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Gladstone, Vaticanism, and the Question of the East1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

H. C. G. Matthew
H. C. G. Matthew*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

That Gladstone was religious is obvious enough, and to state it does not get us very far, but this remains as far as most historians get. The aim of this paper is to show by exposition the religious motivation behind two of the greatest Gladstonian and Victorian outbursts—the clutch of writings on the Vatican council published in 1874–5 and the pamphlet and articles on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. These two expostulations, though they occurred within twenty two months of each other, are usually treated by historians as quite unrelated. Moreover, although attention has been paid to their proximate causes, they have not been placed in the complex and long-drawn out process of Gladstone’s religious development. I hope to show that both groups of pamphlets, though written in passion spurred by proximate causes, reflected long standing and interrelated intellectual, theological and political interests, an understanding of which illuminates both Gladstone and his age. If this paper ranges from idealism to cabinet diplomacy, this reflects the range of influences on Gladstone who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 417 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted to Perry Butler and David Nicholls for their comments on an earlier draft of the first part of this paper which was read to the Newman conference in Dublin 1975.

References

1a ‘Ritualism and ritual’, Contemporary Review, October 1874 Google Scholar; The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on civil allegiance: a political expostulation, [November] 1874; ‘Speeches of Pope Pius IX’, Quarterly] R[eview], January 1875 Google Scholar; Vaticanism: an answer to replies and reproofs, 1875; ‘Italy and her church’, Church Quarterly Review, October 1875.Google Scholar

2 Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, [September] 1876, A speech delivered at Blackheath . . . September 9th, 1876; together with letters, on the Question of the East, 1876; ‘Russian policy and deeds in Turkistan’, Contemporary Review, November 1876 Google Scholar, ‘The Hellenic factor in the Eastern Problem’, Contemporary Review, December 1876.Google Scholar

3 Pusey, E.B., An Eirenicon (London 1865) p 260 Google Scholar. For the Eirenicon, see B., and Pawley, M., Rome and Canterbury through four centuries (London 1974) cap eight, and Brandreth, H. R. T., The (Ecumenical ideals of the Oxford Movement (London 1947) cap 4.Google Scholar

4 These are discussed in my introduction to Foot, M. R. D. and Matthew, H. C. G., The Gladstone Diaries (Oxford 1974) 3, pp xxiii seq. Google Scholar

5 The State, 1 pp 73-6.

6 Ibid 1 p 78, quoting Coleridge.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid 1 p 126.

9 Ibid 1 p 124, 1 pp 296-7. It is interesting that in his Bulgarian pamphlet Gladstone specifically disavowed an attack on Islam.

10 Ibid i p 123.

11 Ibid 1 p 301.

12 Ibid 1 p 109.

13 Manning later correctly noted the difference between himself and Gladstone on this point: ‘he saw his theory to be impossible, and I saw it to be fake’, Purcell, [E. S.], [Life of Cardinal Manning] (London 1896) 2 p 491.Google Scholar

14 I have discussed the details of Gladstone’s resignation in The Gladstone Diaries, 3, pp xxx seq.

15 Hansard, third series, 115 p 565, 25 March 1851.

16 C[hurch] Principles], cap 7.

17 CP pp 506-7. This goes a good deal further than W. Palmer of Worcester’s branch church theory, which saw anglicanism merely as part of an apostolic triangle; though his own interests centred on Roman and eastern relations, Gladstone maintained his position, as, for example in the case of Scandanavia and the 1867 Lambeth conference; see Stephenson, A. M. G., Tlie first Lambeth Conference, 1867 (London 1967) p 221.Google Scholar

18 From the 1860S onwards Gladstone developed a wary working relationship with English nonconformity, but though it commanded his political respect and in individual cases affection, he remained unable in principle to find theological justification for it: ‘If in the abstract it be difficult to find justification for English Nonconformity, yet when we view it as a fact, it must surely command our respect and sympathy’; ‘The place of heresy and schism in the modern Christian Church’ (1894), in Later Gleanings (London 1897) pp 288-9; see also Machin, G. I. T., ‘Gladstone and Nonconformity in the 1860s’, HJ 17, 2 (1974) p 347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 CP p 327, and ibid p 390: ‘those Catholic or primitive principles not only do not naturally lead into Romanism, but are the one barrier which effectually closes the way thither . . .’ He noted that even in Italy ‘Romanism’ was an unnatural imposition, often resisted at a local level, where sermons were often ‘much more Catholic than specifically Roman’; ibid p 349.

20 Gladstone to Manning, 1 June 1850, in [Correspondence on Church and Religion of W. E. Gladstone, ed Lathbury, D. C.] (1910) 2 p 26.Google Scholar

21 Many of the papers are collected in Gladstone, W. E., Later Gleanings (London 1897).Google Scholar

22 Memorandum of 17 April 1885, BM Add MS 44769 fol 77.

23 Gladstone put considerable stress on observation of traditional religious practices as a necessary means of making sense of written material; see CP p 354n.

24 Diaries, 1 p 462, 31 March 1832.

25 Ibid, 2 p 429, 8 October 1838.

26 Ibid, 4 pp 352-3, 19 August 1851.

27 Diary, 19 August 1851.

28 Ibid 4p 322, 7 April 1851. See also ibid 3 pp xliii-xlviii.

29 Gladstone to S. Wilberforce, 17 October 1854, Bodleian Library, MS Wilberforce d. 36, fol 25. For similar views and emotional denunciation of Rome see Gladstone’s review of [Elizabeth Harris], From Oxford to Rome, in QR 81 (June 1847) p 131.

30 CP p 509.

31 See Lathbury, 2 p 383 for Gladstone’s account of this meeting. At the same time as meeting Döllinger, Gladstone familiarised himself with the Ronge movement, which attacked the pope, initially from within Roman Catholicism. See Diaries, 3 pp 488-9, 10 October 1845 ff.

32 Diaries, 3 p 275, 22 November 1850.

33 CP p 506.

34 Gladstone’s comment on De Maistre in ‘Remarks on the royal supremacy’ (1850, rep 1865, 1877), in Gleanings, 5 p 288. This passage was quoted by E. B. Pusey at the culmination of his argument in his Eirenicon pp 260-1.

35 QR 92 p 137 (December 1852). Gladstone re-read this review in 1873, commenting ‘the pope was a worm in the gourd all through’; Morley 2 p 476.

36 QR 92 p 150.

37 Diaries, 27 March 1855.

38 Gladstone to Meyrick, 8 October 1856, Pusey House, Oxford, Meyrick MSS 30.

39 Gladstone to Manning, 16 November 1869, in Purcell, 2 p 408.

40 See Gleanings 7 p 31.

41 Diaries, 7 September 1863.

42 Ibid, 19 March 1862.

43 Gladstone, W. E., ‘The place of Homer in classical education and in historical inquiry’, Oxford Essays (London 1857) pp 4–5.Google Scholar

43a Diaries, 2 December 1858.

44 Gladstone to Tosti, 20 August 1860, printed in Nuova Antologia, January 1937, p 163.

45 Gladstone to Valettas, 5 September 1865, BM Add MS 44535, fol 192.

46 Diaries, 15 February 1865.

47 Diaries, 30 June 1859.

48 Gladstone to Clarendon, 26 November 1859, Bodleian Clarendon MSS dep. c. 523, on Marliani’s letter forwarded to Gladstone by Clarendon.

49 Ibid and 27 March 1863, in Lathbury, 2 p 391.

50 Diaries, 7 January 1860.

51 Purcell, Life of Manning, 2 p 398.

52 Diaries, 22 October 1866, and Lathbury, 2 p 395.

53 Gladstone to Clarendon, 11 January 1869, Bodleian Clarendon MSS dep. c. 497. Antonelli was Gladstone’s chief link with the papal court during his 1866 visit.

53a For an interesting view of Gladstone’s pluralism, differing from mine, see D. Nicholls ‘Newman, Gladstone and the politics of pluralism’, paper read to the 1975 Newman conference in Dublin, whose proceedings are expected to be published.

54 Gladstone to Clarendon, 7 November 1867, Bodleian Clarendon MSS dep. c. 523; see also his memoranda quoted earlier.

55 There is much new detail in Cwickowski, F. W., The English bishops and the first Vatican Council (Louvain 1971).Google Scholar

56 Clarendon to O. Russell, 28 June 1869, Bodleian Clarendon MSS dep. c. 475.

57 O. Russell to Clarendon, 22 December 1869, ibid c. 487.

58 Clarendon altered his position on a protest at Rome. On 11 September 1869 he told Gladstone that despite its futility ‘It will not be difficult to state at Rome your apprehension about the Council in which I entirely concur’. On 17 October 1869 he wrote ‘Odo Russell and I have discussed the practicability of a collective or single growl against the Council. He, well knowing the ground at Rome, sees difficulties in the way of remonstrance . . .’; Bodleian, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 501.

59 Gladstone to Clarendon, 21 May 1869, Bodleian, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 497. Clarendon’s visit to cardinal Grassellini and to Paris in August and September 1869 was intended to discover whether the basis for such action existed. He went enthusiastically anti-papal: ‘You may be sure of the pleasure I shall have in taking every opportunity legitimate and the reverse of throwing dirt on the Council. I believe that will best be done through the Emperor ... if within the next two months there is a tolerable unanimous expression of opinion the Pope and his Jesuits may think it expedient to put much water in their wine’; Clarendon to Gladstone, 31 August 1869, Bodleian, Clarendon MSS dep. с. 501.

60 Gladstone to Clarendon, 14 September 1869, Bodleian, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 498.

61 Gladstone to Clarendon, 19 October 1869, Bodleian, Clarendon MSS dep. с. 498.

61a Howard (minister in Munich) to Clarendon, 4 May 1869, PRO FO 9/194.

62 Purcell, Life of Manning, 2 p 436; I am obliged to Sir E. W. Gladstone for lending me Gladstone’s copy. Manning’s recollections, long after the event, clearly misdate the Hohenlohe initiative placing it by implication in 1870, during the council. The Manning-Purcell account is followed by Butler, E. C., The Vatican Council (London 1930) I p 10 Google Scholar, and by others, for example, Norman, E. R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion (London 1965) p 411 Google Scholar, which otherwise has much useful information on the council. In 1896, on the publication of Purcell’s Manning, Gladstone wrote to Acton: ‘Have you any recollection of keeping me by letter steadily or frequently informed of what was going on? I have no such recollection. You are represented as having been to me what Odo Russell was to Manning ... You will find that Manning gives with undoubting confidence the account of a hot debate in the Cabinet of 1870 on Prince Hohenlohe’s application to the British Government. According to my recollection and belief, there is not one word of truth in it’; Acton MSS, Cambridge University Library, uncatalogued.

63 Loftus (ambassador in Berlin) to Clarendon, 24 April 1869, PRO FO 64/662.

64 Howard to Clarendon, 4 May 1869, PRO FO 9/194; governments officially included were: Wurtemberg, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt, Austria, Prussia, France and Belgium; Britain was informed unofficially.

65 There is no mention of the initiative in Gladstone’s cabinet minutes for 1869; BM Add MS 44637. The initiative did prompt Gladstone’s letter to Clarendon of 21 May 1869, quoted above. Clarendon was by no means opposed, sending the letter to O. Russell, commenting ‘letter c. might be advantageous if practicable’; Clarendon to O. Russell, 31 May 1864, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 475.

66 Acton to Gladstone, 24 November [1869], in Figgis, [J. N.] and Laurence, [R. V.], [Selections from the correspondence of the first Lord Acton] (London 1917) I p 84.Google Scholar

67 Gladstone to Acton, 1 December 1869, BM Add MS 44093, fol 96, in Lathbury, 2 p 49 and Gladstone to Clarendon, 1 December 1869, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 498.

68 See Figgis and Laurence, I p 96.

69 Gladstone to Clarendon, 13 January 1870, Clarendon MSS dep. с. 498.

70 See Clarendon to O. Russell, 2 May 1870, in Blakiston, N., The Roman Question (London 1962) p 430 Google Scholar. Manning’s recollections confused this incident with the Hohenlohe initiative a year earlier. Apart from its comments on the council, Britain could not accept Daru’s memorandum in full because it expected continued French occupation of the papal states. Acton’s note on 7 December 1869 is a misunderstanding of the exchange between Gladstone and Clarendon in October 1869; Lord Acton and the First Vatican Council, ed Campion, E. (Sydney 1975) p 26.Google Scholar.

71 Gladstone to Clarendon, 13 March 1870, Clarendon MSS dep. c. 498. Gladstone’s cabinet minute of 19 March 1870 (BM Add MS 44638, fol 51) reads: ‘Ecumenical Council: conversation on concurrence in possible French move. HM Govt. to stand in 2d rank’.

72 Gladstone to Acton, 18 November 1873, Figgis and Laurence, I p 175.

73 The disarray of dissenters and anglicans over the 1870 education act may have accounted for this.

74 BM Add MS 44762, fol 14.

75 See Marsh, P. T., The Victorian church in decline (London 1969) cap 7.Google Scholar

76 Gladstone to Döllinger, 23 September 1874, in Lathbury, 2 p 57. See also Gladstone’s memorandum of 30 September 1874, in Lathbury, 2 p 400. For a useful account of this visit and of the proximate causes of the pamphlet, see Altholz, J. L., ‘Gladstone and the Vatican Decrees’, The Historian, 25 May 1963) pp 312-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Normau, E. R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859-1873 (London 1965 pp 457–9 and Norman, , Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London 1968).Google Scholar

77 Contemporary Review, 24 p 674.

78 Gladstone to Acton, 19 October 1874, and Acton to Gladstone, 21 October 1874, BM Add MS 44093, fols 154-6.

79 Acton to Simpson, 4 November 1874, in Altholz, J. L., McElrath, D. and Holland, J. C., The correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson (London 1975) 3 p 318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

80 Gladstone, W. E., The Vatican Decrees (London 1874) p 10.Google Scholar

81 Gladstone, W. E., ‘Vaticanism: an answer to reproofs and replies’, February 1875, in Rome: and the newest fashions in religion (London 1875) p 6 Google Scholar. In view of the nature of Gladstone’s sexual crisis of 1851, the imagery is significant.

82 See Purcell, Life of Manning, 2 pp 475-9.

83 Gladstone to Döllinger, 7 March 1875, quoted in McElrath, D., The Syllabus of Pius IX: some reactions in England (London 1964) p 316.Google Scholar

84 BM Add MS 44446 fol 293.

85 Münster to Gladstone, 25 November 1874, BM Add MS 44445, fol 106. Munster addressed ultra-protestant societies in the same vein.

86 Moss, C. B., The Old Catholic Movement, its origins and history (London 1948)Google Scholar; Anglican initiatives in Christian unity, ed Bill, E. G. W. (London 1967); A history of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948, ed Rouse, R. and Neill, S. C. (2 ed London 1967).Google Scholar

87 Rome and the newest fashions in religion, p 119.

88 The Anglo-Continental society’s constitution explicitly disavowed proselytization; see Meyrick, F., Memories of life at Oxford and elsewhere (London 1905) p 178.Google Scholar

89 Gladstone to Musurus, 2 January 1872, BM Add MS 44541, fol 27. For the remarkable Hatherly, see Anson, P., Bishops at Large (London 1964) cap 2.Google Scholar

90 Occasional paper of the Eastern Church Association Number XIV, ed Williams, George (London 1872) p 9.Google Scholar

91 Ibid p 11.

92 See Gladstone to Acton, 8 December 1851, copy in Add MS 44541, fol 3.

93 Gladstone to Lycurgus, October 1875, in Lathbury, D. C., Correspondence on Church and religion of W. E. Gladstone (London 1910) 2 p 64.Google Scholar

94 Gladstone to Döllinger, 29 August 1875, in ibid 2 p 62.

94a Gladstone to Döllinger, 8 April 1875, BM Add MS 44140, fol 384.

95 Diaries, 28 June 1876.

96 Ibid. See also Houtin, A., Le Pere Hyacinthe, Réformateur Catholique 1869-1893 (Paris 1922) p 199 Google Scholar.

96a See, for example, Gladstone to Döllinger on Hyacinthe, the Old Catholics and Orthodoxy, 29 May 1876, BM Add MS 44140, fol 416.

97 ‘Memorandum’ by F. A. White, 11 December 1878, on a meeting with Gladstone to prepare for a mission in London by father Hyacinthe; Gbdstone said ‘he might subscribe again, but could not move actively. But I might use his name’; Lambeth Palace Library MS 1472, fol 25. See also Gladstone to Döllinger, 29 May 1876, in Lathbury, 2 p 314.

98 See Diaries, 28 June 1876.

99 For the atrocities and the agitation, see Seton-Watson, R. W., Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question (London 1935) and Shannon, [R. T.], [Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1S76] (London 1963) with an introduction by Clark, G.Kitson. Shannon stresses the delay between the start of the serious agitation and Gladstone’s intervention, but at the most this was not more than two weeks in the summer recess.Google Scholar

100 W.E. Gladstone, ‘A speech delivered at Blackheath’, 9 September 1876.

101 Ibid. To achieve this, Gladstone had to withhold strongly felt anger at Vatican exploitation of the eastern question; see Gladstone to Acton, 16 October 1876, in Shannon p 192.

102 de Lisle, the foremost Roman catholic ecumenical layman, assisted in the preparation of the first Vatican pamphlet, and was requested by Gladstone, while writing his Bulgarian pamphlet, to influence Manning.

103 When prime minister, Gladstone had discouraged intemperate action by the Greeks which might have formalised the schism; see Gladstone to archbishop Lycurgus, 18 August 1872, in Lathbury, 2 p 304.

104 W. E. Gladstone, ‘The Hellenic factor in the Eastern problem’, published December 1876, reprinted in Gleanings, 4 p 298. See ako his previously quoted letter to Lycurgus of October 1875.

105 Ibid. In this article Gladstone does comment on Vatican attempts to ‘profit by the quarrel’.

106 The 1876 conference was abandoned in June 1876 because of disagreements about the Filioque; the 1877 conference and Döllinger’s proposal of one in 1878 came to nothing because of British support for Turkey; see Johnston, J. O., Life and letters of H. P. Liddon (London 1904) p 190.Google Scholar

107 Liddon to Döllinger, Trinity Sunday 1878, Liddon Papers, Keble College, Oxford. A. J. Beresford-Hope had been, with Gladstone, the chief layman involved. See also Liddon’s notes of a conversation with Dòllinger, n June 1880, Liddon MSS.

108 See Gladstone’s, ‘Soliloquium and Postscript’ of 1896 in his Later Cleanings (London 1897) p xiii.Google Scholar

109 Manning, H. E., The temporal mission of the Holy Ghost (6 ed London 1909) p 31.Google Scholar