When the English Catholic community entered the government's inchoate elementary education system in 1847, it was not even twenty years removed from the monumental emancipation act that, for all intents and purposes, had finally allowed the resuscitation of Catholics to political life in Great Britain. Acceptance into the educational system and the subsequent restoration of the church hierarchy with English bishoprics three years later marked two vital steps toward the successful maturation of English Catholicism into a viable denomination in the nineteenth century. But the community that took these midcentury steps bore little resemblance to that which entered the twentieth century over fifty years later, its identity having changed considerably. Being a minority community that was rather surprised and cowed by the official and public harassment it received following the announcement of its hierarchical restoration in 1850, Catholics emerged from the nineteenth century a confident group. In the process, they became more active citizens of Great Britain, learning to operate in the minefield of late Victorian politics by petitioning Parliament, attending political demonstrations, voicing criticism and support of parliamentary bills, lobbying MPs and prime ministers, and encouraging their own community to make use of later changes in the franchise to become engaged in the political nation.
The education issue, above all other factors, altered the Catholic identity in the last half of the century, transforming a community that was a timid, reticent, and often suspicious outsider into a confident, tenacious, and sometimes aggressive participant in public policy. John Bossy's The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 offers the most compelling view of this community from the Elizabethan Reformation to the industrial slums of the early Victorian era, concluding that between 1780 and 1850, English Catholicism experienced several “processes,” all working toward the “creation of a complicated whole.”Footnote 1 This article will build upon and extend his conclusions, arguing that education was the major change agent and the dominant issue in the evolution of late nineteenth-century Catholic identity.
At midcentury, the Catholic community was still haunted by its recusant past, unwilling to trust the motives of the government and, on education matters, preferred to keep up a proprietary shield for Catholic schools. The community was not entirely unified on the issue of education either since certain vicars apostolic—the church leaders prior to the restoration of the bishoprics in 1850—actually opposed entering the state educational system. And the prolific Catholic press, while rarely achieving consensus among its varied organs, often and freely criticized the actions of church leaders on education policy. Yet, by the beginning of the next century, that lack of unity, for the most part, disappeared, as the timid identity of this community emerged into something much more assertive and militant. Tracing this transformation further enhances our political and religious understanding of the faith by revealing a community that was bolder, more politically active, and unwilling to be ignored than has been argued by Dermot Quinn, Jeffrey von Arx, Edward Norman, Mary Heimann, and others.Footnote 2
The complexity of the English Catholic community in the 1840s is essential to an understanding of how the pursuit of a fair and equitable education solution altered the identity of Catholicism in England. Much like other English communities in the early nineteenth century, the Catholic community contained disparate identities split along ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. It consisted of three important groups: old English Catholic gentry, Oxford Movement converts, and Irish Catholic immigrants. The old Catholic gentry had weathered the penal era, when, at the end of the eighteenth century, most of the civil disabilities and religious restrictions on Catholics were removed. However, by the early nineteenth century, this Catholic group was losing the control it had exerted over the Catholic community since the Glorious Revolution.Footnote 3 Oxford Movement converts emerged from the internal conflicts that plagued the Church of England in the early nineteenth century. Often highly educated, they held diverse religious and political opinions and brought with them high educational expectations. The third group consisted of the Irish Catholic immigrants, who began arriving in substantial numbers in the 1790s, continuing through the mass exodus at the time of the Irish Famine in the 1840s. Once in Great Britain, this group, in contrast to much of the existing English Catholic community, was an urban phenomenon, mainly settling in three heavily populated areas: London, western Scotland, and industrial Lancashire. Generally speaking, they were poor, uneducated, unskilled, and self-secluding, and practiced a form of Catholicism that some have argued was neither robust nor much like the faith practiced in England.Footnote 4
Since these three Catholic factions had little in common with one another other than their faith, the challenge for the Church was to achieve unity so that English Catholicism could benefit from their collective strength rather than be hindered by their respective differences. No other pursuit except education could have possibly served to bring together Catholics, rich and poor, cradle and convert, liberal and ultramontane, English and Irish. It was the one issue that interested each of these groups. The restored church hierarchy recognized education as the way not only to prepare Catholics for this world and the next, but also to unify the divided Catholic community. That said, there was an additional wrinkle in the educational effort: the parliamentary voice of English Catholicism was Irish. For much of the mid- to late nineteenth century, there were few if any English Catholic MPs; those Catholics sitting in Parliament were almost exclusively from Irish constituencies, and, thus, Irish affairs almost always took precedence for Irish politicians. This affected the Catholic struggle for the schools substantially until late in the century.
CATHOLICS ENTER THE STATE EDUCATION SYSTEM
English Catholics joined the system of elementary education in 1847, when they first received approval for state education grants for denominational schools. Those grants had begun in 1833 when the failure of a prohibitively expensive education bill led Parliament to commit funds for school construction as a fallback measure. For fourteen years, those monies were distributed to localities throughout England and Wales and administered solely through the Anglican National Society and the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society, as long as those communities raised half of the necessary funds themselves. New elementary schools remained under the control of the religious denominations and underwent annual inspections. Created in 1839, the Committee of the Privy Council on Education served as the administrators of the grant program. When the council approved a test application for a Catholic diocese in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1847, the system broadened its scope beyond the Protestant pale. According to The Catholic Directory, Catholics entered the state grant system with 236 elementary schools, educating approximately forty thousand children; however, the figure that alarmed Catholic leaders was the estimated sixty-five thousand Catholic children not receiving any education at all.Footnote 5 In addition, the existing Catholic schools struggled under deficiencies ranging from inadequate size to missing roofs or walls to actually being rooms in private homes. All of this was compounded by the poverty of the Catholic community at large.Footnote 6 Clearly, English Catholics had tremendous work ahead of them to improve educational provision. Yet Catholics had not even been unified on the decision to enter the state education system in the first place. Prominent bishop of Birmingham William Ullathorne remained a steady critic of this decision for many years. He warned of the dangers of entering the state system, arguing that education belonged first to the family and the church and that the acceptance of government money amounted to a loss of parental and church control.Footnote 7 Nonconformists, while resembling the Catholics in not conforming to the established church and wanting their own schools, were able to obtain monies from the very beginning of the elementary education program. But they began to rethink their position on education by midcentury. Because they were spread among many denominations all over the country, they built fewer schools, and, more importantly, they regularly had to send their children to Anglican schools in rural areas where their numbers were not high enough to warrant their own schools. These Nonconformists objected to the Anglican-inspired education their children received and thus began gravitating toward a secular system of education at roughly the same time that the urban-centered Catholics began their fervent support for keeping religion in the schools and under the direct supervision of the church.
The Catholic Poor School Committee, created by the vicars apostolic in 1847 to liaise with the government once Catholics entered the state grant system, served as the conduit to state funding.Footnote 8 While state grant aid required annual state inspections, it is important to note that the Poor School Committee, at the bidding of the church hierarchy, secured a provision allowing those inspectors to be Catholic. This was an early victory that inspired confidence. Their inexperience in working with the government on educational matters often undermined their initial confidence, resulting in suspicion, accusation, and contention. The Poor School Committee's first secretary, Scott N. Stokes, spent much of his first few years writing to the council with questions about regulations and policy.
Early correspondence between the Poor School Committee and the Council on Education was bold, somewhat defensive, and, perhaps, impetuous. The Poor School Committee, Catholic bishops, and any other Catholics involved with the schools became more assertive in claiming that to which they were now entitled in their partnership with the state. The initial impatience was revealed in correspondence with Stokes, who protested perceived discrepancies in the treatment of Protestant and Catholic training colleges.Footnote 9 Later that same year, Stokes criticized what he believed were school inspection examination questions designed to perpetuate Victorian prejudice against Catholicism. One of the questions read, “In what points is the assimilation of Paganism and Popery apparent?” In bringing this to the attention of the council, Stokes was appealing to “that religious impartiality and freedom from bigotry” that the government displayed toward other denominations.Footnote 10 And in January 1850, just three months later, Stokes lectured the council on the necessity of equal treatment for all denominations in hiring practices. The appointment of teachers, he said, should be “open to general competition and awarded with reference to attainments alone.”Footnote 11
When Stokes left the committee in 1853 to become a Catholic inspector of schools, his successor, Thomas Allies, continued Stokes's propensity for expressing his agitation with the council. After the Council's Minutes of June 1856 called for the use of “Her Majesty's Inspectors” for the inspection of industrial schools, Allies wrote to R. R. W. Lingen, council secretary, reminding the council that inspectors for Catholic industrial schools must be Catholic.Footnote 12 When a Protestant inspector showed up to inspect the Catholic industrial school at Hartlepool the following month, Charles Langdale, chairman of the Poor School Committee, sent a curt letter to Lingen stating succinctly that this action would be contrary to the Council Minutes of 1847, which had declared that inspectors of Catholic schools could not be appointed without the consent of the Poor School Committee.Footnote 13
In 1859 the government initiated the Newcastle Commission to investigate the effectiveness and rising cost of the current elementary education system. The commissioners planned to visit elementary schools and collect data on the number of students in attendance and the length of time they spent in school before leaving for employment. But the Poor School Committee was simply planning to refuse commissioners access to its schools, thus avoiding participation in the commission. The Catholic organization believed the examination was an unnecessary state intrusion into the operation of its schools, which it believed violated its agreement with the state that only Catholic inspectors could perform examinations. A blistering editorial in the Rambler, a liberal Catholic journal often out of favor with the Catholic hierarchy, attacked the Catholic Poor School Committee for this inactivity, claiming its inaction was a fundamental breach of its primary duty as the only national Catholic organization devoted solely to educational matters. In the eyes of the Rambler, the Poor School Committee was fast asleep. “For many months,” the editorial complained, “we have regretted that the Poor School Committee communicated so rarely with its supporters and the public, and finds so few opportunities to rouse and inform the Catholic body upon educational questions.”Footnote 14 The Poor School Committee justified its decision not to get involved in the Newcastle Commission by arguing that it was adhering to the original agreement that ensured that only Catholics would have permission to inspect Catholic schools. The Newcastle Commission had no Catholic members; thus, the Poor School Committee refused to participate. However, not only had the Poor School Committee misunderstood the purpose of the commissioners, who were only to gather data and make inquiries rather than perform inspections, but it was allowing a lingering historical mistrust of the government to become an obstacle in the improvement of its schools. Once the committee actually convened and realized that its understanding of the Newcastle Commission had been in error, Langdale sheepishly wrote to the Education Department to offer to collect the statistical information on its own for the Newcastle Commission. The Education Department accepted the compromise offer, and the matter, for the time being, was settled.Footnote 15 Letting go of their recusant past was not an easily accomplished task; thus Catholics learned from this experience and moved on.
Despite these occasional lapses by the Poor School Committee and the often frustrating efforts by the bishops to get the Catholic laity more involved in supporting education, Catholic education expanded steadily over the next two decades. This occurred in spite of the Revised Code of 1862, which imposed its reductive state examination system as a new hurdle in the acquisition of funding. The code, which followed from the Newcastle Commission report, pushed the school-government relationship in an economical direction because liberal ministers were concerned about the escalating education budget. Thus, the Education Department began basing school funding on average attendance and an annual examination by a government inspector, who visited the schools, checked the attendance books, and examined the children's reading, writing, and math skills. Since the annual examination covered only those three subjects, education devolved into a process of rote memorization and teaching to the exams; Robert Lowe's revised educational system earned the pejorative description “payment by results” and lasted until 1897. The result of Lowe's changes was a system emphasizing thrift rather than effective elementary education. While critics warned of the dire consequences that could result from such a retreat in educational provision, the budget minders rejoiced, especially when the education budget was reduced by £200,000 in four years. Lowe famously defended this new system by stating in Commons, “If it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap.”Footnote 16 Many petitions against the proposed changes arrived in Commons from Anglican schools during the first month of the code's debate in February 1862. Petitions representing Catholic interests trickled in during March, including one from the Catholic Poor School Committee, and two each from the three Catholic teacher training colleges. In all, twenty-three Catholic parishes or schools sent petitions to Parliament in opposition to the Revised Code, compared with hundreds from Anglican national schools and Nonconformist British schools. Importantly, not one Catholic MP entered the parliamentary debate to express the views of the church.Footnote 17 Since thirty-one of the thirty-two Catholic MPs represented Irish constituencies, Irish Catholic affairs took precedence over English Catholic ones; thus the Revised Code took a back seat to more pressing Irish concerns, such as the reform of the Irish poor law and their education system. This situation remained problematic for English Catholic leaders until the 1890s.
ENGLISH CATHOLICS AND THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION
The cause of free, state-supported, secular education advanced forward in 1869 with the formation of the radical National Education League. Opponents of this cause created the reactionary National Education Union to counter the Education League and keep elementary education in the hands of the religious denominations where it had always been. In the wake of these partisan developments, the government decided to once again inquire into the health of elementary education, this time focusing only on four industrial towns: Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. As in 1858 with the Newcastle Commission, each denomination was asked to cooperate with the state's educational inquiries. The reaction of the Catholic community, now under the skillful and more determined guidance of Archbishop Henry Edward Manning, who became archbishop of Westminster in 1865, reveals an extraordinarily changed outlook.Footnote 18 Instead of stubbornly refusing to cooperate out of fear and mistrust as they had ten years earlier, the Poor School Committee recommended full cooperation. By participating, the Poor School Committee argued that “Catholics will take their place as citizens, and will entitle themselves to be heard in the settlement of future policy.”Footnote 19 Such a radically different response indicates a changing Catholic ethos, a maturation and growing confidence that a decade of lectures and sermons on the importance of education had leavened. With the statesmanlike Manning leading the way, the Catholic community, from London to the parishes, was slowly recognizing the need to become active “citizens” participating in the public-policy process if they wished to ensure the survival and continued expansion of their schools. This meant organizing, lobbying, petitioning, editorializing—in a word, politicking—during a time when their Nonconformist educational opponents, who wanted a state-supported secular system, were gradually gaining the ear of Parliament.
A turning point for the Catholic community occurred when the controversial Education Act of 1870 significantly altered the educational landscape. The initial bill proposed to create a system of rate-supported, nondenominational schools administered by publicly elected school boards that would rival the existing religious schools. The long struggle over this bill inspired various Catholic clerics and laity to become more actively engaged in the education struggle. When Catholics, like the Anglicans, realized the damage that this new system, with its unlimited funding from the rates, could inflict on the denominational schools system, the political tocsin sounded. Before the bill was even introduced, Manning warned that “the preservation of our Christianity, of our public morality and of liberty of conscience” was at stake.Footnote 20
From the Catholic press to mass public rallies, Catholic public opinion synchronized with Manning and the bishops. In January 1869, a large meeting of Birmingham Catholics led by Bishop Ullathorne revealed that this Catholic community was ready for the national debate. Speaking from the platform, Lord Howard, brother of the Duke of Norfolk and member of the most prominent Catholic family in England, praised the recent work of all English Catholics on educational affairs but forewarned that a great crisis was looming, one in which they would have to fight to preserve religious education. Nothing, he concluded, was more important to Catholics.Footnote 21 February brought large outdoor rallies in the East and West Ends of London; several thousand Catholics from fifteen different parishes gathered to offer support for the denominational system and condemnation of any movement toward state-sponsored and compulsory secular education.Footnote 22
The real work began the following year. After the Queen announced that an education bill would be unveiled in February 1870, Catholic leaders organized plans for public demonstrations despite the fact that the bishops were in Rome for the first Vatican Council. Meeting at the Catholic Club in Liverpool, Canon Bernard O’Reilly and Father James Nugent created a watching committee comprised of prominent Catholics of all political stripes: Liberal, Conservative, and Home Rule. At this committee's instigation, a large Catholic demonstration was staged on St. Patrick's Day in Williamson Square, Liverpool, a few weeks after W. E. Forster brought his education bill before Parliament. The boisterous crowd adopted the following resolution: “Religion being the basis of all true education, this meeting holds that any system which would tend to secularize education cannot be acceptable to the Catholics of this country.”Footnote 23 Further, Father Nugent introduced a motion to send a Catholic deputation to explain to Forster how prejudicial the Catholics found his bill.Footnote 24 Easily seconded, the motion brought great cheers.
Coinciding with the mass rallies was a Catholic petition campaign that took place while the education bill was crawling through the House of Commons. The difference between the number of petitions received from Catholics on the Revised Code eight years earlier and the number received at Westminster in March and early April 1870 is extensive. The latter numbered close to two hundred, compared with a mere twenty-three in the former. An early petition from the clergy and teachers of St. Augustine's School, Manchester, set the tone for much of the subsequent communication; it criticized Forster's bill for not expanding denominational education and, fearing the worst from the National Education League lobby, asked that religious freedom in the classroom be protected.Footnote 25 Other petitions drew upon the basic concepts of equal and parental rights and asked that Parliament not pass a bill compelling Catholic children “to attend schools where the course of instruction would be a violation of their consciences.”Footnote 26 For six weeks petitions came from Catholic parishes and communities throughout England, Wales, and even Ireland, despite the fact that Irish education would not even be affected by this legislation.Footnote 27
Lay Catholics also appealed to the press, successfully requesting The Times to publish a circular of Catholic opinion.Footnote 28 Published on 5 July, it clearly described the threat to Catholic education included in the proposed legislation. Fearing that the building grants for denominational schools might be discontinued under the new legislation, it lamented, “such is the gratitude shown by the State to the religious zeal which alone has hitherto educated its people; and such the encouragement given to that secular spirit which has hitherto raised a great clamour, but built no schools.”Footnote 29 Herein lies the essence of the assertive and combative argument that Catholics used for the next thirty years in subsequent education debates: education must remain the offspring of the churches. For his part, Lord Howard entered the July debate on the Forster bill in the House of Lords, arguing that the denominational system was worth saving, that rate-supported secular schools would damage the overall Christianity of England, and that the American system was an example of the danger to come from such proposed changes.Footnote 30
Later that year, The Times's editorial page, not known for its friendly attitude toward Catholics, praised the considerable Catholic political effort in response to the education bill.Footnote 31 Catholics, however, were not alone in their concern over how the church-dominated educational system might be affected by the new legislation; the Anglicans, who operated three times more state-aided elementary schools than the other denominations combined, were heavily engaged in the education debate and relatively pleased when the new system actually incorporated the existing one, rather than replacing it.Footnote 32 Once Forster's much-amended bill became law, the denominational schools’ most pressing task was to address educational deficiencies in their communities. They had six months to fix their shortcomings before local school boards could be elected and nondenominational board schools constructed nearby.
CRITICISM AND COMPLIANCE
Further tinkering with the education system occurred again in 1873 and 1876. The participation of Catholics in the subsequent debate of 1876 was likewise substantial, considering their relatively small population, led by the high-profile Manning, who now was a cardinal. The Poor School Committee held strategic planning meetings between the bishops and lay Catholics, including Catholic MPs, and their message was presented to the community via larger public meetings and Sunday sermons from London to the industrial north. The message remained consistent and simple: education without Catholicism was not acceptable, the rights of parents must be maintained, and all Catholics must contribute to the survival of their schools against the slowly spreading nondenominational board school system.Footnote 33 For his part, Manning decided to focus on education for the remainder of his time as archbishop of Westminster. In a letter to archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen, Manning chose an appropriate military analogy to describe the battle they faced ahead in England: “[Education] is the field on which I should most wish to fight a general action.”Footnote 34
The Catholic response to the Education Act's requirements reveals the assiduity and diligence with which they approached the schools issue. Racing against the six-month deadline to make their schools more efficient, Catholics, like the Anglicans, jumped into action.Footnote 35 When the Act went into effect in 1871, there were 383 Catholic schools with 797 departments, 654 certified teachers, and 73,111 in average attendance. These schools received £1. 0s. 11d. in average income per student in attendance, as well as cumulative totals for the year of £25,881 and £19,709 in voluntary contributions and school pence, respectively. By the end of 1872, Catholics operated 464 schools with 914 departments, with 805 certified teachers, and 80,155 in average attendance. Average income per student in attendance rose nearly three shillings to £1. 3s. 33/4d., and totals for voluntary contributions and school pence were £31,197 and £23,695.Footnote 36 More impressively, after ten years fighting against the proliferation of board schools, Catholics operated 789 schools, 1,319 departments, with 1,697 certified teachers, with an average attendance of 152,641; these figures rose 106 percent, 65.5 percent, 159 percent, and 108 percent, respectively. Anglican increases in those four categories were 72 percent, 34 percent, 79 percent, and 67 percent. While the attendance figures were boosted by the compulsory law for elementary schools coming in 1880, one has to marvel at how the poorest Christian community in Great Britain opened 406 schools and 522 departments in ten years.Footnote 37
Part of that success came from the Catholic Education Crisis Fund, created in 1870 to help Catholic communities open or enlarge schools before board schools could be established nearby. By May 1872, the fund had donated £23,180. 19s. toward that end, with the five Dioceses of Liverpool (£3,575), East Scotland (£2,660), Salford (Manchester, £2,353), Southwark (London south of the Thames River, £2,350), and Westminster (London north of the Thames, £2,175) receiving 57 percent of the fund's monies.Footnote 38 The Diocese of Liverpool, which reported a deficiency of just over twenty-four thousand school places in 1870, built or enlarged sixty-six schools by March 1877, thus increasing accommodation for 21,216 students.Footnote 39 The Diocese of Salford's school accommodation deficiency was not as dire as Liverpool’s, but successive bishops William Turner and Herbert Vaughan directed an intense building program to meet their accommodation needs. After assessing an estimated deficiency of 6,077 school places for children in 1870, the diocese built or enlarged twenty-nine schools by the end of 1877, and forty-nine by 1881.Footnote 40
It was in the 1880s, while Manning led the Catholic battle on the national front, that Bishop Vaughan began a twenty-year commitment to improving education at the parish level, while demanding in an increasingly strident tone that the post-1870 system of primary education be made more fair to religious schools. Vaughan became bishop of Salford (Manchester) at the death of William Turner in 1872 and served the post for twenty years before moving to London as Manning's successor.Footnote 41 To him and other Catholics, and even many Anglican leaders, the inequality of the new education system placed a greater financial strain on supporters of denominational education. The board schools created by the Education Act of 1870 had virtually unlimited funding, while the denominational schools still had to raise considerable funding on their own. To Catholics like Vaughan, fairness became a code word for sharing the rates with the denominational schools.Footnote 42 Like Manning, Vaughan often used military metaphors to describe the education struggle. In 1882, he wrote in a widely circulated letter: “we must resolve to fight to the last for our parental rights, and for the Christian and Catholic education of our youth. No sacrifice can be too great to win this victory. We fight for the cause of God.”Footnote 43 A few months later, the Catholic community took Bishop Vaughan's advice. As a new education code was being debated, Catholic parishes flooded Parliament with nearly 250 petitions complaining about the inequality of the education system and the fear that the nondenominational board schools, created in 1870, would eventually replace the denominational schools.Footnote 44
Despite the organization shown by the 1882 petition drive, Vaughan concluded that the Catholic effort was lacking in centralization and consensus at the grassroots level. This had become evident with the problems Catholics had experienced in the 1870s and the uneven Catholic political efforts since, especially in Parliament, where their Irish voice was often myopically focused on Irish affairs. After the duke of Norfolk stated at a Catholic Union meeting in April 1884 that “we are all dissatisfied with the condition of [educational] affairs; but in no body of Catholics … would you find a unanimous opinion as to a certain course of action which it would be right to take,” inspiration and necessity mothered the bishop's invention.Footnote 45 Vaughan began the Voluntary Schools Association (VSA) to serve the Diocese of Salford with the intention of expanding it to every diocese in the country. The purpose of this organization was to provide guidance on educational matters, to take the lead in any necessary agitation when an education bill was under consideration, and to help “form public opinion as to the fairness of our Educational claims.”Footnote 46 Vaughan told his clergy at the first VSA meeting that they had a solemn duty to instruct their parishioners at local meetings on political matters. He also asked his priests in July 1884 to ensure that as many Catholics as possible get registered to vote for the next general election, adding with didactic political guidance: “I refer to this with a view to strengthening our Educational demands, which must be enforced as far as possible at the next general Election.”Footnote 47 Here was the creation of an assertive grassroots political action committee for the education struggle. This was certainly not the same religious community that had refused to participate in the Newcastle Commission in 1858. Gone was the timidity, the reticence, and the self-doubt.
The general election of 1885 brought the education issue and the nascent Irish question into full view, and Catholic leaders tried to swing both Catholic and popular opinion behind the Tories, whom they believed offered the best hope of helping those denominational schools losing ground to the board schools. Early on, Catholics made clear that 1885 would be a year in which they would be both vocal and active in the pursuit of educational reform. Firing the first salvo was Father John Kershaw, who attacked the elementary education system in a January 1885 Dublin Review article. In an aggressive diatribe, Kershaw complained about how the board schools were evolving into middle-class schools out of the reach of the poor, and he concluded by admitting the mistakes Catholics had made in not waging a fiercer political battle to ensure the fairness of the dual system in the debates on the Education Acts of 1870, 1873, and 1876. He asked for an energetic and ambitious effort on the part of all Catholics to fight for their schools.Footnote 48
Later in 1885, Manning gave a rousing speech on education to a Catholic crowd near Newcastle. He stated his two central objections to the current system: one, the children were considered wards of the state rather than wards of their parents, who should direct and control their education; two, the system was “unequal and unjust” to supporters of denominational education. To combat this, Catholic bishops also urged believers to the polls in 1885. At the end of his speech, Manning demanded that all Catholics exercise their civil duties: “At the coming Elections, we must ask something in return for our votes. We must ask Parliamentary Candidates what are their intentions, and accordingly as they answer, so must we give our votes. (Loud applause.)”Footnote 49
With the bishop of Salford actively urging his clergy to use the pulpit to influence Catholic voters and the archbishop of Westminster telling the faithful to weigh their votes carefully with regards to the candidates’ education policy, the Catholic community was earnestly crossing a barrier into the political realm from which they would not return, not as long as they believed Britain's education policy was unjust.Footnote 50 Manning and Vaughan radiated confidence that their words and deeds could actually make a difference in the political arena, and this was another step forward in the Catholic political maturation of the 1880s. They would find, however, that this confidence was misplaced as they overestimated their ability to influence political outcomes.
Taking political guidance to the most didactic level, Manning's article “How Shall Catholics Vote at the Coming Parliamentary Election?” listed five areas of concern to Catholics: disestablishment of the Church of England, housing of the poor, land ownership, intemperance, and education; it was upon the final area that Manning gave outright instructions to Catholics. He demanded that Catholic voters ask each candidate two questions: “Will you do your utmost to place Voluntary schools on an equal footing with Board schools?” and “Will you do your utmost to obtain a Royal Commission to review the present state of education in England and Wales, and especially the Act of 1870 and its administration by the School Boards?” Only those who answered yes to both questions should be supported, Manning concluded.Footnote 51 Other bishops followed suit. Bernard O’Reilly, bishop of Liverpool, obediently instructed his faithful to base their votes upon the candidates’ answers to Manning's two questions. He also reassured Catholic voters that supporting the Conservatives was sanctioned by the church, even though Catholics in Great Britain had a cozier and longer relationship with the Liberals (and the Whigs before them). “To many of you,” the bishop stated, “it may be painful to vote against the political party with which you have been long associated. Still as the calls of conscience are above those of party, we hope you will look upon it as a duty to obey your conscience and not count the cost.”Footnote 52 In another move with obvious political overtones, all of the Catholic bishops announced on the eve of the election that they would only support candidates who would do their “utmost to protect liberty of conscience and to redress the present glaring inequalities by providing for the just maintenance and multiplication of Christian and voluntary schools as the growth of the people shall require.”Footnote 53 This public statement reveals uniform opinion among the hierarchy, which is even more surprising because it is tantamount to a political declaration of support for one party over another, and the hierarchy contained both Tory- and Liberal-leaning members. It also reveals that even though some members of the hierarchy like Bishop Ullathorne had originally disagreed with taking grant aid at midcentury, those divisions had disappeared by the mid-1880s.
While Manning had not mentioned either party by name, it was understood that the Conservatives would benefit from this political guidance, especially since the radical wing of the Liberal party, under the influence of Joseph Chamberlain, had revealed its plan to offer free education in all board schools by abolishing all fees and providing a greater grant from the state. They had not mentioned helping the denominational schools at all.Footnote 54 When the bishops were criticized in the press for their “partisan attitude,” they responded defiantly. If support for candidates who endorsed Christian education made them sound like partisans, then, they argued, “it is the partisanship of the Christian world against the anti-Christian and pseudo-Liberal world.”Footnote 55 The Tablet subsequently sent Manning's two questions to all parliamentary candidates in London. The results were interesting. Only three Conservatives did not provide adequate answers, while nearly 60 percent of all the Liberal candidates failed this litmus test. Similar results came from other towns, as well.Footnote 56
THE CROSS COMMISSION
The Conservatives announced just prior to the November 1885 election that they would initiate a royal commission on education to examine and assess the elementary education system since the Forster Act was implemented a decade and a half earlier. Although the Tories lost the November election and caretaker Prime Minister Salisbury left office in January, the royal commission went ahead under the Tory guidance of Sir Richard Cross. The high-profile Cardinal Manning served as one of the commissioners, and his politicking continued unabated. He sent a pamphlet to Salisbury immediately after the election urging the Conservative prime minister to “redress the inequalities created by the Act of 1870, and to place the Voluntary Schools on the broad basis of a law common to the whole people of the country.”Footnote 57
To sway Catholic, public, and commission opinion, Manning kept up his informational assault during the commission's two-year examination. In 1887 he published “Suggestions for a Common System of National Education” to clarify his views. He acknowledged that the Education Act of 1870 could not be repealed but also reminded his readers that the inclusion of the principle that “all who pay [the rate] should share [it]” was part of Forster's original draft of the bill that was eventually stripped during the debate.Footnote 58 Manning's belief that a resolution was close and the hierarchy's willingness to compromise were both evident when all the bishops voted, in another act of uniformity, to accept rate aid under county councils and also, as a compromise, to allow some measure of taxpayer control in the management of their schools.Footnote 59
The eventual ideological division of the Cross Commission and its submission of majority and minority reports prevented any significant reforms following its investigation. The majority report, reflecting Anglican and Catholic interests, recommended, in part, sharing the rates, while the minority report, reflecting Nonconformist opinion, disagreed. Manning, however, would not be deterred. After the commission ended, he immediately began a campaign to keep the reform agitation going; this entailed a three-pronged strategy: one, to fight the minority's challenges in the public eye; two, to secure steady Anglican support for universal rate aid; and three, to openly lobby the Salisbury ministry that the time was right for the kind of reform called for in the majority report.Footnote 60 Unfortunately, Prime Minister Salisbury had to please all of his constituents, and rate aid for denominational schools would have angered the Liberal-Unionists who had left the Liberal party over Gladstone's Home Rule bill in 1886, allied with the Tories, and ushered Salisbury back into power in August of that year. Led by Chamberlain, who staunchly supported free, secular education, the Liberal-Unionists would not have stomached such a turn in educational philosophy.Footnote 61 Frustrated that rate aid for all schools would not be realized, Manning fingered his Anglican counterparts as the culprits and criticized Salisbury's schemes in a letter to Bishop Ullathorne: “Here are fifty stripes for the backs of those cowardly Anglican Bishops for deserting their own principles and showing their uselessness. … I had hoped the Tories would remain in office to carry the proper measures, but they are in the hands of the Liberal Unionists, and as cowardly as to their adhering to their principles as the Anglican Bishops. Politically, what a state we are in. … We sadly want a good Catholic leader in the House.”Footnote 62 Perhaps his final words rang truer than the others. Despite the increased and matured political activity on the part of Catholics for educational reform during the decade, they had only made some small inroads toward their ultimate goals. And even though Britain had a Catholic Home Secretary, Henry Mathews, their influence in the Commons, and, generally speaking, in the political arena was deficient. Ultimately, they still had to rely upon Irish MPs for their parliamentary voice. In a time of tension over land reform, Salisbury's ministry used heightened coercion during this period to crack Irish resolve for reform and to calm Irish unrest. Their strategy did not work as Irish determination and anger increased.Footnote 63 But these events kept the attention of the Irish MPs off education. Also, embedded in this Irish question was another attempt to solve the higher education problem in Ireland for Catholics, a solution that, if it ended in a Catholic University, could then split the Home Rule party between its Catholic-Nationalist center and its Liberal Nonconformist supporters in England.Footnote 64 For the time being, the English Catholics would have to wait until the Irish situation was less volatile and the government more willing to inch closer to a resolution such as that endorsed by Manning and the majority of the Cross Commission. That opportunity would not come until well into the next decade.
THE FINAL STRETCH
The 1890s saw Vaughan succeed Manning as archbishop of Westminster in a decade that also brought intensified Catholic efforts to influence the education policy-making process. Vaughan's efforts, which equaled those of his predecessor in publicizing the Catholic educational position, also included riskier strategies such as attempts at ecclesiastical detente with the Anglicans and several personal appeals to Prime Minister Salisbury, neither of which proved particularly effective.Footnote 65
In 1895 certain bishops, upper clergy, and Catholic laity began working on a stripped-down version of a proposal they initially had penned the year before demanding a share of the educational rates in return for limited, local, and public oversight. The resulting proposal, titled “An Act for the Furtherance of Free Education in School Board Districts,” contained only two clauses: one asked for permission to be able to open an Education Department–approved school wherever at least thirty children required one. The other clause asked for an equal share of the rates.Footnote 66 When he sent a draft of this new bill to The Times, Vaughan included a letter of explanation that further expounded on the Catholic grievances in the current system. He described the financial inequality that existed for supporters of denominational schools and explained that Catholics sought to put all elementary schools on equal footing for fear of “the extinction of the denominational schools.” Such a result would be unacceptable, he wrote, because their religious convictions dictated that Catholic children could only attend Catholic schools.Footnote 67
In April, the bishops publicized their strategy to support the new proposal. They instructed the clergy to be vigilant “on the platform and through the press” in impressing upon lay Catholics the necessity of the changes this proposal would bring. The bishops contacted all Catholic MPs for support of the proposal in the upcoming session of Parliament, and they met with leading statesmen to plan the most opportune and effective time to present it to Parliament.Footnote 68 In June, the Unionists swept back into office with the Liberal-Unionist vote bringing a commanding majority. The archbishop and other Catholic prelates had urged Catholics to vote according to candidates’ positions on education, not Home Rule. Again, that meant voting Conservative.Footnote 69 With a more receptive government in place, the Catholic hierarchy finally submitted their proposal to Parliament. While it raised awareness of the Catholic position in Parliament, this effort had little effect.
Soon after the election, education again became the dominant political issue, presumably borne into the public discourse by the change in ministries, as well as by the bills proposed by the Catholics and a similar one by the Anglicans. In essence, the argument was reduced to whether or not voluntary schools should receive a share of the rates. Catholics and Anglicans, although offering different plans, both demanded some portion of the rates that all taxpayers paid. Even The Times was moved to state that the Catholic bill “is the boldest and the simplest, and possibly the most statesmanlike” of the two.Footnote 70 Again, these were generous words from a traditionally anti-Catholic corner. Nonconformists generally opposed such a scheme that would strengthen the schools of the established church or increase the state's financial support for any sectarian education in the schools. One letter in the Manchester Guardian from “a Taxpayer” warned of the danger to the school boards posed by the denominationalists: “The time is ripe; the danger is real; the forces of religious tyranny must be met by forces equally earnest on the side of liberty. … We must not allow the priestly hand to snatch new millions of public money.”Footnote 71 To which, Dean Patrick Lynch, rector of St. Wilfrid’s, Hulme, replied the following day that Catholics did not want to penalize the board schools, but only to make the system fair by respecting liberty of conscience and the rights of parents. On the charge of religious tyranny, Lynch agreed that it was a danger, but with a twist: “Those who wish to cram the School Board system of religious training down the throat of everybody else I regard as the most extreme religious tyrants and bigots of our time.” That was just as obvious proselytism as any other, he concluded.Footnote 72
Sensing that the time was right to strengthen the Catholic agitation to coincide with and capitalize on the public debate, Cardinal Vaughan wrote a decidedly provocative letter to The Times on 30 September 1895, repeating Manning's call for a comprehensive reconstruction of the educational system rather than piecemeal tinkering. Turning up the assault, he questioned why they should continue to make such sacrifices when “education has become a recognized legal public right, to be had at the expense of the State.” They (denominationalists) were not a minority pleading for crumbs of sympathy, but the majority in the country, “and I submit that [we] ought, without hesitation of apology, to demand a full measure of justice and not to pray and pay for mercy.” In a final gesture of the ecumenical spirit begun under Manning and now exemplified by his successor, Vaughan acknowledged that Nonconformists had legitimate grievances in small rural districts and that their objections must also be met before a true national system could be established.Footnote 73
Building upon the public debate and political agitation on education, the Catholic bishops released yet another joint declaration in November. This one, however, was presented personally to the Tory prime minister on 13 November 1895 by Vaughan and the Duke of Norfolk, current chairman of the Catholic School Committee. It first asked Salisbury and his government to live up to their campaign promises “to promote … any measure which shall place all Public Elementary Schools … upon a footing of perfect equality.” Then in reference to the inequality of the current system, it declared, “our schools are often starved, our teachers underpaid, our pupil teachers overworked, and our apparatus inferior … , while the private resources which might have been spent on the improvement of buildings are absorbed in meeting expenses that ought to be borne by the State.”Footnote 74 Again, The Times reacted favorably.Footnote 75 But the denominationalist and Catholic effort was dealt a serious blow when a Church of England deputation also met with Salisbury and subsequently lessened their demands. They told the prime minister that the Church of England did not wish to eliminate private subscriptions and would even consent to a plan in which a certain level of subscriptions was necessary for assistance from the rates. This was a concession that a wealthier body like the Church of England could afford but one that would harm the Catholic community considerably. For the time being, the Catholic hierarchy determined to continue the education battle without their more powerful educational allies.
Foreshadowing a strategy the archbishop employed over the next two years, Vaughan took his demands on the road and presided over a large demonstration in Bradford on 17 December. During his speech, Vaughan demanded that the state respect parental rights and freedom of choice and claimed that although they were not asking for the state to pay for religious education, “they would be perfectly within their right in doing so.”Footnote 76
The archbishop returned to the circuit in support of the Catholic position in January of the new year. At a town hall meeting of Birmingham Catholics, Vaughan repeated his soon-to-be familiar mantra of a “fair and equal” solution to the education problem. He argued that the Nonconformist cry for ratepayer control had been overplayed and that managers of voluntary schools were often ratepayers too; they were obviously much more efficient than board school managers because experience had forced them to be.Footnote 77 Two days later, Vaughan spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at St. Francis Xavier School, Liverpool. After acknowledging England's religious diversity, he opined that the State should solve the education problem in a way acceptable to all groups. He also noted wryly that because the board schools had spent £43 million on schools and administration in twenty-four years, voluntary schools could, in all fairness, ask for similar support. But, he claimed, they were not asking for that. They simply wanted a share of the rates along with the recognition of parental rights.Footnote 78 The following day, Vaughan's letter to the editor of The Times restated publicly his plan for education. Again, building upon the “newly-created right of each child to receive education at the cost of the State,” the archbishop outlined his proposal to determine what sum per child was adequate and to then provide that sum to whatever school the parents decided—a late nineteenth-century form of school choice. This plan, he argued, respected the natural law of parental rights and upheld the national interest in educating all children. Vaughan even broached the emerging issue of international competition with this prescient appeal: “If external dangers are ahead, … and if we are to be invited to make popular sacrifices, an enlightened patriotism points out that every effort should be made at once … to place the whole population on an equal footing in respect to the education of their children.”Footnote 79 When asked a few days later whether Catholics would respect the wishes of Unitarian or agnostic parents, the archbishop replied in the affirmative. If agnostics or Unitarians built their schools in compliance with the Education Department and produced comparable results, Vaughan concluded, then they should also be treated equally.Footnote 80
In 1896, an education bill was introduced in the House of Commons that proposed creating local educational authorities, as well as the abolition of rates paid by schools, the abolition of the 17s. 6d. grant limit per student, the raising of the age of compulsory attendance to twelve years, and an increase in grant aid to voluntary schools. Home Rule MPs, notably John Dillon and T. P. O’Connor, vigorously supported this Tory bill in Commons, despite having to vote against their traditional Liberal allies.Footnote 81 The amended bill was later withdrawn because it contained too many political compromises that most Anglicans and Catholics could not accept. The following year, the Voluntary Schools Act, supported by Anglicans, Catholics, and Wesleyans, provided minor relief to the denominational schools, but Vaughan was still not satisfied.Footnote 82 He continued meeting with Anglican bishops to plan for the ultimate legislative victory for educational equality—a share of the rates. In addition to these meetings, Catholics held several strategic planning sessions at archbishop's house with attendees including a heady mix of Westminster diocesan clergy, local Catholic schoolmasters, prominent Catholic politicians, and Irish Home Rule MPs, all united in their pursuit of the archbishop's dream. The unifying nature of the education battle was evident as Vaughan humorously told a friend that “meetings are taking place two or three times a week at [the archbishop’s] house—the Duke (of Norfolk) sitting beside anti-Parnellites and Parnellites.”Footnote 83 That the duke of Norfolk's Conservative party was rabidly anti–Home Rule highlights the importance of such unity of purpose.
Moreover, the urban Irish Catholic poor, for whom the Catholic community was fighting in the education battle, were, by most accounts, in unison with the English leadership. While Catholic teachers in the poorest areas often reported in their logbooks and even in parliamentary testimony that parents regularly pulled their children from school in order to work in the local mills, the evidence reveals that the situation was gradually improving.Footnote 84 Thomas Allies, then chairman of the Poor School Committee, testified before the Cross Commission in 1886 that Catholic parents were more concerned than ever before about making sure their children were not educated by teachers whose beliefs they did not share. During the same hearings, a member of the working class testified that many of his Catholic acquaintances were greatly interested to see that their children attend a Catholic school.Footnote 85 Perhaps the best indication that the Catholic poor were on board was that Catholic schools in Lancashire, London, and other growing urban areas were full and more were needed.
The Catholic struggle for education reached its climax and, according to Vaughan, a fair resolution in 1902 with Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour's Education Act. The Catholic community, still energized after a decade of Vaughan's leadership, launched its most ambitious, well-organized education campaign yet. The attitude of the Catholics in this final battle can be adequately summed up in a letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian from Patrick Lynch. He wrote: “Catholics in England will never consent … that their schools should be managed in any manner hostile to their faith.”Footnote 86 Reminiscent of the Cross Commission's majority report in 1888, Prime Minister Balfour's bill, introduced on 24 March 1902, intended to replace the myriad school boards with county and county borough councils that would oversee both denominational and nondenominational schools and would have the choice whether to extend rate aid to the denominational schools if they desired. In return for rate aid, Balfour intended for denominational schools to allow the councils to oversee their secular instruction and appoint some of the managers.
In response to the bill, the Catholic bishops held an emergency meeting and subsequently sent a declaration of their objections to the press and the prime minister's office; these included their disapproval of the bill's design to allow local councils to nominate more than one-third of a school's managers and the plan to place a greater burden of maintenance costs back on to the schools.Footnote 87 Bishop John Bilsborrow of Salford presided over a large meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 7 May, the intended purpose of which was to “safeguard the interests of Catholic Schools.” Three resolutions that emerged from the meeting were later sent to Parliament.Footnote 88 After the second reading of Balfour's bill, the leaders of the many Catholic Voluntary Schools Associations met at London's Westminster Palace Hotel on 27 May to approve their own parliamentary resolutions. They also urged all Catholic Voluntary Schools Associations to contact Parliament on behalf of Catholic educational interests. A full-scale lobbying process had begun.Footnote 89
The archbishop actually visited Commons frequently during the debate (the longest debate over a single bill in Parliamentary history hitherto), and Irish MPs argued the Catholic position vehemently from the floor. Vaughan even contacted John Redmond, the leader of the newly reunited Irish Parliamentary Party, in an effort to make sure the Irish remained steadfast in their support of the bill. “We are convinced that we are not likely ever to get a more satisfactory settlement of the education problem,” he wrote to the Irish leader.Footnote 90 This gesture from a man who was against Home Rule revealed just how important the passage of this bill was to him and the hierarchy and how he would attempt what was necessary politically to achieve that goal. Catholic planning meetings, further letters to the editor, and political petitions all were part of this effort. The result—the Balfour Act—was a partial victory, as denominational schools were finally allowed a share of the rates. There can be no doubt that in 1902 the Catholic voice was heard clearly in Whitehall, and, with the Irish MPs on board, Catholic influence had some effect on the passage of the Act.
After fifty-five years within the state elementary school system, the sixteen Catholic dioceses together boasted a total of 1,056 elementary schools, the Diocese of Salford supporting 260 alone.Footnote 91 This represents a 347 percent increase in the number of Catholic elementary schools from 1847 to 1902. Incidentally, this figure mirrors almost exactly the percentage increase in the number of Catholic priests during that same period; there were 697 priests in England and Wales in 1847 and 3,073 in 1902, a percentage increase of 340 percent.Footnote 92 The correlation between the two should be no surprise. As the Catholic population increased, the need for priests and elementary schools increased in similar fashion. However, the number of schools reflected as a percentage of the number of Catholic churches/chapels in 1902 had risen to 67 percent (1,056 of 1,568), 23 percent above the number in 1847.Footnote 93 This figure indicates that the opening of schools outpaced that of churches and reflects the hierarchy's priority of school buildings over churches, as well as the need to keep classroom numbers manageable. Such expansion, however, did not come without sacrifice. According to a note in the Westminster Diocesan Archives from 1896, the hierarchy calculated that Catholic school expansion had cost the community £1,850,000 since 1870.Footnote 94 Cardinal Vaughan even decided in the beginning of the educational battle of 1902 not to publicize the Church's capital debt on its schools, which stood at £700,000, for fear that it might “cause anxiety and misunderstanding.” He also indicated that another Crisis Fund might be necessary once the consequences of the Balfour Act became apparent.Footnote 95
By 1902, Catholics were unified on education. There were no more Bishop Ullathornes stubbornly holding on to the recusant past, and, though Irish MP and Home Ruler John Dillon and Bishop Vaughan disagreed on a few points during the Balfour bill debate, they were still fighting the same fight. There is no question that the Irish MPs were much more helpful and vociferous in the educational debates from 1891 to 1902, no doubt because of the split in the Irish party between the Parnellites and the anti-Parnellites and the second failure of Home Rule in 1893, which shelved the movement for the remainder of the decade. They agreed to support the educational position of the hierarchy in Parliament, not necessarily because they were in full agreement with the English bishops—in fact, they often disagreed on other subjects such as Home Rule—but because elementary education in England and Wales was an Irish issue, too. It should be noted that many of these Irish MPs actually lived in England for much of the year and some held jobs there; hence, they were close to the subject of educating the Catholic poor even if they represented voters from Irish constituencies.Footnote 96 Additionally, they hoped that when Home Rule gained enough strength to again wield influence at Parliament that they could expect better support from the English Catholic hierarchy in return.
Home Rule had compromised the Catholic effort to equalize the educational system in the 1880s and early 1890s, leading to failed ambitions despite tremendous efforts on the part of the Catholic community to strengthen and extend their schools. After Gladstone's second Home Rule bill failed in 1893 and the return of the Tories two years later, however, the path was clear to pursue that equitable solution in concert with the Anglicans without the Irish question hindering their progress. This political development helped Vaughan and the Catholics attain more success than they otherwise would have, and clearly, by 1902, the state was not only hearing the Catholic voice, it was listening.
While the education battle was not over and resumed only four years later, the identity transformation was, for the most part, complete. A recent study of the English Catholic church of the twentieth century suggests that the church entered the new century with confidence, passion, and not a little defensiveness that could easily manifest itself as tenacious defiance.Footnote 97 The half-century struggle for the schools is what engendered these traits and altered English Catholic identity, leaving it worlds removed from the quiescent isolation of its past and ready for a new century of educational combat.
