Gladstonianism, 171–6 Ulster Liberals, 12, 143–4, 149–53, 154, 157, 158, 162–3, 179, 245 Gladstone’s brusque treatment of delegation of, 156, 180 Gladstone’s views, 144, 149–51, 156, 162, 273–4 opposition to Home Rule, 153–6 pro-Home Rule section, 151–2, 154–5 Ulster Liberal Unionism, 162–3, 179 regard for Gladstone, 180–1 see also MacKnight, Thomas; Unionism, Irish Ulster Liberal Unionist Association, 152–3 Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union, 152 Ulster Presbyterians, 143–4, 148 support for disestablishment, 143 Ulster Protestants, 274 Ulster question, 4, British Liberals and, 146–9 Dublin Castle and, 144–6, 149, 158 formative influences on Gladstone on, 142–4 Gladstone and, 140–2, 153–4, 157–8 Ulster Liberals and, 149–53 Ulster Unionist Council, 251 Ulster Unionist Council (1978: Belfast), 6 Unauthorised Programme (1885) (Chamberlain), 78 Unionism, Irish, 245 cooperation with Irish Nationalists, 243–4, 246–8 emphasis on ethnic distinctions, 248–9

grassroots organisations, 249–51 internal divisions, 245–6 see also Irish Unionist Alliance; Ulster Liberal Unionism ‘The “Unionist” Case for Home Rule’ (O’Brien), 130 United Church of England and Ireland, 42, 43, 44–5 uncoupling Irish Church, 8, 11, 49–58 United Ireland (newspaper) alignment with anti-Parnellites, 205 April 10 1886 issue, 194–5 Bodkin’s acting editorship, 189–90, 205, 206 Chamberlain depiction, 195–6, 197–8, 200 Gladstone as defender of Irish, 194–9 Gladstone as dictatorial and untrustworthy, 205 Gladstone depiction, 12, 186, 190, 194–5, 205–6 Gladstone glorification, 199–205 Gladstone’s prominence, 191–5 Hartington depiction, 197–8, 200 history and significance, 187 O’Brien editorship, 187–9, 206 Parnell depiction, 190, 192–3, 194, 200, 205 political cartoons in, 12, 186, 190–1, 205–6 Spencer depiction, 190–1 United Kingdom (UK) creation, 237, 257–8 Gladstone on mistreatment of Ireland by, 3, 111–12, 126–8, 264 impact of Irish Home Rule crises, 257, 263–4 law of succession to British throne, 60–1 MacKnight on severance of America from, 170 minimal state, 210 multinational regime, 256–70 political transformations of past 30 years, 6–7 see also England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales


306 Index


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United States (US) disestablishment of Congregationalism, 43 Irish community in, 92 University of Oxford Gladstone and, 50–1 US, see United States Vatican I, 57 The Vatican Decrees (Gladstone), 57 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 73, 80, 84n. 47, 240–1 view on Gladstone’s return to power, 72 Vincent, John, 66 on Gladstone’s Irish policy, 2–3, 208, 241 on high politics of Home Rule, 86, 87, 141, 208 violence Irish nationalism and, 9, 52, 91–2 Voltaire, 165 voluntary retirement 1886 Home Rule Bill provisions, 216 1893 Home Rule Bill provisions, 224 Waddington, David Charles Waddington, Baron, 41 Wales, 258, 264–5 devolution, 6, 281 disestablishment of Church in Wales, 58–9, 266, 279–81 education inquiry report, 259 education reforms, 262 Gladstone’s engagement with, 266–8 and Ireland compared, 98 land legislation, 277 language, 259, 262, 277–8 nationalism, 98–9 Nonconformism, 98, 259, 262, 264, 266 similarities of Irish predicament, 265–6 Welsh Sunday closing, 265 Walker, Samuel, 151–2

307

Wallace, Robert, 279 Walpole, Horace, 171 Weber, Max, 87 Welsh language Gladstone on, 262, 277–8 supposed backwardness, 259 Welsh Nonconformists, 98, 259, 262, 264, 266 Westminster, see Parliament (UK) Westminster Gazette (newspaper) MacKnight obituary, 181 Whitehall, 227 Whiteside, James, 50 ‘Whose Shall the Coffin Be?’ (cartoon), 196–8 Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop, 8, 43, 47, 57, 58 Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 181 William III, King of England, 124, 171 Williams, J. Carvell, 98 Williams of Mostyn, Gareth Wyn Williams, Baron of, 41 Williams, Watkin, 264 Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, 25 reading of Gladstone’s analysis of Locke, 17 Wolff, Drummond, 74 Wood, Philip, 101–2 Woodward, E. L., 281 Wordsworth, Charles, Reverend, 31, 39n. 115 works and writings, Gladstone’s, 15–16 Ireland in, 25 Maynooth grant arguments, 16–17, 19–24 readings of, 16–19 see also specific titles, e.g., A Chapter of Autobiography Wyndham, George, 234, 247 Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act (1903), see Land Act (1903)


Index

Yeats, William Butler, 233 Young Wales (newspaper) Gladstone obituary, 268


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