A history of England

by Charles Oman

Newman's secession.

A storm of wrath was directed against the new High-Churchmen, who were denounced as Jesuits and false brethren. Most of all was the outcry loud when Newman in 1841 wrote a pamphlet to prove that by certain ingenious interpretations of loosely worded portions of the Thirty-nine Articles, a man might hold all the leading doctrines of Rome and yet stay inside the English Church. This curious production was a tour de force which, as he afterwards confessed, did not satisfy his own conscience. He retired from teaching for awhile, and then seceded to the Romanist communion, where alone he felt that he could realize his desire to belong to a Church undoubtedly orthodox and enjoying a right to speak with authority [1845]. Many of his more zealous adherents followed him, at intervals, in the next ten years.

The High- Church party.

But the bulk of the Tractarians felt sure that the Church of England was a true branch of the Catholic Church and remained within it, gradually conquering the tolerance of their contemporaries by their undoubted zeal and purity of motive. Ere long they acquired a strong position, as their doctrines were very acceptable to the clergy, while the admirable life and work of men like Keble gradually won over many of the laity to their views. To the new High-Church party we owe much good work in neglected parishes, and a restoration of decency and order in public worship, which was a great improvement on the careless and slovenly practice of the eighteenth century. Their efforts led to a revival of interest in Church history and ecclesiastical antiquities. Their influence made the clergy as a body more spiritual and more hard-working. But for a time the Tractarian controversy split England into two hostile camps, and the eccentric mediaevalism of the "Ritualists"—those of the party who strove to restore the forgotten minutiae of pre-Reformation ceremonies—drove Low and Broad Churchmen into extreme wrath. Even yet the breach is not healed, and the Church is divided, though the old bitterness has been forgotten to a great extent in the last ten years. But the net result of the movement has been to substitute zeal—if sometimes the zeal was without discretion—for deadness, and the Church of to-day is far stronger and more powerful than the Church of 1830.

The Nonconformists.

The most unhappy result of the movement has been to drive the Nonconformists, to whom High-Church doctrine was particularly repulsive, into a deeper antagonism to the Church than they ever felt before. Hence Dissent has become political, putting the disestablishment of the Church of England before it as one of the ends of its work, side by side with its spiritual aims.

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill.

The fear that the Tractarian movement would lead to widespread conversions to Romanism turned out to be unjustified. Though a considerable number followed Newman in the forties, the stream soon slackened. Yet for some years the nation was nervously anxious about "Papal aggression," and in 1850, when the Pope issued a Bull which appointed a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops to preside over English sees, the government of Lord John Russell passed an "Ecclesiastical Titles Bill," imposing penalties on all who acknowledged the validity of the Bull. But the excitement died down, and nothing was done to enforce the act.

State of the political parties.

Meanwhile, if the social and intellectual history of England was interesting, its purely political history was for some years both dull and perplexing. On the fall of the Russell cabinet in the spring of 1852, owing to the quarrel between the prime minister and his masterful Foreign Secretary, Palmerston, English politics were left in a confused and unsatisfactory condition, for there was no party strong enough to command a majority in the country. The Tories were still split into two sections. Sir Robert Peel was dead, killed by a fall from his horse in St. James's Park on July 2, 1850, but his followers still clung together under Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, and refused to hold any communication with that larger half of the Conservative party which since Lord George Bentinck's death was led by Disraeli and Lord Derby. The question of Protection still lay between them; but a far more real bar to union was their personal dislike for each other, dating back to the hard words used in 1846 over the Corn Laws. Now that the Liberal party had been for a moment broken up by the quarrel of Russell and Palmerston, there were four factions in the House, each of which was largely outnumbered by the junction of the other three.