In both Houses of Parliament this topic occupied a prominent place in the debates on the Address, and on the 7th of February, 1851, the Prime Minister introduced his Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, which prevented the assumption of such titles in respect of places in the United Kingdom. He referred, in connection with the subject, to recent occurrences in Ireland. Dr. Cullen, who had spent most of his life at Rome, had been appointed Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, though his name had not been returned by the parish priests of the diocese, who were accustomed to elect three of their number to be submitted to the Pope as dignus, dignior, dignissimus. He was afterwards transferred to Dublin as the more influential post, with the powers of legate, which placed him at the head of the hierarchy. Then there was the Synod of Thurles, which condemned the Queen's Colleges, and interfered with the land question, and other temporal matters. He argued from the terms of the Pope's Bull that there was an assumption of territorial power of which our Roman Catholic ancestors were always jealous.
The Bill was vehemently opposed by the Irish Roman Catholic members. Mr. Bright and Mr. Disraeli also opposed the measure, which was supported by the Attorney-General, Lord Ashley, Mr. Page Wood, and Sir George Grey. Several other members having spoken for and against the Bill, its introduction was carried by the overwhelming majority of 395 to 63.
Various alterations were subsequently made in the Bill, to prevent its interfering unnecessarily with the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland. The second reading was moved on the 14th of March. Mr. Cardwell refused his assent to the second reading, believing that, by supporting the measure, he would affront Protestant England, and do much to render Ireland ungovernable. Lord Palmerston supported the Bill, because churches were like corporate bodies, encroaching; because it would supply an omission in the Act of 1829; and as the Church of Rome obeyed that Act, she would also obey this. Sir James Graham, on the contrary, expressed his conviction that the passing of this Bill would be a repeal of the Emancipation Act, and then the Dissenters must look about them. Mr. Gladstone ably criticised the Bill, and concluded as follows:—"For three hundred years the Roman Catholic laity and secular clergy—the moderate party—had been struggling, with the sanction of the British Government, for this very measure, the appointment of diocesan bishops, which the extreme party—the regulars and cardinals at the Court of Rome—had been all along struggling to resist. The present legislation would drive the Roman Catholics back upon the Pope, and, teasing them with a miniature penal law, would alienate and estrange them. Religious freedom was a principle which had not been adopted in haste, and had not triumphed till after half a century of agonising struggles; and he trusted we were not now going to repeat Penelope's process without her purpose, and undo a great work which had been accomplished with so much difficulty." Mr. Disraeli expressed his sentiments, and those of his party, upon the general question and the particular measure. He denied that the Pope was without power. He was a prince of very great, if not the greatest power, his army being a million of priests; and was such a power to be treated as a Wesleyan Conference, or like an association of Scottish Dissenters? Sir George Grey having replied to the objections of Mr. Gladstone and others, the House divided, when the second reading was carried by a still greater majority than the first, the numbers being—for the bill, 438; against it, 95; majority 343.
Considering that Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and all the leading Peelites, as well as Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Bright, and the advanced Liberals, joined the Roman Catholics on this occasion, the minority was surprisingly small, showing how deep and wide-spread was the national feeling evoked by the Papal aggressions. Several amendments were moved in committee; but they were nearly all rejected by large majorities. On the 27th of June Sir F. Thesiger proposed certain amendments with a view of rendering the measure more stringent, when about 70 Roman Catholic members retired from the House in a body. Lord John Russell, alluding to this "significant and ostentatious retirement," said it would not save them from the responsibility, as it would cause the passing of the amendments. They were accordingly carried against the Government. On the 4th of July, the day fixed for the third reading, Lord John Russell moved that those amendments should be struck out. One of them was that it should be penal to publish the Pope's Bulls, as well as to assume territorial titles; and another to enable common informers to sue for penalties. There was a division on each of these clauses. The question was then put by the Speaker, "that this Bill do now pass." Another long debate was expected; but no one rising, the division was abruptly taken, with the following result:—For the third reading, 263; against it, 46: majority, 217.
On the 21st of July the Bill was introduced by the Marquis of Lansdowne, into the Upper House. The debate there was chiefly remarkable for the speech of Lord Beaumont, a Roman Catholic peer, who gave his earnest support to the Bill as a great national protest, which the necessity of the case had rendered unavoidable. The Duke of Wellington remarked that "the Pope had appointed an Archbishop of Westminster; had attempted to exercise authority over the very spot on which the English Parliament was assembled. And under the sanction of this proceeding, Cardinal Wiseman made an attack upon the rights of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. That this was contrary to the true spirit of the laws of England, no man acquainted with them could doubt, for throughout the whole of our statutes affecting religion we had carefully abstained from disturbing the great principles of the Reformation." Lord Lyndhurst supported the Bill in an elaborate and able speech. The second reading was carried in this House also by an overwhelming majority, the numbers being—for the bill, 265; against it, 38. On the 29th of July it was read a third time and passed, and shortly afterwards received the Royal Assent, after occupying nearly the whole of the Session. So far as the assumption of titles and the actual establishment and working of the Roman Catholic hierarchy were concerned, the Act undoubtedly proved a dead letter; but it is not to be inferred from this fact that it did not substantially answer its purpose in materially restraining aggression and keeping our jurisprudence clear of the Roman canon law. Cardinal Wiseman and his suffragans in England, on the whole, pursued a moderate and conciliatory course. But a very different course might have been pursued had not the national feeling been so strongly expressed, and been legally embodied in the Ecclesiastical Titles Act.
Lord John Russell's Administration had been for some time in a tottering state. Early in the Session of 1851 the Government was defeated on a motion by Mr. Locke King, for leave to bring in a Bill to make the franchise in counties in England and Wales the same as in boroughs; that is, the occupation of a tenement of the annual value of £10. The motion was carried against the Government by a majority of forty-eight. The Budget came on shortly afterwards, and gave so much dissatisfaction, that there was a general conviction that the Cabinet could not hold together much longer. It was felt that the times required a strong Government; but this had become gradually one of the weakest. The announcement of its resignation, therefore, excited no surprise; but the anxiety to learn what would be the new Ministerial arrangements was evinced by the crowded state of the House of Commons on Friday, the 21st of February. On the order for going into Committee of Ways and Means being read, the Prime Minister rose and requested that it might be postponed till the 24th. On the 24th both Houses were full. In the Upper House, Lord Lansdowne stated that in consequence of divisions which had recently taken place in the House of Commons, the Ministers had unanimously resigned; that Lord Stanley had been sent for by the Queen, and a proposal was made to him to construct a Government, for which he was not then prepared. Lord Stanley gave an account of his gracious reception by her Majesty, but reserved his reasons for declining to undertake the task. In the Lower House, on the same evening, Lord John Russell stated that her Majesty had sent for Lord Stanley, who had declined to form an Administration, and that her Majesty had then asked him to undertake the task of reconstructing one, which he said he had agreed to do. He asked the House to adjourn to the 28th, and when that day arrived, matters were still in a state of confusion. Lord John Russell had failed to reconstruct his Cabinet; Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham had refused to concur in forming an Administration. Lord Stanley had also failed in a similar attempt, owing, according to Lord Malmesbury's "Recollections of an Ex-Minister," to the feeble counsels of Mr. Henley and Mr. Herries. From explanations given by Lord Aberdeen, Lord Stanley, Sir James Graham, and Lord John Russell himself, it appeared that the attempts to reconstruct the Cabinet, or to form a new one, arose from two difficulties in the way of any coalition between the leaders of existing parties—Free Trade, and the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. There could be no union between the Whigs and the Peelites on account of the latter, nor between the Peelites and the Protectionists on account of the former. Lord Stanley remarked that the Peelites, with all their ability and official aptitude, seemed to exercise their talents solely to render any Ministry impossible. A purely Protectionist Administration was out of the question, as it would have to contend against a large majority in the House of Commons. In this dilemma the Queen sent for the Duke of Wellington, and he advised her Majesty that the best course she could adopt in the circumstances was to recall her late advisers; and Lord John Russell's Cabinet resumed their offices accordingly in exactly the same position that they had been before the resignation.
The year 1851 will be for ever memorable by reason of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The idea is generally said to have originated with Prince Albert, who took a lively interest in everything that tended to promote industrial progress and to improve the public taste. As President of the Society of Arts, his attention had been attracted to the Exposition at Paris, under the guidance of the Minister of the Department of Commerce and Industry; and his Royal Highness thought that a similar exhibition in London, open to competitors from all nations, would be useful in a variety of ways, especially in uniting together the people of various countries by the bonds of mutual interest and sympathy. The proposal, from whatever source it originated, was embraced with alacrity by the British public. On the 21st of March, 1850, the Lord Mayor of London gave a splendid banquet at the Mansion House to the chief magistrates of the cities, towns, and boroughs of the United Kingdom, to stimulate their combined interest in the proposed Exhibition. The banquet over, his Royal Highness addressed the guests in an admirable speech, in which the tendencies of the age, the modern developments of art and science, the rapid intercommunication of thought, all realising the unity of mankind, were strikingly presented. The Ministers, past and present, the foreign ambassadors, prelates, and peers, vied with each other in expressing the high value they attributed to the design for the Exhibition.
A similar banquet was given by the Lord Mayor of York, when the Prince Consort and the Lord Mayor of London, the Prime Minister, the Earl of Carlisle, and many of the nobility were present. The Archbishop of York and the High Sheriff of Yorkshire headed the provincial guests, while the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and the Lord Provost of Glasgow appeared as the chiefs of the municipal magistrates. The ancient capital of the north of England brought forth upon that occasion a gorgeous display of historical memorials. There was a collection of maces, State swords, and various civic insignia belonging to corporate bodies, wreathed with flowers and evergreens through which gleamed the bosses and incrustations of gold on the maces that had been wielded by generations of mayors, with the velvet shields and gaudy mountings of gigantic swords of State. Among the ornaments appeared the jewel-bestudded mace of Norwich, presented by Queen Elizabeth. York, on this occasion, surpassed the City of London in the splendour of the banquet. The Prince, in returning thanks for his health, paid a well-turned tribute to the memory of Sir Robert Peel.
A Royal Commission was appointed to manage the Exhibition. Hyde Park in London was fixed upon as the most appropriate site for the building, and Mr. Paxton, head-gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, though not an architect, furnished the plan of the Crystal Palace, as the Exhibition building was called. It was chiefly composed of iron and glass, being 1,848 feet long, 408 feet broad, and 66 feet high, crossed by a transept 108 feet high and also 408 feet in length, for the purpose of enclosing and encasing a grove of noble elms. Within, the nave presented a clear, unobstructed avenue, from one end of the building to the other, 72 feet in span, and 64 feet in height. On each side were aisles 64 feet wide, horizontally divided into galleries, which ran round the whole of the nave and transept. The wings exterior to the centre or nave on each side had also galleries of the same height, the wings themselves being broken up into a series of courts, each 48 feet wide. The Palace was within 10 feet of being twice the width of St. Paul's and four times the length. The number of columns used in the entire edifice was 3,230. There were 34 miles of gutters for carrying off the rain-water to the columns, which were hollow, and served as water-pipes, 202 miles of sash bars, and 900,000 superficial feet of glass, weighing upwards of 400 tons. The building covered about 18 acres of ground, and with the galleries gave an exhibiting surface of 21 acres, with 8 miles of tables for laying out goods.
