To Mrs. Wellesley, Nov. 19, 1882.—I have remained silent, at least to you, on a subject which for no day has been absent from my thoughts, because I felt that I could add nothing to your consolations and could take away nothing from your grief under your great calamity. But the time has perhaps come when I may record my sense of a loss of which even a small share is so large. The recollections of nearly sixty years are upon my mind, and through all that period I have felt more and more the force and value of your husband's simple and noble character. No less have I entertained an ever-growing sense of his great sagacity and the singularly true and just balance of his mind. We owe much [pg 094] indeed to you both for your constantly renewed kindness, but I have another debt to acknowledge in the invaluable assistance which he afforded me in the discharge of one among the most important and most delicate of my duties. This void never can be filled, and it helps me in some degree to feel what must be the void to you. Certainly he was happy in the enjoyment of love and honour from all who knew him; yet these were few in comparison with those whom he so wisely and so warmly served without their knowing it; and the love and honour paid him, great as they were, could not be as great as he deserved. His memory is blessed—may his rest be deep and sweet, and may the memory and example of him ever help you in your onward pilgrimage.
The same week Dr. Pusey died—a name that filled so large a space in the religious history of England for some thirty years of the century. Between Mr. Gladstone and him the old relations of affectionate friendship subsisted unbroken, notwithstanding the emancipation, as we may call it, of the statesman from maxims and principles, though not, so far as I know, from any of the leading dogmatic beliefs cherished by the divine. “I hope,” he wrote to Phillimore (Sept. 20, 1882), “to attend Dr. Pusey's funeral to-morrow at Oxford.... I shall have another mournful office to discharge in attending the funeral of the Dean of Windsor, more mournful than the first. Dr. Pusey's death is the ingathering of a ripe shock, and I go to his obsequies in token of deep respect and in memory of much kindness from him early in my life. But the death of Dean Wellesley is to my wife and me an unexpected and very heavy blow, also to me an irreparable loss. I had honoured and loved him from Eton days.”
The loss of Dean Wellesley's counsels was especially felt in ecclesiastical appointments, and the greatest of these was made necessary by the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of December. That the prime minister should regard so sage, conciliatory, and large-minded a steersman as Dr. Tait with esteem was certain, and their relations were easy and manly. Still, Tait had been an active liberal when Mr. Gladstone was a tory, and [pg 095]
Recommendation To Canterbury
from the distant days of the Tracts for the Times, when Tait had stood amongst the foremost in open dislike of the new tenets, their paths in the region of theology lay wide apart. “I well remember,” says Dean Lake, “a conversation with Mr. Gladstone on Tait's appointment to London in 1856, when he was much annoyed at Tait's being preferred to Bishop Wilberforce, and of which he reminded me nearly thirty years afterwards, at the time of the archbishop's death, by saying, ‘Ah! I remember you maintaining to me at that time that his σεμνότης and his judgment would make him a great bishop.’ ”[60] And so, from the point of ecclesiastical statesmanship, he unquestionably was.
The recommendation of a successor in the historic see of Canterbury, we may be very certain, was no common event to Mr. Gladstone. Tait on his deathbed had given his opinion that Dr. Harold Browne, the Bishop of Winchester, would do more than any other man to keep the peace of the church. The Queen was strong in the same sense, thinking that the bishop might resign in a year or two, if he could not do the work. He was now seventy-one years old, and Mr. Gladstone judged this to be too advanced an age for the metropolitan throne. He was himself now seventy-three, and though his sense of humour was not always of the protective kind, he felt the necessity of some explanatory reason, and with him to seek a plea was to find one. He wrote to the Bishop of Winchester:—
... It may seem strange that I, who in my own person exhibit so conspicuously the anomaly of a disparate conjunction between years and duties, should be thus forward in interpreting the circumstances of another case certainly more mitigated in many respects, yet differing from my own case in one vital point, the newness of the duties of the English, or rather anglican or British, primacy to a diocesan bishop, however able and experienced, and the newness of mental attitude and action, which they would require. Among the materials of judgment in such an instance, it seems right to reckon precedents for what they are worth; and I cannot find that from the time of Archbishop Sheldon any one has [pg 096] assumed the primacy at so great an age as seventy. Juxon, the predecessor of Sheldon, was much older; but his case was altogether peculiar. I cannot say how pleasant it would have been to me personally, but for the barrier I have named, to mark my respect and affection for your lordship by making to you such a proposal. What is more important is, that I am directly authorised by her Majesty to state that this has been the single impediment to her conferring the honour, and imposing the burden, upon you of such an offer.[61]
The world made free with the honoured name of Church, the Dean of Saint Paul's, and it has constantly been said that he declined the august preferment to Canterbury on this occasion. In that story there is no truth. “Formal offer,” the Dean himself wrote to a friend, “there was none, and could not be, for I had already on another occasion told my mind to Gladstone, and said that reasons of health, apart from other reasons, made it impossible for me to think of anything, except a retirement altogether from office.”[62]
When it was rumoured that Mr. Gladstone intended to recommend Dr. Benson, then Bishop of Truro, to the archbishopric, a political supporter came to remonstrate with him. “The Bishop of Truro is a strong tory,” he said, “but that is not all. He has joined Mr. Raikes's election committee at Cambridge; and it was only last week that Raikes made a violent personal attack on yourself.” “Do you know,” replied Mr. Gladstone, “you have just supplied me with a strong argument in Dr. Benson's favour? For if he had been a worldly man or self-seeker, he would not have done anything so imprudent.” Perhaps we cannot wonder that whips and wirepullers deemed this to be somewhat over-ingenious, a Christianity out of season. Even liberals who took another point of view, still asked themselves how it was [pg 097]
Church Appointments