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Gladstone's Abolition of Compulsory Church Rates: a Minor Political Myth and its Historiographical Career

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Olive Anderson
Olive Anderson
Affiliation:
Reader in History, Westfield College, University of London
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Extract

There are four major interpretative themes in historical writing about nineteenth century English politics whose exposition has customarily involved a bald allusion to Gladstone's abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868. In reality the facts do not justify any of these familiar uses. What follows is intended not only to demonstrate that this is so by briefly describing ‘how it really happened’, but also to consider how it has come about that this legislation has been so often pressed into service in inappropriate contexts ever since it was passed, and to speculate a little upon this as part of the general problem of the delays and paradoxes in the development of historical writing on nineteenth-century England.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 1974 , pp. 185 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

page 185 note 1 Liberation Society Records, Greater London Record Office, Minutes of the Committee, A/Lib. 3, 16 February 1866. (I owe my thanks to the General Secretary of the Free Church Federal Council and the Head Archivist of the Greater London Record Office for permission to use these records.) Hardcastle was a country gentleman and churchman of Dissenting parentage who, although hostile to disestablishment and militant ‘Miallism’, wanted religious peace (cf. his article in the Edinburgh Review, cxxxv (1872), 366–93).Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Gladstone Papers, British Museum, London, Add. MS. 44755, fols. 9, 13; Add MS. 44277, fols. 287–89, Add. MS. 44162, fol. 297.

page 186 note 2 The most vivid brief sketch of the debate is in The Nonconformist, 14 March 1866, which also prints extracts from other journals showing the reaction of the press in general.

page 187 note 1 Hansard, 3rd ser., cxxxiv. 451; Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, ed. Lathbury, D. C., London 1910, i. 96.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 Add. MS. 44210, fol. 156, Add. MS. 44746, fols. 53–60, Add. MS. 44162, fol. 181, Add. MS. 44752, fol. 292; Hansard, clxi. 1017–26; Wilberforce, R. G., Life of Samuel Wilberforce, ii (1882) 81; Lathbury, op. cit., ii. 168.Google Scholar

page 187 note 3 Add. MS. 44606, fol. 1; Add. MS. 44209, fols. 174–6.

page 187 note 4 Russell Papers, Public Record Office, London, P.R.O. 30/22/16B/297; Add. MS. 44536, fols. 42–5, Add. MS. 44217, fol. 104, Add. MS. 44209, fols. 178, 180, Add. MS. 44410, fol. 110.

page 188 note 1 A/Lib. 3, 27 April and 1 May 1866, Add. MS. 44535, fol. 45, Add. MS. 44213, fols. 332–35, Add. MS. 44217, fol. 106; Guildhall Library, London, Minute Books of the Deputies of the Protestant Dissenters, Guildhall MSS. 3083/13, 30 April 1866.

page 188 note 2 Add. MS. 44755, fol. 70; Hansard, clxxxiii. 619–36; Guildhall MSS. 3083/13, 14 May 1886; A/Lib. 3, 25 May 1866.

page 188 note 3 Add. MS. 44536, fol. 68; Hansard, clxxxix. 1029–52, 1847–84; Buckle, G. E., The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield iv, London 1916, 449.Google Scholar

page 188 note 4 Cf. The Times, 10 July and 2 August; Saturday Review, 21 July; Spectator, 21 July; Nonconformist, 25 July, 1866.

page 189 note 1 Hansard, clxxxvi. 215–50; The Times, 21 March, 25 July and 9 August, 1867.

page 189 note 2 Hansard, cxc. 987–81; Nonconformist, 18 January, 22 February, 14 March, 1868.

page 190 note 1 Hansard, cxc. 1415–30; G.L.R.O., A/Lib. 4, 24 January, 7 and 21 February, 6 and 26 March, 1868; Guildhall MS. 3083/13, 21 February 1868; Add. MS. 44608, fol. 95.

page 190 note 2 Parliamentary Papers, 1867–68, H. L. xxx (143); Saturday Review, 11 July 1868; Hansard, cxciii. 594–607, 896–903, 1098–1100; Add. MS. 44608, fols. 155, 177, 179, 181; Add. MS. 44184, fols. 200–208; Add. MS. 44278, fol. 17.

page 191 note 1 The Times, 12 March, 24 April, 1868; G.L.R.O., A/Lib. 4, 26 June 1866; Hansard, cxciii. 1773; Add. MS. 44608, fols. 187, 194.

page 191 note 2 The Nonconformist, 5 August, 1868.

page 192 note 1 For some examples, see Butler, J. R. M., A History of England, 1815–1939, London 1st ed. 1928, 2nd. ed. 1960, 155Google Scholar; Feiling, K., A History of England from the Coming of the English to 1938, London 1950, 899Google Scholar, and in a different category, Shannon, R. T., Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876, London 1963, xxiii.Google Scholar

page 192 note 2 May, T. Erskine, The Constitutional History of England, 1760–1860, 3rd. ed. 1871, iii. 448Google Scholar; Miall, A., Life of Edward Miall, London 1884, 301.Google Scholar See also Montagu, F. C., The Elements of English Constitutional History, London, 1st ed. 1893, last ed. 1940, 200.Google Scholar

page 192 note 3 Walpole, S., The History of Twenty-Five Years, 1856–1880, London 1904, ii. 338Google Scholar and Cambridge Modern History, xi, Cambridge 1909, 345Google Scholar; Paul, H., A History of Modern England, London 1905, iii. 140Google Scholar; Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century, London 1922, 348.Google Scholar

page 192 note 4 Not until 1969, when this general framework had been discarded, did two textbooks appear which placed the abolition of church rates correctly chronologically: Beales, D., From Castlereagh to Gladstone, 1815–1885, London 1969, 185Google Scholarand Hanham, H. J., The Nineteenth Century Constitution, London, 1969, 420.Google Scholar

page 193 note 1 Morley, J., The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, London 1903, ii. 161Google Scholar; Trevelyan, op. cit., 348; Maccoby, S., English Radicalism, 1853–1886, London 1938, 103Google Scholar; Beales, op. cit., 208; Cowling, M., 1867. Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution, London 1967, 28, 297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 194 note 1 See for example the pioneering textbooks of nineteenth-century constitutional history written in the last third of the nineteenth century, which commonly worked within the tradition which bracketed religious liberty with the freedom of the press and freedom from arbitrary arrest as one of the liberties of the subject (e.g., Amos, S., Fifty Years of the English Constitution, 1830–1880, London 1880, 104)Google Scholar; as well as general histories discerning in their story the progressive triumphs of Whiggish moderation, or ‘the spirit of liberalism and individualism’, or ‘the growth of democracy’ in the Tocquevillian, social sense, as well as the political one (e.g., Walpole, S., History of England from 1815 to 1856, London 1886, v. 553Google Scholar; Keith, A. Berriedale, The Constitution from Queen Victoria to George VI, London 1940, ii. 456Google Scholar; Webb, R. K., Modern England from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, London 1968, 226).Google Scholar

page 195 note 1 Ecclesiastical historians have usually emphasised the ‘irritation and war’ between Church and Dissent caused by these grievances, and have seen the Act as a piece of tardy conciliation: Cornish, F. Warre, The English Church in the Nineteenth Century, London 1910, i. 171Google Scholar; Addison, W. G., Religious Equality in Modern England, 1714–1914, London 1944, 113Google Scholar; Chadwick, O., The Victorian Church, i London 1966, 146, 158.Google Scholar

page 195 note 2 Skeats, H. S. and Miall, C. S., History of the Free Churches of England, 1688–1891, London 1891, 597 and n.; The Nonconformist, 14 March 1866.Google Scholar

page 195 note 3 Dicey, A. V., Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, London 1905, 352.Google Scholar

page 196 note 1 Skeats and Miall, op. cit., viii; in similar vein, Selbie, W. B., Nonconformity, its Origin and Progress, London 1912, 7 and passim.Google Scholar

page 196 note 2 Vincent, J., The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868, London 1966, 72–76; Hanham, op. cit., 420.Google Scholar

page 197 note 1 Iddesleigh Papers, B.M. Add. MS. 50014, fol. 201: Gladstone to Northcote, 28 July 1865.