He presented the curious spectacle, to sociologists and the world at large, of a Jew by origin who had become a Christian by conviction and one of the sincerest sons of the English Church as he understood it. In political life Sir Michael was a steady, rather than a brilliant, force. He had been Home Secretary under a former Conservative administration, but had retired from office. At the present moment he was a private member for the division in which his country house, Fencastle, stood, and he enjoyed the confidence of the chiefs of his party.
His great talent was for organisation, and all his powers in that direction were devoted towards the preservation and unification of the Church to which he was a convert.
Sir Michael's convictions were perfectly clear and straightforward. He believed, with all his heart, in the Catholicity of the Anglican persuasion. Roman priests he spoke of as "members of the Italian mission"; Nonconformists as "adherents to the lawless bands of Dissent." He allowed the validity of Roman orders and spoke of the Pope as the "Bishop of Rome," an Italian ecclesiastic with whom the English communion had little or nothing to do.
In his intimate and private life Sir Michael lived according to rubric. His splendid private chapel at Fencastle enjoyed the services of a chaplain, reinforced by priests from a community of Anglican monks which Sir Michael had established in an adjacent village. In London, St. Mary's was, in some sense, his particular property. He spent fabulous sums on the big Bloomsbury Parish and the needs of its great, cathedral-like church. There was no vicar in London who enjoyed the command of money that Father Ripon enjoyed. Certainly there was no other priest in the ranks of the High Churchmen who was the confidential friend and spiritual director of so powerful a political and social personality.
Yet in his public life Sir Michael was diplomatic enough. He worked steadily for one thing, it is true, but he was far too able to allow people to call him narrow-minded. The Oriental strain of cunning in his blood had sweetened to a wise diplomacy. While he always remembered he was a Churchman, he did not forget that to be an effective and helpful one he must keep his political and social eminence. And so, whatever might take place behind the scenes in the library with Father Ripon, or in the Bloomsbury clergy house, the baronet showed the world the face of a man of the world, and neither obtruded his private views nor allowed them to disturb his colleagues.
The day after the news arrived in Fleet Street from Palestine—while nothing was yet known and Harold Spence was rushing through Amiens en route for Paris and the East—a house party began to collect at Fencastle, the great place in Lincolnshire.
For a day or two a few rather important people were to meet under Sir Michael's roof. Now and then the palace in the fen lands was the scene of notable gatherings, much talked of in certain circles and commented on by people who would truthfully have described themselves as being "in the know."
These parties were, indeed, congresses of the eminent, the "big" people who quietly control an England which the ignorant and the vulgar love to imagine is in the hands of a corrupt society of well-born, "smart," and pleasure-seeking people.
The folk who gathered at Fencastle were as remote from the gambling, lecherous, rabbit-brained set which glitters so brightly before the eyes of the uninformed as any staid, middle-class reader of the popular journals.
In this stronghold of English Catholicism—"hot-bed of ritualists" as the brawling "Protestant" journals called it, one met a diversity of people, widely divided in views and only alike in one thing—the dominant quality of their brains and position.