Trollope claimed to have avoided theological issues and to have limited himself to the personal lives of the people of the church in the Barsetshire series. Perhaps so. Few sermons are quoted. But political issues of the church rear their head at every turn: Archdeacon Grantly is twice denied the bishopric. Mr. Arabin becomes a dean. The bishop's authority is challenged. High Church contends with Low Church. Bishop Proudie and his wife come into Barsetshire opposed to its high church tendencies, and Mrs. Proudie preaches the importance of keeping the Sabbath Day holy according to her standards. No railway trips on Sunday. No games. Services twice on Sunday. The old ways of the Church are battered. Even the saintly Mr. Harding had been known to chant in Evensong, but no more.
Yet Mr. Crawley cares not for either faction. He resents the bishop's wife's interference in his right and obligation to his parish, but he cites the importance of obedience to the bishop within the limits of legality. He stands down the bishop when challenged, but he is also an uncomfortable member of the family of the bishop's chief antagonist, Archdeacon Grantly. Mr. Crawley is not comfortable with the riches of the world and conducts himself as if convinced of the literal truth of the difficulty of a rich man's entering the kingdom of heaven.
Archdeacon Grantly is not the protagonist in any of the Barsetshire novels, but he makes his appearance in the first of the series, The Warden, and appears so prominently in the others as to become one of the most memorable of Trollope's men of the cloth. Rector of Plumstead Episcopi, Archdeacon of Barsetshire, son of the Bishop, and son-in-law of Mr. Harding (the Warden), the Archdeacon is a wealthy and worldly churchman who defends the church energetically throughout the series. A wealthy clergyman? Surely a contraindication in terms. After all, this was only a little over a hundred years ago. But so it was. He inherited his wealth from his saintly father the Bishop, who possessed his wealth in connection with his position in the church. Those blessed by the material riches of the church alluded to their position with the same euphemisms employed by the nobility—those whom God has endowed, and so forth.
But not all clergymen were so endowed, as we are continually reminded by Mr. Crawley. We are not accustomed to thinking of Trollope as a social crusader, and he probably was not, certainly not in the tradition that Charles Dickens established. Trollope had his psychological baggage resulting from his impoverished childhood and a certain amount of rough treatment as a town boy among the more privileged classmates in school. But although he had no connection and little experience with the church, there is no reason to think that he didn't tell it like it was.
In The Last Chronicle Trollope was careful to conclude several of the lives. Even Mrs. Proudie meets a somewhat untimely death. If we are to believe Trollope's own account in his autobiography, he overheard some men in his club saying how tired of her they had become, and he announced to them that he was going home right away to kill her off. Her demise of a sudden cardiac death is epidemiologically correct, in that 250,000 Americans die in this way every year now. Few, however, have such a dramatic end as does Mrs. Proudie, found standing up, leaning against her bedpost. Mrs. Proudie was a great comic creation, personifying the conflict between low church and high church—yet another of the women in Victorian society who were forced to achieve their goals through the agency of their lord and master. Several others come to mind—Alice Vavasor, Glencora Palliser, Lady Laura Standish.
Mr. Septimus Harding meets a more orthodox end, dying quietly in his old age. Mr. Harding was a gentler saint than Mr. Crawley; he had also faced the humiliation of displacement from his post of service, in The Warden, accepting his fate with quietness and resignation. There are few more sympathetic portraits of the loneliness of the aged than that of Mr. Harding finishing his days wandering about the rooms of his daughter's house, "ashamed when the servants found him ever on the move."
While Mr. Crawley is facing the judgment of his community for a crime he suspects he may have actually committed, his daughter Grace finds herself in love with Major Henry Grantly, son of the Archdeacon, who violently opposes a proposed union of his son with an impoverished woman, however worthy she may be. We follow every opportunity the father and son miss in their stubborn refusal to concede any of their pride and independence in their relationship with each other. Here Trollope's persistence in showing every nuance of each character's thoughts is effective in presenting each of the men as understandable and even likeable, even though we follow each mistaken turn that each of them takes. Thank goodness they had a little help. Conflict resolution occurs only when the women in their lives lead the two men into agreement without suffering the embarrassment of losing face.
The subplot in which John Eames becomes involved in a flirtation with Madalina Desmolines through his friendship with the painter Conway Dalrymple tries the reader's patience at times; here, however, the author spins out the story of how Dalrymple mocks the impassive Clara Van Siever by offering to paint her portrait as Jael driving a peg through the head of Sisera, a story from Judges often portrayed by painters who devoutly chose Biblical themes but selected the bloodiest. This subplot concludes with a farcical scene that could be played on the stage with few alterations, in which John is entrapped by Madalina's mother. Threatened with a shotgun wedding, he only manages his escape after opening the window and calling to a policeman on the street.
And although one may have supposed that the story of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames was concluded in The Small House at Allington, both reappear to provide yet another identical conclusion to his courtship. And as another part of the epilogue to The Small House, we see Adolphus Crosbie suffering still more punishment in consequence of courting and jilting Lily. Dr. Thorne briefly appears as a magistrate considering the case of Mr. Crawley, and his wife the former Miss Dunstable also reappears to give counsel to Lily Dale. Mark Robarts of Framley Parsonage also sits with the magistrates.
Few bases remain untouched. Mr. Toogood, a London attorney and a relation of Mrs. Crawley, appears as a sleuth to dig out a few details of Mr. Crawley's mystery. Johnny Eames makes a heroic trip to Europe to help solve it. But when Mrs. Arabin (Mr. Harding's daughter) is finally notified of the problem, she sorts it out, as she would have done without any assistance.