Religious historians have increasingly rejected the idea that Britain before the First World War was a society in which religion played a small and diminishing role. Yet the implications of this conclusion have not been fully worked out in approaches to politics in this period. An important example of this disjunction between political and religious history is that the predominant methods of explaining why the Edwardian Liberal party was able to enact a major series of social reforms still assume that religion was of little significance in this process. This article argues that religious developments were, in fact, crucial in allowing the party to accept the leadership's wish to steer it toward the New Liberalism. In particular, active and committed Nonconformists among the Liberals could embrace social reform because they could interpret it as a natural outcome of theological changes within Evangelicalism from the late nineteenth century onward.

This article reviews some of the major themes in the current historiography on the relationship between politics and religion in the Edwardian era and then uses the Rowntree family as a detailed example of the close connection between aspects of the New Liberalism and developments within Nonconformity. The Rowntrees exemplify this link because they played an important role in both movements. They were a family of Yorkshire Quakers, mostly engaged in the retail trades, who gained a degree of national prominence after Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925) built Rowntree and Company, a firm of cocoa and chocolate manufacturers based in York, into a well-known brand name and a major industrial concern that employed four thousand people.Footnote 1 However, this article concentrates on the activities of the younger generation of Rowntrees, especially Joseph's sons, the religious writer John Wilhem and the social investigator Seebohm, and Joseph's nephew, the Liberal politician Arnold Rowntree. Their public lives and opinions are only one example, albeit an important one, of the religious dimension to the New Liberalism. Ministers and leading laymen of similar views existed in all the major Nonconformist denominations, and they present a rich field for further investigation into how and why the Liberal party accepted the new agenda of social reform.

The view of historians of the relationship between religion and politics in Edwardian England is inevitably colored by the overarching debate in religious history about whether and to what extent there was a process of secularization, or diminishing significance of religion in society, underway in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.Footnote 2 This issue has grown to involve virtually every aspect of Edwardian society, with investigations ranging over church attendance figures; the impact of urbanization and suburbanization; the role of class, region, ethnicity, and gender; the significance of rising incomes and commercialized leisure; the importance of growing state provision of welfare; the decline of paternalist relations between employers and employees; and the appearance of new intellectual challenges to orthodox Christianity—to name but a few areas of the debate. The general trend of opinion among religious historians is, however, clear. Since the late 1970s, most religious historians have begun to conclude that the degree of secularization in English society before the First World War has been greatly exaggerated and that religion and the churches retained a significant place in people's lives well into the twentieth century.

This development has significant implications for approaches to Edwardian politics, especially for the fraught and complex series of arguments about whether the Liberal party was in inexorable decline before the First World War or, alternatively, the H. H. Asquith–David Lloyd George split killed off an otherwise healthy party.Footnote 3 However, the framework in which political historians still interpret the role of religion in Edwardian Liberalism remains profoundly influenced by the assumption that secularization was well-advanced in the 1900s and religion was of declining significance. Many historians have emphasized the importance for the nineteenth-century Liberal party's success of its identification with the political aspirations of Protestant Nonconformists at a time when religion was still a powerful enough factor in peoples' lives to crucially influence voting behavior and religious issues were central to politics as Nonconformists struggled for civic equality with Anglicans.Footnote 4 However, an important strand in historical thinking has indicated that, in the late nineteenth century, this situation was changing to Liberalism's disadvantage as religion declined in importance. Peter Clarke argued that this process left the way open for the decline of the politics of status and the rise of class as a determinant of voting behavior.Footnote 5 Similarly, John Glaser asserted that once Nonconformists had achieved the civic equality for which they had campaigned, this downgraded the centrality of religious issues in politics and left the field clear for the new “modern” issues of welfare and taxation to emerge and divide voters and parties along class lines.Footnote 6 It could be argued that, in this brave new secular world, Nonconformists had no further need to identify with Liberalism as the party of religious equality and that, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, middle-class Nonconformists were starting to defect to Conservatism as the party of property while working-class Nonconformists were free to support the new Labour party, thus dooming Liberalism before 1914.

Even many of those historians, Clarke, for example, who did not take this gloomy view of Liberalism's prospects before the First World War, based their arguments on grounds that accepted the increasing secularization of politics in this period. For the historians who took an optimistic view of pre-1914 Liberalism, the key was usually the New Liberalism—the reorientation of Liberalism after 1908 toward social reform and its record in enacting pensions, national insurance, minimum wages, and employment exchanges. To historians such as Clarke, the New Liberalism was a quintessentially secular program.Footnote 7 Its intellectual progenitors were writers and journalists such as John A. Hobson and Leonard T. Hobhouse, men who had lost their Christian faith and who framed their arguments in entirely secular terms. New Liberalism's main sponsors in the Liberal party included such politicians as David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Richard Haldane, and H. H. Asquith—none of whom were known for holding orthodox Christian beliefs. Moreover, the whole trend of the Clarke approach is that the promotion of social reform offered hope to the Liberal party because it accepted that religion was no longer an important factor in politics or in voters' calculations and it embraced an entirely secular and material appeal to working-class electors in an effort to outbid Labour.Footnote 8 By emphasizing social reform after 1908, the Liberals were both representing and accelerating the separation of religion and politics.

While these interpretations of the relationship between Liberalism and religion still provide the main planks of the way in which political historians approach the issue, they were developed before religious historians started to discard the secularization thesis. Now it is no longer necessary to assume that the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed the triumph of a secular form of politics. Indeed, there are some important indications that they did not. For instance, the view that class had superseded religion as the main determinant of voting behavior by 1914 has been challenged by Kenneth Wald's statistical work.Footnote 9 Rather, it is possible to argue that religious allegiance remained one important factor in voting behavior in the post-1867 electorate, along with a kaleidoscope of other issues such as occupation, region, and nationality, and that, in the early twentieth century, the picture was not much different. For instance, it is striking that there was still a noticeable correlation between areas of high Nonconformist concentration and Liberal strength, to say nothing of the sectarian politics of places like west Lancashire.Footnote 10

Moreover, it is far from clear that the issues of politics had been largely secularized. While it is true that the Nonconformist struggle for civic equality was dying down, with the notable exceptions of the rumbling education issue and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, the program of “moral reform,” in the shape of campaigns against drink, gambling, sabbath-breaking, and all forms of “impurity,” was still very much part of the political scene.Footnote 11 Moreover, issues that were not explicitly religious still touched on religious sensibilities—notably, of course, Irish Home Rule and the crisis over the role of the House of Lords from 1909 to 1911, which some Nonconformists interpreted as the last episode in the English Civil War.Footnote 12 This approach can be pushed further, and this article will argue that the New Liberal program itself, which to historians like Clarke was the apogee of the secularizing trend in politics before 1914, cannot be fully understood without inserting a religious dimension.

In other words, while New Liberalism may have some of its philosophical origins in the writings of secular thinkers and while it may owe its implementation at the cabinet level to largely secular political strategists, it is impossible to understand how it was perceived or why it was accepted by the Liberal party in purely secular terms. Religious developments were one of the most significant reasons why the party was able to accept, and in some cases to anticipate, embrace, and contribute to, the leadership's reorientation of Liberalism toward social reform.

In making this case, the crucial arena is the relationship between Liberalism and Nonconformity. There was, of course, a huge range of religious denominations represented in Liberalism—the Edwardian parliamentary party included Roman Catholics, Jews, and atheists—but it was still preeminently true in the early twentieth century that Liberalism was a party saturated with Nonconformity at both the parliamentary and the local level. About half of the 272 Liberal M.P.s elected in December 1910 were Free Churchmen from England and Wales, while innumerable regional studies have confirmed the continuing link between religion and politics at the local level. In Warrington, for instance, of the town councillors whose religion can be determined, in the twenty years up to 1914 the twelve Anglicans were all Tories and six of the seven Nonconformists were Liberals.Footnote 13

Mid-nineteenth-century Nonconformity was almost entirely Evangelical in its theology—that is, to use David Bebbington's shorthand definition, it emphasized the centrality of Christ's atonement for the sins of the world through his death on the cross, the need for individuals to undergo a conversion experience to be assured of salvation, the importance of actively preaching the gospel, and the role of the Bible as the source of divine guidance.Footnote 14 It was, of course, possible for stern nineteenth-century Evangelicals, even those whose eyes were fixed firmly on the next world rather than this one, to support wide-ranging projects of social reform. An obvious example was William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, whose In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) was full of plans to use the state to help the poorest. Booth, though, was not typical. Many nineteenth-century Evangelicals distrusted state interference in what they saw as a divinely ordained market economy that existed to further people's moral education. They traditionally focused on an individual's conversion and on charitable help carefully tailored to the individual's needs as the way to alleviate poverty.Footnote 15 However, Evangelicalism was not a static belief system. Historians of religion, such as Bebbington and David Thompson, have recently paid a good deal of attention to delineating the response of Nonconformity to the challenges perceived to be thrown up by the late nineteenth century, in particular the feeling of many Nonconformist ministers that Evangelicalism was no longer at the center of national life in the way that it had been in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 16 Responses were varied and included a retreat from the world into the “holiness” movement exemplified in the Keswick Conventions—the idea of a deepening of spiritual experience through the Holy Spirit subsequent to conversion—or a simple reassertion of the fundamental truths of orthodox Christianity. But one possible reaction, and this strand can be found in virtually all Nonconformist churches, was to attempt to emphasize the secular responsibilities and involvements of Nonconformists. This latter path was taken by some of the leading divines, such as the Methodist Hugh Price Hughes and the Baptist John Clifford.Footnote 17

Nonconformists who wanted to emphasize social reform could choose from a menu of theological arguments. In particular, some Nonconformists in all denominations began to shift the emphasis of their theology from the centrality of Christ's death and his atonement for the sins of the world, to his life—Christ as the incarnated moral guide and teacher. This approach tended to look on the church as an institution that should be judged by its ability to perform good works in this world following Christ's example. Many who took this line favored an immanentist theology that suggested that God was in everyone and everything and that society and perceptions of God were gradually evolving according to God's purposes. This idea also emphasized the duty of Christians to help the needy. As Hugh Price Hughes put it, “Every kindness that you show to the drunkards … to the harlots … to the starving poor … is a kindness shown to Jesus Christ.”Footnote 18 This concept was often linked to the idea of God as the Father of all and all men as therefore part of a brotherhood with mutual responsibilities. Others interpreted the Kingdom of God as a realm of justice that had to be built now on earth, rather than looked for only in Heaven. These new developments were complemented by changes in the institutional commitments of the Nonconformist churches as they sought to reach out to the working classes through new charitable and social endeavors. However, particularly at a time when the influence of the environment on behavior, and hence on sinfulness, was being widely canvased, this sort of thinking could be inflected into support for social reform. In the case of some leading Nonconformists, such as John Clifford, this was clearly the case.Footnote 19

However, religious and political historians have downplayed the impact of these theological developments on politics. For religious historians such as Richard Helmstadter, this “New Evangelicalism” was itself a product of the declining influence of the churches in society and politics and further exacerbated this trend by dividing Nonconformists about its validity. Moreover, “effective sustained action in support of social reform proved impossible” because Nonconformist thought on these questions was far too vague and impractical.Footnote 20 Political historians, too, have felt that these developments had little practical significance. George Bernstein argued that leading Nonconformists, such as Clifford, may have been able to offer a lukewarm acceptance to the New Liberalism, but their role was entirely passive and was in no way to be compared with that of secular thinkers and politicians.Footnote 21 Nonconformists remained obsessed with the old sectarian causes, wary of doing anything that undermined family obligation or an individual's sense of personal responsibility, ignorant of complex social issues, and prone to drifting off into platitudes or to reducing social evils to moral failings—to select from a relatively favorable summary of Nonconformists and social reform in the best of the recent summaries of Edwardian Liberalism.Footnote 22

However, while Nonconformists continued to emphasize the agenda of moral reform, notably temperance, antigambling, and sabbatarianism, it can be argued that active and committed dissenters also played a much more positive and important role in persuading and pushing the Liberal party at all levels into embracing the New Liberalism than has hitherto been appreciated. There are already one or two indications of this at the local level, as in Jeffrey Cox's superb study of religion in south London, which makes the point very well about the role of Nonconformists in Lambeth Liberalism.Footnote 23 A much fuller appreciation of the significance of religion to the New Liberalism at all levels of the party can be made by looking in detail at the role of the Rowntree family. But the Rowntrees were Quakers, and one objection to using members of this denomination to illustrate wider points about Nonconformity is the obvious point that Quakerism was a very untypical type of Nonconformity. Quakers were distinct in their organization, having no formal ministry and a theoretically totally democratic form of church government; in their method of worship, meetings being conducted largely in silence, without hymns, formal prayers, or Bible readings; in their theology, as in the notion of the Inner Light in all people as the ultimate form of divine guidance; in the denomination's long devotion to pacifism as an essential part of Christianity; and in some of their customs, for instance, using “thee” and “thou” and refusing to swear oaths.

Quakers certainly thought of themselves, and were thought of by others, as a distinct group. But in the nineteenth century, as with all other Nonconformists, the beliefs of the Quakers were profoundly shaped by the rising tide of Evangelicalism, demonstrating an increasing emphasis on the Bible, rather than the Inner Light, as the guiding principle of Christianity; on the centrality of the atonement on the cross; on the need for individuals to undergo a conversion experience; and on a new activism to win converts, through foreign and home missions.Footnote 24 Mid-nineteenth-century Quakerism, like mid-nineteenth-century Nonconformity, was mainly profoundly Evangelical, and it is notable that it is at this time that Quakers abandoned many of the practices that marked them as a “peculiar people,” such as their distinctive dress and the ban on marrying out, and became much more involved in mainstream Nonconformity, especially in working with other dissenters in philanthropic organizations and in the Liberal party. The first Quaker M.P. was elected in 1832, and there were over thirty Quaker M.P.s in the nineteenth century.

The Quakers were different, but in the nineteenth century they were becoming steadily less different from other Nonconformists, and just as other denominations witnessed a fragmenting of Evangelicalism at the end of the century, so, too, did the Quakers. While some Quakers held firm to their Evangelical beliefs, others, mainly in the younger generation, took part in a movement to reformulate Quakerism. Dubbed the Quaker Renaissance, this development shared many characteristics with the “New Evangelicalism” in other denominations.Footnote 25 In some ways, of course, it was distinctive. In particular, the Quaker Renaissance embraced scientific and critical attacks on the authority of the Bible and downgraded the idea of the atonement much more readily than was feasible in most other denominations. This was possible because it was fairly straightforward for proponents of the Quaker Renaissance to appeal to the society's own distinctive tradition of the Inner Light as the ultimate religious authority, rather than the Bible. It is no coincidence that there was a huge revival of interest in early Quaker history and theology among the Friends in the late nineteenth century. But the Inner Light was rather similar to the immanentist theology of many “New Evangelicals,” which emphasized that God was in everyone and everything, so even here there is a broad comparability to developments elsewhere in dissent. Moreover, the Quaker Renaissance emphasized to Quakers, just as Hughes did to Methodists and Clifford did to Baptists, the necessity to revive Quakerism by making it more relevant to society and more involved in society's concerns; to perform good works, following the example of Christ; and to act with justice and compassion to all human beings as bearers within them of the divine spark of the Inner Light. Just as in other denominations, this sort of approach could be inflected toward social reform, so, too, it could be among Quakers.

The central figure in this process within Quakerism was John Wilhelm Rowntree (1868–1905), the eldest son of Joseph Rowntree.Footnote 26 John Wilhelm remains a crucial figure for English Quakers, despite his early death at the age of thirty-six, because he was, without doubt, the central figure in the Quaker Renaissance in England. This was not because he was an original theologian, though he was a close friend of all the leading thinkers in the Quaker renewal, including the American professor of philosophy Rufus Jones, the English academics John W. Graham and Rendel Harris, the scientist Silvanus Thompson, and the writer and teacher Edward Grubb. John Wilhelm's significance lay in his inspirational personality, his skills as an organizer and a propagandist, and, through his prolonged ill health and early death, his role as a kind of martyr for the movement. He was the main driving force behind the 1895 Manchester conference on “Quakerism and the World,” which acted as a platform to proclaim the Quaker Renaissance to the younger generation of Friends. From 1897 onward, he organized a series of very influential and well-attended summer schools for Quakers to discuss Biblical criticism and new movements in theology. Just before his death, he was instrumental in setting up Woodbrooke College in Birmingham as a center where Quakers could undertake residential study and prepare themselves to spread the gospel of the Quaker Renaissance. In addition, he poured forth a river of books, pamphlets, and articles articulating his beliefs, particularly a series called Present Day Papers, which was published from 1896 to 1903. In all of these, his message was the same: Quakers must not just embrace new developments in theology; they must show how their faith was relevant to the world and how it could offer solutions to the world's problems. As John Wilhelm put it in his essay “What Has Jesus to Say to the State?” recognition of the Fatherhood of God and “real fraternity” inevitably led to the conclusion that “the grinding poverty of a third of the population becomes an evil too heavy to be borne.” Action to deal with this situation, therefore, “arises naturally from the teaching of Jesus to the individual and to the state” and is necessary to remain “faithful to his conception of God's Fatherhood.”Footnote 27

John Wilhelm's ideas had a great impact, not just on Quakerism, but especially on his immediate family, and this message fed into the New Liberalism in some significant ways. First, John Wilhelm's closest brother in age was Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954). The influence of religion on Seebohm's outlook and activities is not usually emphasized, but it was a crucial element in his life and in all of his public activities before the First World War.Footnote 28 As early as 1893, John Wilhelm Rowntree drew his brother into an enterprise called “the Yorkshire Northern movement,” designed to revive Quaker meetings near York, and Seebohm's interest in working people's conditions was first aroused through his work in a Quaker adult school in his home city.Footnote 29 Seebohm destroyed many of his early papers, but, significantly, some of the few items he kept were his first public addresses, which he gave to his adult school pupils. They are redolent of his brother's approach to religion, constantly emphasizing the need to reject “set dogma” as the essence of Christianity and to replace it with both an inward search for truth and practical service to humanity. To Seebohm, this service could be in “directly religious work,” in “public work,” or in “social work,” but all were expressions of faith. It was to the last of these options that Seebohm felt called. As he declaimed in 1894: “What part are you going to play as a citizen? Will you be one of those whose selfish indifference precludes them from understanding the problems that are to be faced—shall the causes of Education, Sanitary Dwellings, Healthy Recreation, etc., be of no moment to you? Remember this chain of Indifference, not far removed from Selfishness, will be a heavy one to bear.”Footnote 30 Seebohm's attempt to escape from that “chain of Indifference” made him the best known of the Rowntrees for his pioneering work as a social investigator.

Seebohm was a reticent man, especially about his deepest feelings, but occasionally the language of the Quaker Renaissance would break through into his published work. A telling illustration of this was his essay in a collection that he edited on gambling. The tone of the other contributors, including Hobson and Ramsay MacDonald, was largely secular and focused on the social problems produced by gambling. Seebohm's essay discussed some of the practical ways in which gambling could be discouraged, but it ended with an impassioned declaration:

The conclusions of the best known of Seebohm's social investigations that aimed to hasten the arrival of the “social” aspect of God's Kingdom were contained in his Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901). The book was essentially an examination of all the working-class households in York, and it became an important subject of debate because of its assertion that not only were 28 percent of the total households in York in poverty but nearly 10 percent had incomes so low that they could not keep the members of the family in what Seebohm termed “physical efficiency,” that is, provided with sufficient nutritional food to maintain health. This made the book not only a social document but also an important contribution to the contemporary debate about poverty, because it claimed to prove by empirical research that about a third of observable poverty was due to low incomes, not working class spending and saving habits. Seebohm subsequently entered into a prolonged public debate with the representatives of the Charity Organization Society, who claimed that there was no poverty that was not due to the correctable behavior of particular individuals—this was a debate that Seebohm was widely perceived to have won.Footnote 32

The book was thus one tributary of the stream of early twentieth-century social investigation and criticism that helped create the climate for the New Liberal social reforms by arguing that much poverty was structural and not the responsibility of individuals. In particular, the claim in Poverty that low wages were an important factor in creating destitution was a significant contribution toward arguments for minimum wage legislation, for example, the 1909 Trade Boards Act.Footnote 33 Seebohm's importance for New Liberalism, however, was much more specific than being a general influence. When Lloyd George wanted someone to oversee his land enquiry of the years 1912–14, which he intended to use to formulate a great new program of land reform to sweep the Liberals to victory at the next general election, he appointed Seebohm to be the most influential member of the land enquiry committee.Footnote 34 This was a fairly natural choice, even though the two men knew each other only slightly. Seebohm had already proven he could carry out a large-scale social investigation, Lloyd George wanted someone to make the case for a minimum wage for agricultural laborers, and minimum wages were a policy with which Seebohm was already associated through his work on poverty in York.

Seebohm quickly ensured that the enquiry acquired two other luminaries of the Quaker Renaissance. He appointed as paid secretary a Quaker convert called John St. George Heath. The two men knew each other through Woodbrooke, the Quaker college that was inspired by John Wilhelm and devoted to his ideas, where Seebohm was a member of the governing Council and Heath was a lecturer. He also recruited E. Richard Cross to head the urban side of the land enquiry.Footnote 35 Cross was the Rowntrees's solicitor and had been converted to Quakerism in 1898 after attending the Manchester conference of 1895 and one of John Wilhelm's summer schools. The backing of his two Quaker colleagues enhanced Seebohm's influence on the enquiry's conclusions. Seebohm not only supported Lloyd George's idea for a minimum wage for agricultural laborers in the enquiry's conclusions but went further in persuading the enquiry and the chancellor also to support a universal minimum wage in the towns.Footnote 36 Moreover, Seebohm, Heath, and Cross adapted some of the ideas behind Joseph Rowntree's experimental private housing development at New Earswick in York to produce a massive scheme of town-planning and council-sponsored suburban development that was intended to transform Britain's urban housing stock.Footnote 37 These ideas were being gradually accepted by the Cabinet on the eve of the First World War—Asquith endorsed the general minimum wage in June 1914—and would have formed the basis of the Liberal party's campaign at the next general election.Footnote 38 Obviously, the genesis of these ideas and their adoption is a complex one, but it is hard to deny that an important contribution was made by the Quaker Renaissance and its ambition to inspire people, in the words of Seebohm Rowntree, “with a love so real and so deep that it cannot rest while so much sorrow and injustice and misery remain in our midst.”Footnote 39

Another Rowntree who was profoundly influenced by John Wilhelm was Arnold Stephenson Rowntree (1872–1951), John Wilhelm's and Seebohm's first cousin. John Wilhelm became Arnold's closest friend when the latter joined Rowntree and Company in 1892, and he was deeply attracted to his cousin's approach to religion.Footnote 40 Arnold became a regular participant in John Wilhelm's summer schools for religious study, and through his cousin, he became a close friend of the other leading lights of the Quaker Renaissance, especially Rufus Jones. After John Wilhelm's death, Arnold was a leading supporter of Woodbrooke College and a central figure in carrying out John Wilhelm's plan for a multivolume History of Quakerism, which had as one of its purposes to demonstrate the links between the early Quakers and the Quaker Renaissance.

For Arnold, the vision of Quakerism he shared with John Wilhelm was at the center of his life. Like Seebohm, however, he felt he was not suited to primarily religious work. As he wrote to his wife after taking part in a religious meeting, “so often one is so conscious of one's special temptations and weaknesses and one feels a glorious old hypocrite.”Footnote 41 While Seebohm chose to express his faith through “social work,” Arnold chose “public work.” Nevertheless, for him, as for Seebohm, there was no division between his faith and his other activities. For instance, in memory of John Wilhelm, some of his closest friends instituted a series of “Quaker tramps” across North Yorkshire—these were essentially groups of young Quakers walking a prearranged route for a week or two, attempting to win new converts, encourage remote Quaker communities, and celebrate the Quaker past. Arnold took part in the first “tramp” of 1905, and on their way up Nidderdale, his group encountered a gang of laborers building a light railway between Pately Bridge and the new Bradford Waterworks. Not only did the “trampers” hold a prayer meeting with the laborers but so appalled were they by their living conditions that they started a campaign to persuade Bradford corporation to provide them with better conditions. This is a perfect illustration of the unity of faith and social reform for the followers of the Quaker Renaissance such as Arnold Rowntree.Footnote 42

Arnold's commitment to social reform carried over into the “public work” he chose. In January 1910, he was elected Liberal M.P. for York, a seat he held until 1918. In some ways, he was fairly typical of the mass of Liberal backbenchers with no ambitions to political office—he was (by this time) a middle-aged, Nonconformist businessman, sitting for a constituency with which he had strong personal ties. He was also an interesting example of how backbenchers of this type with a firm grounding in the “New Evangelicalism” could play an active role in promoting and supporting, rather than retarding or reluctantly accepting, the Liberal party's turn toward social reform. This emerges most clearly from examining what Arnold actually did as an M.P. before 1914, that is, by breaking down the matters he dealt with in his speeches and questions. He naturally had to spend a certain amount of his time as an M.P. dealing with matters of constituency interest, and he occasionally acted as a spokesman for the confectionary industry, playing a central role in negotiating the readjustment of the duties on chocolate and cocoa in the 1911 Budget.Footnote 43 He also pursued some traditional Quaker concerns, including upholding his denomination's peace testimony by speaking against conscription bills introduced by Tory backbenchers and taking an interest in penal reform, particularly the imprisonment of debtors, thus following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Fry. Some of his interventions in the Commons can only be labeled “personal,” as when on a holiday in Eastbourne he met a self-educated coastguard and then asked a Commons question about the contents of coastguard libraries.Footnote 44

But by far the most substantial part of Arnold's speeches and questions of the period 1910–14, some 55–60 percent of them, dealt with social reform. Some of this activity had a constituency slant, as one topic on which he spoke and asked questions about regularly concerned the wages and conditions in the railway industry, whose workers were, of course, notably well represented among the York electorate.Footnote 45 He showed a similar interest, however, in the fate of coal miners and postal workers, and his main contribution to social reform was in the field of national insurance. Not only did he fully approve of Lloyd George's initiative; he also was part of a small group of backbench Liberal M.P.s who helped shape and amend the legislation as it went through the Commons, often working in cooperation with the chancellor.Footnote 46 Arnold's particular concern was provision for women and low-paid workers, and he was one of the most active M.P.s in providing a counterweight to pressures, mainly from the big insurance companies, to cut down benefits for low-paid and casual workers who would be unable to join one of the insurance companies or friendly societies administering the national insurance scheme and who would be paying their contributions into a special post office scheme. Nor did Arnold's interest stop when the national insurance measure became law. He questioned the government about the administration of the scheme, spoke on the subsequent Amendment Bill in 1914, and contributed to the chief whip's committee to publicize and defend national insurance.Footnote 47

Arnold was not, therefore, quite without influence, even as a politically unambitious backbencher, but another Quaker, his wife's brother, T. Edmund Harvey, who was elected as Liberal M.P. for West Leeds in January 1910, had the ability to make a much bigger impact on politics. Harvey had known the younger generation of Rowntrees since childhood, and he was just as concerned as Arnold was to carry on the legacy of John Wilhelm Rowntree. He had, for instance, joined Arnold on the “tramp” of 1905, he was involved in producing the History of Quakerism, and he served on the Council of Woodbrooke College.Footnote 48 Like Arnold Rowntree, he proved a persistent advocate of social reform in Parliament, but, unlike his brother-in-law, he soon started to ascend the junior rungs of office, serving as parliamentary private secretary to Charles Masterman for the period 1913–14 and helping to administer the national insurance scheme. His career was cut short when he resigned in August 1914 in opposition to the decision to declare war on Germany, but Harvey showed that the Quaker Renaissance was capable of producing a new generation of politicians who could help continue and extend the Liberal government's commitment to social reform.

Moreover, the Rowntrees and their connections did not just make an impact at the parliamentary level. As well as being a director of Rowntree and Company and a backbench M.P., Arnold Rowntree played a significant role in the newspaper world. His uncle, Joseph Rowntree, had, in 1904, transferred much of his wealth to three trusts, one of which, the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust, was explicitly designed to buy up and support ailing Liberal newspapers.Footnote 49 Joseph had been particularly upset at the way that popular Tory papers, especially the Daily Mail, had whipped up jingoistic fervor during the Boer War, and he wanted to ensure that high-minded Liberal papers were not squeezed out of the market by their less scrupulous rivals. The trust's most famous acquisition was the weekly the Nation, which it owned from 1907 to 1923. This journal had a tiny circulation, but it gained immense prestige in political circles under the editorship of Henry W. Massingham, who reinforced its status as the house journal of the New Liberal intellectuals such as Hobhouse and Hobson. The paper was only able to keep going and retain its unique character because the Rowntree trust invested about £60,000 in it to cover its losses and let Massingham run the paper very much as he wanted.Footnote 50

Less well known, but far more important in terms of circulation, was the trust's acquisition of a regional newspaper empire. The first papers it acquired in 1904 was the Darlington-based Northern Echo and its weekly sister papers. This was followed quickly by the acquisition of the weekly Yorkshire Gazette and Malton Gazette in 1905 and later of local papers in Durham, Lincolnshire, and Derbyshire.Footnote 51 The trust even jointly owned, in collaboration with the Cadbury family, a national paper, the Morning Leader, and a London evening paper, the Star, over the period 1909–12. Joseph Rowntree, however, was always dubious about this venture; the papers were quickly turned over to the Cadburys, and the trust's main focus remained on the regional press. Joseph appointed his nephew Arnold to administer the papers, presumably on the grounds that, since he was in charge of advertising and marketing at Rowntree and Company, he was the member of the family who was best qualified to sell newspapers. His status as a minor newspaper baron gave Arnold a wider scope to spread his ideas than he had as a backbencher, and he used his role to campaign for New Liberalism. In this context, it is significant that many members of the Rowntree clan, especially Joseph and Seebohm, were intent on banning betting news from the papers owned by the Rowntree trust, and that, after the Northern Echo was acquired by the trust, the paper was required to sever any connection with horse racing.Footnote 52 Arnold shared his uncle's and cousin's dislike of gambling, but he opposed the ban and persuaded the Rowntree trustees to rescind it in March 1910 on the grounds that the Echo could not possibly survive if it did not carry betting news. Arnold would not compromise, however, on his papers' coverage of social reform. For instance, he appointed a like-minded editor, the radical Unitarian George Armstrong to the Echo, supported his decisions to launch investigations into housing conditions and to campaign for local government and land reform, and persuaded advocates of social reform in both the Liberal and Labour parties, such as Charles Masterman, Arthur Acland, and Arthur Henderson, to write for the Echo.Footnote 53 This probably did not sell papers either, but the Echo maintained a consistent tone of high-minded reform under Rowntree ownership, despite incurring continual losses.

This redirection of a group of regional newspapers toward the New Liberalism was a matter of real significance. Not only did papers like the Northern Echo and the Yorkshire Gazette keep the Liberal flag flying in their areas, but they also helped both to change the image of Liberalism and to push local Liberal parties in a New Liberal direction. A particularly good example of the latter process occurred in Sheffield. Sheffield Liberalism was bitterly divided in the Edwardian era between two factions: the numerous relatives of Henry Wilson, M.P. for Holmfirth, and their opponents, who were led by the formidable alderman Sir William Clegg.Footnote 54 It was Arnold who saved the Sheffield Liberal paper, the Sheffield Independent, from going under, at a crucial moment in 1909 when the battle between the two factions was at its height, by investing in it with John Bowes Morrell, another director of Rowntree and Company.Footnote 55 Under its new owners, the Independent gave consistent backing to the Wilsons strategy of not opposing Joseph Pointer, the recently elected Labour M.P. for Sheffield, Attercliffe, at the next election, urging “let Attercliffe Liberals work as well as vote for the People's Candidate in every way open to them.”Footnote 56 The Independent also campaigned, with some success, to push municipal social reform to the forefront of the Liberals' program and to make it the crucial issue at council elections. In 1910, it concentrated on defending municipal control of street-sweeping and rubbish collection, labeling the Tories “the Reactionaries—the anti-municipalisation party.”Footnote 57 The Conservative leaders were furious, claiming that the paper “took the principal part in the election” in labeling them as proponents of sweated labor, and they accused the Independent of playing a “low down game.” Similarly, in 1913, the paper campaigned to make Oliver Wilson's proposal for a municipal tuberculosis sanitorium the central issue in the local elections.Footnote 58 This activity maintained pressure on local Liberals to embrace the New Liberalism and contributed to the party's success in regaining control of the council in 1911 and only losing in 1913 by one seat.

Arnold's role in Sheffield is just one example of the need both he and Seebohm felt to ensure that local Liberal parties moved in a New Liberal direction. Naturally enough, they had the most influence in their home city of York, where they both played an active role in local politics in the early 1900s. Arnold was secretary of the York Liberal association from 1901 to 1904 and its president from 1904 to 1909, before becoming M.P. for York. Seebohm was secretary of a body that he set up in 1901 called the Health and Housing Reform Association, which campaigned for municipal action to improve housing conditions, medical inspections in schools, an improved milk supply, and a host of other social reform causes.Footnote 59 Both men called for council action to relieve unemployment, and when they got no response, in 1904, they helped to organize a Citizens Association, which set up its own employment bureau. They helped to prepare and contributed to a series of articles in the Yorkshire Gazette (run by Arnold) entitled Towards a Municipal Policy (published as a pamphlet in 1905), which outlined how the York council should take greater steps to improve its citizens' lives—for instance, by taking control of the tramways and the local gas company and by taking municipal action on housing.

Following Arnold's and Seebohm's lead, a group of members of the Rowntree family and their connections started, from 1905 onward, to gain election to the council as Liberals committed to this new program of reform, thus reversing the usual trend of the time for big businesses to withdraw from municipal politics as such politics became more time consuming and specialized. Soon there were so many people linked to the Rowntrees on the council that they dominated the Liberal group and determined its policies.Footnote 60 They included Oscar Rowntree, Seebohm's younger brother, a director of Rowntree and Company, and treasurer of York Liberal Association; Theodore Rowntree, Arnold's elder brother and secretary of Rowntree and Company; John Bowes Morrell, the only nonfamily director of Rowntree and Company; Morrell's brother Cuthbert Morrell and his brother-in-law Frank Pollard, a Quaker teacher; Kenneth Wilkinson, a solicitor married to a cousin of Arnold's and Seebohm's and Arnold's election agent; Sebastian Meyer, a Quaker and close friend of Arnold's from the adult school movement; Samuel Davies, a Quaker employed by Rowntree and Company, who had helped Seebohm with his investigations into working-class diet; and James Hogge, who worked for Seebohm's antigambling organization in York.

The newly reorientated York Liberal party proved remarkably successful. In 1901, the city's council was dominated by thirty Conservatives, opposed by fifteen Liberals and three Labour members. In 1911, the Liberal group obtained control of the council with the support of the handful of Labour councillors, reversing the general trend for the Liberals to do badly at the municipal level while there was a Liberal government. They were also able to achieve at least some of their program, most notably winning a bitterly contested local referendum in 1909 to municipalize the tramways. All this is of some significance because it shows very clearly that the Rowntrees had a clear idea of how to use the state to implement social reform, predating the Liberal leadership's initiatives in this direction. In other words, this is an example of a local party dominated by a business family who did not have to be dragged reluctantly behind the leadership. They were already enacting the New Liberalism at a local level before it became the policy of Liberal governments.

The York Liberal party's espousal of social reform had implications for Liberalism beyond the city, because the Rowntrees did not confine their activities to one constituency. The Rowntree factory was just outside the boundaries of the York seat, in the largely rural constituency of Thirsk and Malton. The Rowntrees basically took over the local Liberal party in that seat in the years before 1914, with Seebohm becoming president of the Liberal association and his brother Oscar its treasurer.Footnote 61 Seebohm oversaw a plan to wrest this rural seat from the Tories by instituting an intensive local version of the national land campaign he was involved in producing from 1912 to 1914, concentrating on minimum wages and improved housing for agricultural laborers. George Nicholls, a former farm laborer and a devotee of social reform, was installed as the Liberal candidate in 1914, presumably with Rowntree finance. Seebohm and Arnold were also influential in Darlington, the headquarters of the Northern Echo.Footnote 62 Members of the Echo staff, such as its general manager, Charles Starmer, and its editor, George Armstrong, played a leading role on the town council and in the constituency association, often in alliance with local Liberal trade unionists. The Rowntrees were widely reported to be behind the installation of one of Seebohm's former researchers, a disreputable figure called Trebitsch Lincoln, as Liberal candidate for Darlington in January 1910. So closely was Lincoln identified with the Rowntrees that he was regularly heckled with the cry of “cocoa.” Certainly, Lincoln could not have fought for and won the seat without the generous financial support he received from Seebohm.

This was part of a trend in the years before 1914 whereby Arnold and Seebohm helped their nominees and associates into Parliament. James Hogge, who had worked full time for Seebohm's antigambling association in York, became Liberal M.P. for East Edinburgh in 1912, something that was only possible because Seebohm and the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust continued to give him financial help; this amounted to something like £1,600 in the period 1912–16.Footnote 63 Arnold had been instrumental in introducing and financially supporting a young Canadian barrister called Hamar Greenwood as the York Liberal party's candidate in 1906.Footnote 64 Although he lost his seat in 1910, the start the Rowntrees had given him in politics allowed him to go on and become Liberal M.P. for Sunderland. Moreover, Rowntree influence was used, wherever possible, to sustain good relations between the Liberal and Labour parties—an essential part of the New Liberal project. York was a two-member seat, and the Liberal candidate stood in tandem with a Labour nominee in 1906. The Labour party was unable to find a candidate in 1910, and it was again in difficulties by 1913, so Frank Rowntree, a cousin of Arnold and Seebohm, introduced the local Labour party to Henry Schloesser, a Fabian barrister, who agreed to contest the seat in harness with Arnold Rowntree.Footnote 65 In Darlington, Labour was given a free run by the Liberals in 1906, and the Liberals only took over the nomination again in 1910 because Labour had been unable to win the seat even in the annus mirabilis for progressives of 1906. Arnold Rowntree did everything he could behind the scenes to prevent any Liberal opposition to Arthur Henderson as Labour candidate for Barnard Castle in 1903, and the Northern Echo gave Henderson consistent support.Footnote 66 In fact, Arnold was a great admirer of both Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald. He even gave MacDonald money in 1910 to ensure that his local Labour newspaper, the Leicester Pioneer, could keep going.Footnote 67 Thus, the Rowntrees were the center of an important network of contacts in Yorkshire and the North East that sought to push the Liberal party in a New Liberal direction. If New Liberalism was acceptable to the party in these areas, it was at least partly because of their efforts.

New Liberalism may have seemed at the national level to have little to do with religion, but this is only part of the picture. While it may have gained much of its inspiration from secular thinkers such as Hobhouse and Hobson and from politicians such as Lloyd George, it also had an important input at all levels, from national policy making to local council elections, from people who were still grounded in a deeply Christian way of looking at politics. Moreover, it is impossible to understand why the Liberal party at backbench, regional, and local levels accepted the New Liberal project without realizing the crucial contribution made by people, such as the Rowntrees, whose understanding of their religion had led them to embrace social reform as a Christian duty. Nonconformity was not an irrelevance to the New Liberalism, nor did it necessarily retard the adoption of collectivist thinking in the Liberal party, because Nonconformity itself was capable of changing to accommodate social reform, just as secular ideologies could. The role of the Rowntrees in Edwardian Liberalism shows how religion could still act as the crucial carrier of new ideas in the early twentieth century, rather than holding them back.