After much determined opposition from the Tories, with whom Mr. Gladstone acted on this occasion, the Government succeeded in carrying the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into the condition of the Universities—a proposal which had the warm support of the Queen and Prince Albert, in consequence of which some foolish people went about saying that there was a conspiracy on foot to Germanise the academic system of England.
The Bishop of London’s Ecclesiastical Appeals Bill, which was introduced into the House of Lords on the 3rd of June, touched on matters regarding which the Queen has always been sensitive—the relation of the Church to the prerogative of the Crown. The principle of the Bill was that ecclesiastical appeals should be tried, not before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as representing the Queen, but before an assemblage of Bishops, whose decision should be binding, not merely on the Judicial Committee, but on the Queen also. This, of course, destroyed her supremacy over the Established Church of England, a prerogative of the Crown which has always been tenaciously guarded. The Bill was rejected. And here it may be well to record what it was that led to its introduction. It was introduced to tranquillise the High Churchmen and Tractarians, who were smarting over the decision of the famous “Gorham case.”
Mr. Gorham had been presented by the Crown to the benefice of Bramford Speke in August, 1847. When the Bishop examined him, he found that he was an extreme Low Churchman, and that he denied that spiritual regeneration was conferred by the sacrament of Baptism; also that his views on other matters, such as predestination and election, were those of the narrowest Presbyterian Calvinists. The Bishop of Exeter refused to institute Mr. Gorham, and, after much litigation, the case was appealed by him from the Court of Arches to the Judicial Committee, who decided that Mr. Gorham’s views were not incompatible with the Thirty-nine Articles. The Judicial Committee on this occasion consisted of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London. Associated with them were the Master of the Rolls (Lord Langdale), the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Campbell), Mr. Baron Parke, Vice-Chancellor, Sir J. Knight Bruce, Dr. Lushington, and the Right Hon. Pemberton Leigh. The complaint of the Churchmen was that the ruling of a Bishop and an ecclesiastical court on a disputed point of doctrine was not only considered, but actually reversed by a secular tribunal the large majority of whose members were laymen, and the clerical members of which could not vote, but merely gave their opinion to the lay members who formed the Judicial Committee. Churchmen passionately resented these proceedings, and the excitement they raised was fierce and uncontrollable. The Gorham Appeal Case was the badge of the Church’s servitude to the State. The Bishop of London’s Bill was an attempt to remove that badge by constituting a purely ecclesiastical tribunal to try all ecclesiastical appeals, thereby avoiding the necessity for submitting them to lay judges.
When the Queen prorogued Parliament the shadow of mourning was over both Houses. Sir Robert Peel had died suddenly on the 2nd of July. Returning on horseback from a visit to Buckingham Palace on the 29th of June, he met Miss Ellice, one of Lady Dover’s daughters, on Constitution Hill. As he bowed to her, his horse shied at the Green Park railings, and threw him. His fifth rib was broken, and its jagged end pierced the lung with a mortal wound. He lingered in great agony for three days, and it is hardly possible to describe the extraordinary sensation his accident and illness produced throughout the country. Party animosities vanished, and the nation with one voice joined the Queen in the expressions of sorrow which came from her when she said, “The country mourns over him as over a father.”[20]
Peel’s character will, for this generation, be an enigma. Look at one aspect of it, and it seems as the character of a patriot of the pure Roman type, who flourished in the days “when none were for a Party, and all were for the State.” Look at another aspect of it, and it seems as if it were permeated by the conscious insincerity of the unscrupulous political intriguer, whose stock-in-trade was Party principle, which he bought and sold for power in the Parliamentary market. One thing is clear. His abandonment of Protection could not possibly have been due to a love of office. He knew too well when he determined to repeal the Corn Laws, that he doomed himself to political ostracism. Two things seem to account for Peel’s difficulties with his partisans. He saw clearly, but he did not see far. He used his influence as a political leader to become a Minister, but the Minister of the Queen, and not the Minister of his Party. Long before Catholic Emancipation triumphed he ought to have seen that its triumph was inevitable, and the same may be said of the repeal of the Corn Laws. When he suddenly awoke to the fact that in the one case war, and in the other famine was impending, he reversed his policy, but he had to change front so quickly that he had not time to “educate his Party.” On both occasions he had to choose between his Party and the nation. On neither did he shrink from making his choice as a patriot, even at the cost of his reputation as a far-seeing statesman, or a faithful Party leader. Mr. Disraeli said he was not the greatest statesman, but the greatest Member of Parliament England ever produced. That was a just estimate of his magical power of mastering and managing the House of Commons. But it did no justice to his genius for administration, his vast and accurate knowledge of affairs, and latterly the serene judicial temper of mind, in which he dealt with the most agitating and perplexing political problems. Coldness, secretiveness, and egotism were the only flaws in a character, which otherwise almost realised the loftiest ideal of British patriotism.
At the beginning of 1850 the Queen became grievously alarmed about the health of Prince Albert. The toil and anxieties of politics during the years of revolution and counter-revolution had sadly worn his nervous system. In addition to his work as confidential private secretary to the Queen, his own occupations, which have been noticed from time to time in these pages, had grown more numerous and varied each year. As Mr. Gladstone once observed of Mr. Ayrton, “he was a cormorant for work.” As Sir Theodore Martin says, “Ministers and diplomatists found him at every interview possessed of an encyclopædic range of information, extending even to the minutest details.” The Court at this time was a rich treasure-store of information regarding the inner history of Courts and Embassies on the Continent, on which our diplomatists were grateful to draw for aid and suggestions, when appointed to difficult and delicate missions. “But to the claims of politics,” writes Sir Theodore Martin, “had to be added those which science, art, and questions of social improvement were constantly forcing upon the Prince’s attention.... He was habitually an early riser. Even in winter he would be up by seven, and dispose of a great deal of work before breakfast, by the light of the green German lamp, the original of which he had brought over with him, and which has since become so familiar an object in our English homes.[21] The Queen shared his early habits; but before her Majesty joined him in the sitting-room, where their writing-tables stood always side by side, much had, as a rule, been prepared for her consideration—much done to lighten the pressure of those labours, both of head and hands, which are inseparable from the discharge of the Sovereign’s duties.”[22] These labours ultimately produced insomnia or sleeplessness, and at the beginning of the year the Queen, writing from Windsor to Baron Stockmar, alludes to a suggestion from their doctor that his Royal Highness should take a trip to Brussels, and adds:—“For the sake of his health, which, I assure you, is the cause of my shaken nerves, I could quite bear this sacrifice. He must be set right before we go to London, or God knows how ill he may get.”
MEETING OF THE LADIES’ COMMITTEE AT STAFFORD HOUSE IN AID OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION.
The Queen’s affectionate desires could not be gratified. The business of organising the Great Exhibition of 1851 proved more engrossing than had been anticipated, not merely because the idea at the bottom of it was her husband’s, but because he was found to be the only man in England who thoroughly understood the scheme. As Lord Granville, in a letter to Prince Albert’s secretary, remarked, his Royal Highness seemed to be almost the only person who had considered the subject as a whole and in details. “The whole thing,” said Lord Granville, “would fall to pieces if he left it to itself.”