The object and effect of all the amendments hitherto described was to secure for the Church, after disestablishment, a large portion of its property, in addition to the sums required for the satisfaction of life-interests. Many peers saw clearly that if passed in this way, the Bill, besides causing dissatisfaction among English Dissenters, would arouse feelings of disappointment and indignation among Irish Roman Catholics, who had been led to expect that the disendowment would be real and bonâ fide, no less than the disestablishment. Attempts were therefore made to keep the balance even by applying a portion of the surplus to the use and benefit of the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Churches in Ireland. A proposal of the Duke of Cleveland tending in this direction was rejected; but just before the Bill was read a third time, Earl Stanhope moved and carried an amendment, authorising a certain measure of "concurrent endowment." By this amendment, the clause conveying the glebe-houses to the disestablished clergy received an enlarged scope, so that it should be in the power of the Commissioners to make provision for residences, in cases where they were wanting, for Roman Catholic priests and Presbyterian ministers, as well as for Protestant Episcopalian bishops and clergy. Government, bound by their election pledges to the Dissenters, strenuously opposed this amendment; Lord Granard also, professing to speak for his Catholic countrymen in Ireland, refused his consent to it. On the other hand, Lord Dunraven, a Catholic peer, supported it; and Earl Russell expressed an opinion in its favour, drily remarking, that he doubted whether there would be much feeling of religious equality in Ireland so long as the Protestant clergy were comfortably housed, and the Roman Catholic priests lived in hovels. Lord Stanhope's amendment was carried by a narrow majority, and the Bill was then read a third time and passed, a protest being first signed by Lord Derby and forty-three temporal and two spiritual peers. Lord Derby had previously denounced the Bill with the impressive solemnity of a dying man. "My lords," he said, "I am an old man, and, like many of your lordships, past the allotted span of three score years and ten. My official life is at an end, my political life is nearly closed, and in the course of nature my natural life cannot be long.... If it be for the last time that I have the honour of addressing your lordships, I declare that it will be to my dying day a satisfaction that I have been able to lift up my voice against the adoption of a measure, the political impolicy of which is equalled only by its moral iniquity."
The Bill, as amended by the Lords, came back to the House of Commons; and it became the duty of Government to consider how far they could give way, in order not to imperil the safety of the Bill. In the main it was deemed impossible to accept the measure in the altered form in which it came from the hands of the Lords. Mr. Gladstone announced (July 15th) that he should propose to disagree from all the more important amendments, with the exception that, in the case of Lord Carnarvon's proposal, Government would consent to a modification of the original clause, so as to make it slightly more favourable to the clergy. A few amendments of minor importance he was willing to accept. The course proposed by the Prime Minister was approved by the House, and all the more important of the Lords' amendments were rejected by large majorities.
Violent language was heard in the House of Lords when the Bill, restored nearly to its original shape, came back to them from the House of Commons. The Marquis of Salisbury said that "his reason for opposing the Government project for appropriating the surplus was that it was false and that it was foolish. In the first place, it implied a partial application of the fund for spiritual teaching; and, in the second place, it was a vain attempt of the House of Commons, which distrusted its own resolution against concurrent endowment, to bind itself, like a drunkard taking the pledge, against changing its mind in the future. In truth, the only argument for it was, that the House of Commons had passed it; and the only reason why that House had done so was, that the Prime Minister had bidden it. Why the Prime Minister bade it, he could not search deep enough into the labyrinthine recesses of that mind to detect, unless it were that Mr. Gladstone had desired to give this House a slap on the face. So far from agreeing with the Earl of Shaftesbury's appeal to the House to waive its amendments in deference to the Commons, he believed this was just an occasion on which it was the duty of this House to interfere between the country and the arrogant will of one man." The motion that the House should insist on its amendment, altering the preamble in relation to the surplus, was carried by a large majority.
The state of things was now very serious. A collision between the two Houses seemed to be on the point of taking place which would have strained the Constitution to the last point of tension. Plans for overcoming the resistance of the Lords were openly propounded and generally discussed. It was said that the Ministry would advise her Majesty to bring the Session immediately to a close, that Parliament would be summoned to meet again for the despatch of business in the autumn, that Mr. Gladstone's Bill for disestablishing the Irish Church would then be passed again by the House of Commons in its original shape, and again be sent up to the House of Lords; and that this process must and would be repeated until that House agreed to pass it. Fortunately the new Primate, Archbishop Tait, whose recommendation had been one of Mr. Disraeli's last efforts, was a man peculiarly fitted to mediate between contending parties. Despite his deep sympathies with the cause of Episcopacy in Ireland, which found expression on May 6th, 1869, in a strongly worded resolution against disestablishment and disendowment moved by him in St. James's Hall, he, like Bishop Wilberforce, promptly perceived that the unmistakable declaration of the constituencies had rendered futile any further resistance. The Queen was of similar mind, and under her Majesty's wise command the archbishop had placed himself in communication with Mr. Gladstone early in February. He found the Prime Minister far more moderate than some of his lieutenants, and was able to report to the Queen that the proposed safeguards were admitted in principle, though some of Mr. Gladstone's intentions, particularly for dealing with post-Reformation grants and bequests, did not go as far as he wished. On the 8th of May he held a private conference at Lambeth with eight lay peers, representing the various parties, and in vain endeavoured to persuade them to consent to the second reading of the Bill. On the 3rd of June he again received the Queen's commands to put himself in communication with Mr. Gladstone, but without much success, nor did a letter to Earl Cairns, asking him to persuade his followers to consent to the second reading, produce the desired effect. On the contrary Lord Cairns informed him that at a meeting held at the Duke of Marlborough's house the Conservative peers had authorised Lord Harrowby to move the rejection of the Bill. The Queen wrote in alarm, saying that, though her objections against the measure still existed in full force, she considered that "the rejection of the Bill on the second reading would only serve to bring the two Houses into collision, and to prolong a dangerous agitation of the subject, while it would further tend to increase the difficulty of ultimately obtaining a measure so modified as to remove, or at least to mitigate, the fears of those who are conscientiously opposed to the present Bill as it stands." Accordingly the archbishop not only advised Lord Granville to introduce the Bill in a conciliatory speech, but himself spoke in such a moderate tone as greatly to influence the issue of the debate. After the second reading had been carried—as we have already mentioned—and the Bill had been amended in committee, Archbishop Tait received a further despatch from her Majesty, which ran—"The Queen must say that she cannot view without alarm the possible consequences of another year of agitation on the Irish Church, and she would ask the archbishop seriously to consider, in case the concessions to which the Government may agree should not go so far as he himself may wish, whether the postponement of the settlement for another year would not be likely to result in worse rather than in better terms for the Church." The archbishop accordingly set himself to mediate between the contending parties as represented by Earl Cairns and Mr. Gladstone, and his diary, as published in his biography by Dr. Randall Davidson and Dr. Benham, gives a vivid expression of his hopes and fears. On Tuesday evening he records "a violent and apparently hopeless quarrel between Cairns and Gladstone"; on Thursday, after negotiations with all parties—Irish bishops, Conservative peers, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, and Earl Cairns—he could write that "by five o'clock all was settled." On the 22nd of July Lord Cairns announced the result of these negotiations to the House. The point about the date he was willing to waive, so that the legal disestablishment would take place, as originally fixed, on the 1st of January, 1871. Government had made various concessions which, while still thinking them inadequate to the justice of the case, he was willing to accept, rather than run the hazard of a collision between the two branches of the Legislature. They consented that the liabilities of incumbents for the salaries of curates should be confined to the case where a curate had been employed for five years. As to diocesan commutation, Government—who had already added seven per cent. to the amount of the annuities obtainable by commuting incumbents—now agreed to grant five per cent. more; this involved a diminution of the surplus by upwards of £700,000. Better terms for curates had been already conceded. The acceptance of commutation by three-fourths, instead of four-fifths, of the clergy of a diocese was to be held sufficient. Government had also agreed to exempt from the commutation any residence and land in an incumbent's own occupation if the incumbent should so desire. Lastly, there was the question of the disposal of the surplus. Government on this point had consented to amend the 68th clause, so that it would provide for the employment of the surplus for the relief of unavoidable calamity and in such manner as Parliament should hereafter direct.
NEW PALACE YARD, WESTMINSTER.
(From a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co., Aberdeen.)
A general sense of relief, mingled with admiration for the consummate ability and discretion with which Lord Cairns had managed his case, pervaded the House at this announcement. That he deserved less credit for the arrangement than the Queen and Archbishop Tait must now be conceded, but the workings of their wise diplomacy were not revealed until many years had passed. The compromise which the earl had agreed to on his own responsibility was adopted with hardly a dissentient voice, and the Bill was then returned to the House of Commons, where (July 23rd) it received a final consideration. Mr. Gladstone did not conceal that he deemed the last grant of five per cent. in augmentation of the commutation fund to be a matter of great importance, and a concession against the principle of the Bill. But looking to the mischief of leaving the controversy open, and in deference to the opinion of the House of Lords, and wishing to preserve the harmony between the two Houses (which had never been so severely tried, but which, he thanked God, had withstood the trial), Government had not felt justified in refusing the overtures made to them on the point. The Lords' amendments were then agreed to; and the Bill received the Royal Assent on the 26th of July.
This important measure accordingly passed into law. Those who declaimed against the disendowment of the Church as an act of spoliation—confiscation—sacrilege, and predicted that the disregard for the rights of property shown by Government in this instance would fatally weaken the respect for property in the minds of the general community, forgot the fact, of which Mr. Chichester Fortescue took care to remind them, that "the Bill was no more confiscation than the original transfer of the Church property from Roman Catholic to Protestant hands had been; and Parliament, which made that change, might now convert the property to other Irish purposes." On the other hand, the brilliant anticipations of concord and contentment which Mr. Bright indulged in were not realised. He said the Bill was put forward by Government as the means of creating a true and solid union, and of removing Irish discontent, not only in Ireland, but across the Atlantic. Archbishop Trench could not conceal his chagrin. The proposal to disestablish the Irish Church was made, he thought, with levity and precipitation; the Roman Catholics would be but feebly and languidly pleased, whilst the Protestants would entertain the liveliest and most enduring resentment for the wrong inflicted upon them. The former saw that all the changes which the Bill underwent in its progress through Parliament were in the direction of making fresh inroads upon the surplus in favour of the disestablished clergy. Even before the Lords' amendments had so greatly swelled the amounts to be given in commutation and compensation, the O'Donoghue observed, on behalf of his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen, that the compensation clauses went much farther than was the due of the Irish Protestants, and that to increase them would be an injustice to the Irish people. And while the disendowed Church was thus being, to a large extent, re-endowed, Lord Stanhope's clause—the one solitary indication of a friendly feeling towards the religion of the majority which the Bill would have contained—was summarily and inexorably rejected. It is true that this rejection was promoted by the Irish members themselves. A compact had been entered into between the Irish Liberals and those English and Scottish members who viewed with uncompromising hostility all national establishment or endowment of religion, by which, on condition of the Irish members renouncing everything in the nature of an endowment for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the English and Scottish Liberals agreed to support the Irish Land Bill when it should be brought forward. Among politicians this was well understood; but to the masses of the Irish people the disestablishment of the Church must have seemed to be carried out in such a way as to establish little claim on their gratitude.