Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins

Author:Roy Jenkins [Jenkins, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Politics, Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780812966411
Goodreads: 572168
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 1996-02-13T08:00:00+00:00

It was curious that he should have got himself impaled, from the other direction as it were, upon the same stakes which had speared Newman in his Dublin lectures twenty years before. In one of the uneasiest passages in The Idea of a University Newman endeavours to reconcile his view that ‘the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions [on the range of its teachings] of any kind’ with his reluctant acceptance of the Pope’s view that the university he had been asked to set up in Dublin must be a purely Catholic one. Newman tied himself in knots to try to resolve this contradiction, yet Gladstone, who was always very well up in Newmaniana, seemed to have learnt little from it. He exposed himself to the derision contained in that bracketed ‘Laughter’, yet failed to win over the Irish hierarchy. Cardinal Cullen was a very hardline Archbishop of Dublin, whose mission was to impose the will of Rome upon the Irish Catholic Church, which on his appointment in 1852 he had found almost as Gallican as the French Church of those days. The Irish Church obviously did not have the prestige of being the ‘eldest daughter’, but it had the alternative advantage of remoteness coupled with devout adherents.

Cullen and his bishops, contrary to the hopes and expectations of Manning, on whom, in spite of his ultramontane excesses at the Vatican Council, Gladstone still depended too much, killed the bill. They wanted no system of education which mingled the religious and the secular power. But Gladstone had already made too many concessions to them for the bill to arouse any advanced Liberal enthusiasm. And the vested interests, in the shape primarily of Trinity, which he proposed to federate with Maynooth, Magee (a Presbyterian) College and two of the three existing Queen’s Colleges, were obviously opposed. So was the third Queen’s College at Galway, which he proposed to wind up on the ground that its main product were lawyers trained at too high a public cost. The bill therefore had plenty of enemies and hardly more than one friend, although powerful and dedicated in his solitariness.

The bill perished soon after 2.00 a.m. on the night of 11–12 March. Gladstone had moved the second reading in another long expository speech on the 3rd, and then, after four nights of debate, wound up immediately before the fatal division. As he described it to the Queen, ‘Mr Disraeli rose at half past ten, and spoke amidst wrapt attention until midnight [despite deep underlying disapproval Gladstone was nearly always much more gracious about Disraeli’s speeches than vice versa]. Mr Gladstone followed in a speech of two hours.’11 The bill was then defeated by 287 votes to 284. The margin was narrow, but as this was in a House with a normal Liberal majority (even after a few bye-election losses) of eighty-five, and as Gladstone had described the bill as ‘vital to the honour and existence of the government’, the effect was nonetheless shattering.

Gladstone’s winding-up speech won more praise than votes.

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