Only a very few of the remaining measures of this Session of Parliament require notice. The Ballot Bill did not become law until the next year; for Purchase kept it back until towards the end of June; the Opposition carried on a furious warfare against it for five or six weeks; and when at last it was sent up to the Lords, it was rejected by them, by ninety-seven to forty-eight. The conduct of the Opposition was vexatious and could not fail to be damaging to the Government; for no man's endurance can face the loss of so many precious weeks without blaming his own side a little, as well as his opponents. As the Bill was sent to the House of Lords, it was a very different Bill from that which Mr. Forster had introduced; and some considerable alteration was due to the Liberal side. Mr. Henry James, for instance, helped by Mr. William Vernon-Harcourt—two gentlemen who afterwards were, strangely enough, colleagues in Mr. Gladstone's Government as Attorney- and Solicitor-General—threw out the very useful provision, that election expenses should be charged on the rates.
A second, but a fortunate, Ministerial failure was the Epping Forest Bill, in which Government proposed to appoint a commission for settling the respective rights of the Crown, the commoners, and the lords of the manor in Epping Forest. "The Forest" was the favourite holiday-ground of the dwellers in the eastern half of London. For many years a stealthy process of encroachment had been carried on by a few persons who possessed manorial rights over the great common land. Such was the state of the English law, that this kind of appropriation was quite possible and very frequent. The lord of the manor, regarding a common as so much waste land and grieved that so much land should be allowed to go to waste, set to work to "improve" it; and to improve it, he had to enclose it, until by the help of a few posts and rails, and a few years of undisturbed possession, he established a prescriptive right to the land and converted his shadowy manorial rights into absolute ownership. This is exactly what was happening in Epping Forest, where the beauty of the positions and their nearness to London promised immense rents to enterprising lords of the manor who should venture to cut the land up into building lots. Fortunately, however, the Crown has rights over the "Royal Forest of Waltham," as Epping Forest is properly called, and the encroaching lords of the manor had to deal with another body as well as the commoners—namely, the Commissioners of Works. These commissioners, however, had begun the bad practice of selling the rights of the Crown to the lords of the manor. It was against this unpatriotic tampering with encroachment that Mr. Fawcett protested; in the end, the personnel of the Government commission was strengthened by the addition of Mr. Locke, and, on the motion of Mr. Cowper-Temple, the House decided that the Forest ought to be preserved untouched as a recreation ground for the people. The land recovered from the river by means of the Thames Embankment was also preserved for the Londoners against the will of the Government.
The Bill for legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister made no progress this year; carried by the House of Commons, it was thrown out as usual in the Lords. The Bill for extending the franchise to single women rated to the relief of the poor, though rejected, was rejected by a narrower majority than before; 151 voted for it, and 220 against it. The motion of Mr. Miall for disestablishing the Church of England was thought important enough to call out a strong debate. The Irish Church Act had made the motion not only a possible one, but a motion to be expected; and no fitter man could be found to bring it forward than the editor of the Nonconformist. But the Dissenters were not strong enough in the House to make their success at all probable; not even though, as Mr. Disraeli charged them with being, they were "allied for the moment with revolutionary philosophers." The debate was interesting, as bringing not only a declaration of strong confidence in the Establishment from the leader of the Conservative party, but also as calling out a similar declaration from Mr. Gladstone, whose churchmanship had been thought by friends and foes to be rapidly shifting from the point of view of State-churchmanship he had held so vigorously in his youth. That opinion had been rather encouraged this year by the success of the Government Bill for the Abolition of Religious Tests in the Universities. This subject had been agitated for many years, and it had become a recognised aim of the Liberal party to carry the Bill. The universities—that is, the resident teachers in Oxford and Cambridge—were singularly unanimous in favour of it; and many a meeting had declared how unwilling they were any longer to restrain the freedom of competition and study by retaining any tests whatever. Before the abolition, although any one might be admitted to a Bachelor's degree in Arts without subscribing to any declaration of belief, he could not hold a fellowship, nor qualify himself, by taking a Master's degree, for becoming a member of the governing body of the university, unless he subscribed his assent to the Thirty-nine Articles. It followed that a Dissenter could neither gain the great pecuniary prizes of a student's career, nor could he vote in the Parliamentary elections for the university, nor take any part in the government of the place. At last, mainly perhaps through the efforts of the Solicitor-General, Sir John Duke Coleridge (afterwards Lord Coleridge), the Bill became law, although some restrictions were still kept up. The test at the M.A. degree was abolished entirely, and no test was allowed to be applied in elections to fellowships. But the distinction between lay and clerical fellowships was still retained, in spite of Mr. Fawcett's proposal to merge them. Heads of houses, except in one or two cases, were still to be clergymen of the Establishment; and the test was to be kept up in Divinity degrees. The other Bill of importance that became law this Session was a Trades' Union Bill, designed as a compromise between the extreme views of masters and men. It may also be mentioned that this year saw also the final repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, passed at the initiative of Lord John Russell at the time of the "Papal Aggressions."
The marriage of her Majesty's fourth daughter, the Princess Louise, to the Marquis of Lorne, the eldest son of the Duke of Argyll, was celebrated with great state at Windsor Castle on the 21st of March, 1871. For the first time since the passing of the Royal Marriage Act in 1772, a descendant of George II. married a commoner with the full consent and approval of the reigning Sovereign. The Queen stood by her daughter's side during the ceremony, which was performed by the Bishop of London, assisted by the Bishop of Winchester, and gave the Princess away.
PROCESSION OF MATCH-MAKERS TO WESTMINSTER. (See p. [599].)
A lecture given at Newcastle in August by Sir Charles Dilke, one of the members for Chelsea, on the subject of "Representation and Royalty," excited much comment. Desiring to recommend to his hearers republican simplicity and cheapness, and forgetting that there are institutions, as there are public characters, which are dear at any price, Sir Charles Dilke enlarged on the terrible expensiveness of royalty to the nation. The positive and direct cost of the institution he estimated at about a million a year; he complained of the large sums spent on royal yachts, and of the "scandalous exemption" by which, as he said, her Majesty's income was not subject to the payment of income-tax. On all these points full and satisfactory answers were made to the allegations of the honourable baronet. The bulk of the expenditure incurred in the support of British royalty—namely, the Civil List—was really not one bit more an expense to the country than the rental of Woburn Abbey or Trentham Park, or the dividends received by Sir Charles Dilke himself on any India or railway stock he might have inherited from his father. The Queen received nearly £400,000 a year in respect of the Civil List from the general revenue; but she gave up to the general revenue rents that amounted pretty nearly to the same annual total. These were the rents of the Crown lands, which belonged to her Majesty by exactly the same title that Trentham belonged to the Duke of Sutherland; but which, by a fair and equitable bargain, she abandoned to the nation in exchange for the Civil List. With regard to the exemption from income-tax, it appeared on inquiry that there was nothing "scandalous" in the matter, except the assertion of Sir Charles Dilke, which turned out to be absolutely unfounded, the Queen having paid income-tax from the day of its first imposition. Strange to say, the lecture excited in the lower classes rather a disgust of Republicanism than the opposite feeling, as the riotous conduct of the mob at several subsequent gatherings of Sir Charles Dilke's disciples and adherents plainly evinced.
Before the close of the year testimony of the most direct and unimpeachable character was furnished to the popularity of the Queen and the royal family. Early in November the Prince of Wales paid a visit for a few days to Lord Londesborough's seat near Scarborough. It was supposed that there was some defect in the drainage of the house, which stands close to the sea, and that the seeds of typhoid fever were thus implanted in the Prince's frame. After his return to Sandringham he was taken ill, the fever being of a low and lingering type, and he continued in much the same condition for several weeks, during which her Majesty, accompanied by Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice, visited Sandringham. On the 1st of December, the Prince appearing to be no worse, the Queen returned to Windsor. That some dangerous miasma lurked in the precincts of Londesborough Lodge seemed to be proved by the death, on this same day, of the Earl of Chesterfield, who had been one of the party invited to the house to meet the Prince, and was attacked by a fever of the same kind in so severe a form that he sank from collapse. A groom who had been in attendance on the Prince during the same visit was also attacked.
During November, and till the end of the first week of the following month, no serious symptoms appeared, and the attack was supposed to be passing away; but, on the 8th of December, a decided relapse declared itself, and for several days the life of the Prince of Wales was in the most imminent danger. The Queen, accompanied by some and followed by others of her children, hurried again to Sandringham.