On the question of Parliamentary Reform little interest was at this time felt in the country, and the apathy of the constituencies extended itself to their representatives in the House of Commons. Yet the question may be justly held to have advanced a stage, in consequence of a remarkable declaration made by Mr. Gladstone during the debate on Mr. Baines' Bill for substituting a £6 rental qualification for the existing £10 householder franchise in boroughs. The previous question had been moved by Mr. Cave; but Mr. Gladstone declared that although there was a concurrence of opinion that the present was not a suitable time for the introduction by the Government of a comprehensive measure of Reform, yet he could not vote for the amendment, because it went to deny that the question of the reduction of the franchise was one which ought to be discussed and, if possible, settled. Mr. Baines' Bill was lost by the adoption of the previous question, but it was evident to all that the £10 limit was condemned in general opinion, and could not much longer be maintained. On account of these and similar utterances of his Chancellor, Lord Palmerston said to Lord Shaftesbury, "Gladstone will soon have it all his own way, and whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings."
Another Minister was compelled by circumstances to execute upon himself the "happy despatch" before the end of the Session. This was Mr. Lowe, the Vice-President of the Council, whom Lord Robert Cecil (afterwards Lord Salisbury) charged with mutilating the annual reports of Inspectors of Schools, and cutting out passages that did not chime in with his own views, before submitting them to the House. An adverse resolution grounded on this allegation was carried in a thin House, and Mr. Lowe had no choice but to resign. But the explanation which he afterwards offered made it so abundantly clear that the charge was founded on a misunderstanding, and that he had done nothing but what the practice of his and other departments justified, that Lord R. Cecil frankly admitted that, had this explanation been made at first, he should have abandoned his charges; and the House was induced with little difficulty, on the motion of Lord Palmerston, to rescind the inculpatory resolution which it had just passed.
The Convocation of the Province of Canterbury—which, instead of being prorogued immediately after its opening, as had been the case since the reign of Anne, has gradually obtained the royal licence, since the friendly intervention of Lord Derby in 1852, of proceeding to the despatch of business—after discussions of extraordinary prolixity, passed what was called a "Synodical Judgment" (June 21, 1864), condemning the well-known work entitled "Essays and Reviews." Some time afterwards the matter was brought before the Peers, Lord Houghton desiring to know what was the legal effect of the judgment, and whether, in passing it, the Convocation had not exceeded its powers. On this occasion the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) made a speech, the like of which for scathing wit and contemptuous banter, has been seldom heard. "There are," he said, "three modes of dealing with Convocation, when it is permitted to come into action and transact real business. The first is, while they are harmlessly busy, to take no notice of their proceedings. The second is, when they seem likely to get into mischief, to prorogue them, and put an end to their proceedings; the third, when they have done something clearly beyond their powers, is to bring them before a court of justice and punish them." He went on to state that should any attempt be made to give validity to any act of Convocation, without the consent of the Crown, the persons so offending would incur the penalties of præmunire. "I am afraid my noble friend has not considered what the pains and penalties of a præmunire are, or his gentle heart would have melted at the prospect.... I have not ventured—I say it seriously—I have not ventured to present the question to her Majesty's Government; for, my lords, only imagine what an opportunity it would be for my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to spread his net, and in one haul take in £30,000 from the highest dignitary, not to speak of the bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons, vicars, all included in one common crime, all subject to one common penalty.... Assuming that the report of the judgment which I have read is a correct one, I am happy to tell your lordships, that what is called a synodical judgment is simply a series of well lubricated terms—a sentence so oily and so saponaceous that no one could grasp it. Like an eel, it slips through your fingers—it is simply nothing; and I am glad to tell my noble friend that it is literally no sentence." Bishop Wilberforce, to whose nickname, "Soapy Sam," the last passage was an obvious allusion, made a vigorous and dignified reply to this masterpiece of irony.
Parliament was prorogued on the 29th of July; and the records of the remaining five months of the year contain little or nothing of public interest. Earlier in the year, the visit of a distinguished foreigner had been attended with so much of popular excitement and enthusiasm that it deserves a passing notice. There was sufficient real feeling and real knowledge about the Italian question among the masses of the metropolis to secure the champion of a free Italy a warm reception, but before his arrival the infectious enthusiasm of the well-informed few had spread to the ignorant many, to those who scarcely knew that such a country as Italy existed, and only thought vaguely of Garibaldi as a friend of the poor and oppressed. All along the line from Southampton to the capital crowds filled the stations, while at Nine Elms, where the General was to alight, a multitude of working men, arranged in procession according to their trades, awaited him on that April afternoon. Side by side with them stood peers and members of Parliament, and when Garibaldi arrived he was received like a prince, though there was a touch of passion in the reception which is granted to few princes. At Wandsworth Road a halt was made while a monster procession of trades unions filed past. Upwards of 30,000 men took part in it, and as they passed the General one and all broke out in cheers and cries. To the dense multitude gathered at Vauxhall and Kennington, 30,000 men would have been as nothing. Trafalgar Square was one vast sea of faces as the procession entered it, while along Pall Mall the clubs were lit up, and the windows and balconies filled with spectators. At last Stafford House was reached, and the long, fatiguing, exciting journey came to an end. Garibaldi was hoarse and wearied; the excitement had been almost too much for him, and after his introduction to the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, his friends saw his retirement in the care of his host with relief. So far his visit had been an unexampled success; London had given him a noble welcome, as the most cynical confessed. He was fêted, the best houses in London were open to him, while the leaders of society vied with one another in efforts to please and amuse him. Throughout it all he remained his simple unconscious self, unfeignedly pleased by the admiration and attention shown him, but always glad when he could escape the throng around him for a minute or two, and chat in a corner with a friend. On the 20th, when he went to receive the freedom of the City of London, the same unmixed enthusiasm greeted him. It began to be said, at the end of the General's visit, that the red shirt was an emblem of revolution, and that if he stayed longer in England, a dangerous temper might be developed among the workmen who cheered him so lustily. That his visit was shortened by a hint from the Government is well known, but the actuating motive was not fear of a rising at home, but the representations of the Austrian and Italian Ministers. On the 27th of April he quitted Plymouth in the Undine.
Few of those who departed in the course of this year from their wonted places among men awakened in the hearts of the mourning survivors more sad and sympathetic regrets than Henry Pelham Clinton, fifth Duke of Newcastle. But fifty-three years old, and endowed by nature with an eager and buoyant temperament, he was just the man who might have been expected to pass a long life in doing good and faithful service for his country, and then to die in harness. But the gloom of a ghastly private sorrow had long hung over him; the incurable wound of an intolerable injury rankled in his soul. Nassau William Senior, the eminent political economist, died this year at the age of 74. He was an eminent and representative member of the English school of economists, in whose hands the science of wealth tended to be mathematical and precise and aimed at excluding those moral and sentimental considerations from which most Continental economists thought that it could not be disjoined. His mind, remarkable for the clear dry light that it brought to the analysis and classification of facts, was deficient in imagination and sensibility, though it made advances in this direction in the course of his later years, as his journals and letters testify.
On the 23rd of April, 1864, exactly three hundred years would have elapsed since the birth of Shakespeare; and before the anniversary arrived there was a general stir in literary and dramatic circles, out of a persuasion that a date so marked should be signalised by a national festival of a splendid character, which would show the world how England honoured her greatest poet. Something, eventually, was done, and, to some limited extent, well done. A pavilion was erected by public subscription at Stratford-upon-Avon, which was to serve the threefold purpose of dining-room, theatre, and hall of discussion. On the morning of the 23rd of April the Mayor of Stratford received, in the Town Hall, an address from the "Free German Institute of Arts and Sciences at Frankfort-on-the-Main." Professor Max Müller, in presenting this address, delivered a remarkable and somewhat inconclusive speech. He urged that hero-worship should henceforward replace for England that veneration of the saints which was so dear to our forefathers. In London the memory of Shakespeare was honoured in various ways, but the only truly public demonstration was that arranged by the Working Men's Committee. It was resolved to plant an oak in honour of Shakespeare at the foot of Primrose Hill. A young oak sapling was, by the Queen's permission, obtained from Windsor Park; a procession of trades was organised from Russell Square; and after an oration had been delivered by Mr. George Moore, the chairman of the committee, Mr. Phelps, the celebrated actor at Sadler's Wells Theatre, planted the tree, and a Mrs Banks, sprinkling it with water brought from the Avon at Stratford, christened it "Shakespeare's Oak."
The progress of Rationalism on all sides, and even among the clergy of the Establishment, made itself felt this year in various ways. The same Lord Chancellor, who made so merry in Parliament with the "synodical judgment" of Convocation upon "Essays and Reviews," had previously, in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, given to two of the contributors to that volume the full benefit of the extremely latitudinarian character of his own theological sentiments. Dr. Rowland Williams and Mr. Wilson had been condemned in the Court of Arches on two of the reformed articles of charge exhibited against them, and sentenced to a year's suspension. One article exhibited against Dr. Williams which the Court below held to be proved, charged him with maintaining that the Bible, or Holy Scripture, was "an expression of devout reason," and the written voice of the congregation—not the Word of God, nor containing any special revelation of His Truth, or of His dealings with mankind, nor of the rule of our faith. Another charged him with alleging that "the doctrine of merit by transfer is a fiction," and argued that this was at variance with the express language of the eleventh of the Thirty-nine Articles, which teaches that "we are accounted righteous before God only for the merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not of our own works and deservings." With regard to the first article, the judgment of the Judicial Committee, as delivered by the Lord Chancellor, was to the effect that the language used by Dr. Williams had been harshly interpreted; as to the second, the Court accepted Dr. Williams's explanation, that by the term "fiction" he did not intend "false or fictitious statement," but merely "the phantasm in the mind of an individual that he has received or enjoyed merit by transfer." Upon the whole, the committee were of opinion that Dr. Williams had not outstepped the limits imposed by the formularies of the Church of England on the freedom of thought and discussion, and therefore decided that the sentence of a year's suspension must be reversed. In the case of Mr. Wilson, charged with encouraging the hope that the last judgment of God upon the wicked might not be really one consigning them to eternal punishment, the committee similarly held that this opinion was fairly tenable by clergymen of the Church of England, and therefore reversed the penal sentence of the Court of Arches.
An incident in the great Colenso anomaly, which occurred partly in this and partly in the following year, when stripped of the legal technicalities in which it was enveloped, resulted no less favourably for the advocates of free thought than the trial of Dr. Williams and Mr. Wilson. In virtue of letters patent issued from the Crown, erecting Capetown into a metropolitan see, with Dr. Gray for its first bishop, and Natal as one of the suffragan sees—giving also to the metropolitan bishop jurisdiction over his suffragans, with a right of appeal only to the Archbishop of Canterbury—Bishop Gray had cited Bishop Colenso to appear in his diocesan court of Capetown and answer to the charges of heresy, founded on the novel doctrines broached in his Essay on the Pentateuch, which had been brought against him. Dr. Colenso denied the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Capetown in hac re, and declined to appear; nevertheless, Bishop Gray proceeded to hear the charges and, having decided them to be proved, pronounced a sentence of deposition against Bishop Colenso, and prohibited his clergy from paying him canonical obedience. Dr. Colenso, however, in due course lodged an appeal with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, as the depositary of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical causes, and prayed, not only that the sentence against him might be declared null and void, but that the letters patent conferring jurisdiction on the Bishop of Capetown might be declared to have been illegal and of no effect ab initio. The case was argued on the 14th of December and following days, but the judgment of the Judicial Committee was not delivered till March in the following year, when the court decided that the proceedings of Bishop Gray were null and void as law. The fact was that the zeal of the Bishop had outrun his discretion and entirely disregarded the remonstrances of Dr. Tait, the judicious Bishop of London.
But the Rationalising and anti-dogmatic party were not allowed to carry all before them; their flank was vigorously assailed by Mr. Disraeli, in November, who, in a speech delivered at a meeting of the Oxford Diocesan Society, attacked the new scepticism with all the resources of his bitter wit and unsparing rhetoric. He spoke of the clerical underminers of the doctrines which at their ordination they had vowed to maintain, whose works, he said—insufferably dull and interminably prolix—would, if we were compelled to peruse them, go far to realise for us that perpetuity of punishment which their authors denied. The highest science, he went on to say, was that which interpreted the highest nature, namely, the nature of man; but when he compared the new interpretations with the old, he was not prepared to say that the lecture-room was more scientific than the Church. "What is the question which is now placed before society with the glib assurance which to me is most astounding? That question is this—Is a man an ape or an angel? My lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories. I believe they are foreign to the conscience of humanity; and I say more—that even in the strictest intellectual point of view I believe the severest metaphysical analysis is opposed to such conclusions."
