MR. CHICHESTER FORTESCUE (AFTERWARDS LORD CARLINGFORD).
From the 1st of March to the end of July, however, the affairs of Ireland completely absorbed public attention. As an earnest of their conciliatory policy, Ministers had allowed the Act suspending Habeas Corpus in Ireland to expire. In February they pardoned forty-nine of the Fenian prisoners, selecting the objects of the Queen’s clemency from those who were dupes as distinguished from ringleaders. This still left eighty-one prisoners under sentence, and whilst it did not satisfy Irish hopes, it encouraged a belief that it was comparatively safe to play at treason in Ireland. As Lady Clanricarde said in a letter to Mr. Hayward, “the released Fenians are now [April 13] socially, financially, and in character, in a better position than they were at any other time of their lives.”[296] The popular notion in Ireland was that they had cowed the Government. Nor was the Church Question the only one which was agitating the Irish mind. Shrewd observers had, indeed, warned Ministers in the autumn of 1868 that the Irish people were even more eager for Land Reform than the Disestablishment of the Church. Writing to Mr. Chichester Fortescue on 15th of October, 1868, Mr. Hayward says, “Froude, who has been two months in Ireland, mostly near Kenmare, says, that so far as he saw, the Irish Church Question is little thought of in comparison with the Land Question, and he knows of nothing that could be proposed in the way of compromise, as the proprietors want to get rid of their small tenants, and the small tenants want to get rid of the landlords. Lord Lansdowne’s manager told him that he could make £25,000 a year out of the property by clearing out the cottiers.”[297] It was, therefore, creditable to Ministers that, when questioned on the subject in both Houses, they declared that whenever the Church Question was disposed of, they would try and solve the Irish agrarian problem.
On the 1st of March Mr. Gladstone rose in an eager and crowded House and moved that the Irish Church Resolutions be read. After that ceremony, he moved that the House go into Committee to consider them. This being done, he then proceeded to unfold his plan, in a speech which was a masterpiece of artistic exposition. Technically speaking, he proposed to disendow the Irish Church absolutely from the passing of the Act, because he vested all its property in a Commission, appointed for ten years. But the Church was to be disestablished at a date fixed by him as the 1st of January, 1871. Whenever the Act passed the Church would be quite free to take collective action for its future management, and whenever it could present the Crown with a scheme of organisation the Queen would be advised to incorporate it as a Free Church. The Commission, of course, was to pay the life incomes of the clergy. But these life incomes under the Bill might be commuted for a fixed sum, to be handed over to the new Church Corporation. Private gifts made to the Church since 1660, and all ecclesiastical fabrics, would remain in the hands of the disestablished clergy. Similar methods for dealing with the State subsidies to Presbyterian clergymen and professors were proposed, and the trustees for the Presbyterians and for Maynooth College were to have fourteen times their annual subvention given to them in full satisfaction of all claims. The tithe charge was to be sold to the landlords for twenty-two and a half years’ purchase, the money to be vested in the Commission. As for the surplus property, or “spoil,” as it was called, it was to be devoted to keeping up pauper lunatic asylums, infirmaries, and hospitals for the poor, and asylums for idiots, institutions which were then chargeable on the country.[298] The leading idea disposing of the surplus for the benefit of the poor, was generally admitted to be an ingenious way of meeting the cry of sacrilegious spoliation.[299] Lord Westbury was, however, said to have remarked that in taking endowments from the Irish clergy whose intellects were warped, and giving it to lunatics and idiots who had no intellects at all, Mr. Gladstone had followed a natural law of association, and had exhibited a nicely discriminating sense of the relative value of competing claims on his compassion.
But the country was impervious to all sarcasms of this sort, and it was lavish in praise of a measure so obviously characterised by breadth of view as to its ends, and minute completeness and efficiency of detail, as to its means. The strategic value of Mr. Gladstone’s policy in passing the Suspensory Bill in 1868 was now apparent to everybody. The discussions it provoked had armed him at every point, and from the almost embarrassing returns of dates and materials with which it furnished him he was able to draw up a measure which was felt to be complete and symmetrical. He reduced its weak points to a minimum—in fact, if the principle of the Bill were accepted, it would be very difficult for the most unscrupulous opposition to wreck it on details. Mr. Disraeli’s criticism was very mild. He said Mr. Gladstone “had not wasted a word,” but despite his statement, the Opposition must still “look on Disestablishment as a great political error,” and on Disendowment as “sheer confiscation.” Whether intentionally or not, his tone conveyed an impression that, so far as he was concerned, he would have been glad, after the verdict of the General Election, to throw over the Church. But Sir Stafford Northcote a few days afterwards told a meeting of Middlesex
CHOIR OF ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN.
Conservatives that the Bill was a combination of robbery and bribery, and Sir J. Pakington significantly thanked Providence for the House of Lords. Mr. Disraeli felt that his resignation before Parliament met, implied an acceptance of the verdict of the country. To him and to many others, including the Bishop of Oxford, the Bishop of Peterborough (Dr. Magee), the two Archbishops, Lord Salisbury, Lord Nelson, “our best Churchman,” according to Wilberforce, Lord Carnarvon, and the Duke of Richmond, it seemed unwise to divide the Houses of Parliament against the principle of a national decision, to which the leaders of the Opposition bowed when they resigned. They would have preferred to accept the Bill in principle, and in Committee to have extorted from the Government the best possible terms for the Church. But the advice of extreme men prevailed, and so the Tory leaders decided to oppose the Second Reading of the measure. On the 18th of March Mr. Disraeli moved its rejection, in a speech remarkable for its brilliancy and the skill with which he laid bare the weak points of Mr. Gladstone’s plans.