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Maynooth, the ‘Godless colleges’ and liberal imperial thought in the 1840s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2018

Justin Biel*
Affiliation:
Minnesota State University, Mankato, U.S.A.
*
*Department of History, Minnesota State University, Mankato, U.S.A., [email protected]

Abstract

In 1845, parliament passed an act establishing the three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland – Belfast, Galway and Cork – with the stipulation that ‘religious’ instruction in the colleges would have to be sponsored by voluntary organisations, not the state. Prior to 1845, parliament’s approach to providing spiritual guidance in state-run institutions had been one of ‘parallel patronage’, assuring that wherever there were individuals representing different denominational backgrounds, religious specialists from each denomination would be appointed to work in the institution. For example, the Prisons (Ireland) Act, 1826 required that Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican chaplains serve their respective portions of the prison population in each gaol that housed any of their co-denominationalists. But in 1845, parliament took an ostensibly different tack, implying that denominations would have to sponsor their young men’s study of theology or any other ‘religious’ subject at university level. However, this article argues that the Irish colleges bill gained assent from the liberal wing of parliamentary opinion precisely because it seemed, to early Victorian liberals, to instantiate the logic of parallel patronage. Using Thomas Wyse, Charles Buller, and T. B. Macaulay as cases in point, this article reveals that the logic behind this vision of state ‘neutrality’ as simultaneous support for each denominational interest was steeped in a working knowledge of colonialism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2018 

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References

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46 Hansard 3, lxxx, 579–80 (19 May 1845).

47 [Charles Buller], ‘Payment of the Irish Catholic clergy’ in Edinburgh Review, no. 150 (Jan. 1842), p. 486.

48 Hansard 3, lxxx, 579–80 (19 May 1845).

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53 Report of the earl of Durham, her majesty’s high commissioner and governor-general of British North America (Methuen ed., London, 1902), p. 205 (hereafter cited as Durham report). An English Historical Review article that was published contemporaneously with the 1902 Methuen edition attributes the first 94 pages and most of the section between page 190 and the end of the Durham report to Lord Durham himself, making Buller the author of the middle 95 pages (R. Garnett, ‘The authorship of Lord Durham’s Canada report’ in E.H.R. xvii, no. 66 (Apr. 1902), pp 268–75).

54 [Charles Buller], Responsible government for colonies (2nd ed., London, 1840), pp 3–4. See also Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ‘Sir Charles Metcalfe in Canada’ in Fisher’s Colonial Magazine and Journal of Trade, Commerce, and Banking, new series, i (1844), pp 385–438.

55 Buller, Responsible government, p. 30: ‘We are not now speaking of our Indian empire, … But looking at our Colonies properly so called at the Colonies in most part inhabited by British settlers or their descendants, and retained for pacific purposes alone it seems that the British interests which require to be protected by the Imperial Legislature are very simple.’

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84 Hansard 3, lxxix, 650 (14 Apr. 1845).

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86 Ibid., 652 (14 Apr. 1845).

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88 As Chatterjee points out, too, ‘this perspective’ afforded him liberal ground on which to ridicule the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland for its inutility later in his career (Chatterjee, Making of Indian secularism, p. 30).

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94 In a way, this contention revives an older argument: Joseph Hamburger, Macaulay and the Whig tradition (Chicago, 1976).

95 Hansard 3, lxxxii, 230 (9 July 1845).

96 Ibid., lxxix, 646–58 (14 Apr. 1845).

97 Macaulay to Andrew Rutherfurd, 10 July 1845 in The letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (6 vols, Cambridge, 1974), iv, 262.

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100 Macaulay to Andrew Rutherfurd, 10 July 1845 in Letters of Macaulay, ed. Pinney, iv, 261.

101 Hansard 3, lxxxii, 230 (9 July 1845).

102 Ibid., lxxix, 654 (14 Apr. 1845): ‘I do not conceive that it is open to me, however strong my feeling might be on the voluntary principle, to meet the Irish, who ask for 17,000l. more for the education of their priests, and say to them, I am on principle opposed to such a grant.’

103 Hansard 3, lxxxii, 236 (9 July 1845).

104 See Koditschek, , Liberalism, imperialism, pp 106111 Google Scholar.

105 For more on the ways in which early Victorian English culture was saturated with versions of the environmental ‘register’ of race-thinking that scholars trace to the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment (David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson), see Hall, Catherine, Civilising subjects: colony and metropole in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar.

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109 1 & 2 Vict., c. 109.

110 Hansard 3, lxxx, 1261 (2 June 1845).