Introduction

AFTER A LONG ECLIPSE, Cardinal Manning seems to be slowly coming into his own: Vincent A. McClelland, Robert Gray, James Pereiro, and David Newsome have recently contributed to this long overdue reappraisal. A fresh look has been taken at many aspects of his work, but so far his political role has not attracted much attention, and since Shane Leslie in 1921 and Denis Gwynn in 1951 last took an interest, the subject has been largely ignored. I wish here to reopen the subject and study the relation of English Catholics to Irish nationalism under his episcopacy. The Gladstone Diaries and correspondence, my own work on “H. E. Manning and the Social Question,” and Professor Alphonse Chapeau's collection of the Manning Papers formerly housed in the library of the Université Catholique de l'Ouest in Angers, have helped me track the course of Manning's involvement with Ireland from 1865 to 1890, a twenty-five year period covering the growth of Fenianism, the Land War, and Parnell's rise and fall.

The Irish question was no part of Manning's inheritance as Archbishop of Westminster. His predecessor, though himself an Irishman, had been wary of getting caught in this hornet's nest. A trueborn Englishman, Manning loved Catholic Ireland and managed to use his influence in high political circles for the sake of peace and justice in the “sister-island” until Britain, faced with a quasi-revolutionary situation in the 1880s, tried to use the authority of Rome to make the Irish Catholics more amenable to British rule and approached the Pope for the sake of quieting Ireland, forcing Manning to side with his Irish brethren when the English Catholics chose to stand by class and privilege. Delated by the Times as “the active promoter of separatist intrigues,” dissuaded by the Archbishop of Dublin to publish his “Address to the Irish People” because he was viewed as the real author of the revolt of the Irish Party against Parnell, Cardinal Manning seems to have been yet another victim of the tragedy that wrecked the career of a brilliant politician and shattered the prospects of Ireland when Home Rule appeared so near at hand.

Was Parnell's hubris responsible for the eventual catastrophe, was it the English Catholics' short sightedness, their archbishop's “extreme” and “mistaken” views or the Nonconformists' Puritanism, will be up to the reader to decide. But the rapprochement between Protestant Britain and the Holy See which the English Catholics favored and Catholic Ireland viewed with suspicion as yet another attempt at governing Ireland through the Pope could only make matters worse.

Henry Edward Manning had hardly been appointed Archbishop of Westminster and, as such, the head of a Church comprising a million Irish – five sixths of the Catholic community in England – when Irish nationalism forced itself upon him with the resurgence of Fenianism in 1865. For years he had warned his friend, William E. Gladstone, that England should be wary of supporting the Italian revolution lest Ireland, excited by dreams of independence and by the success of Italian nationalists, should in turn raise the standard of rebellion against England. Now, with the civil war over in America, the Fenians were getting ready for action. For over a quarter of a century, all along Manning's episcopacy, Irish nationalism would be a problem not only for the English government, but also for the Catholic Church in Ireland, in England, and in Rome.

Act I: Fenianism

MANNING'S POSITION was the same in the case of Ireland as it had been in the case of Italy: a line of opposition to the revolution – “the direct antagonist of the providential and Christian order of the world.”¹

On January 27, 1866, he wrote to a friend, “I wish I had time today to write on Fenianism. I believe it to be far graver than we think. The majority of the Irish sympathize in the cause of nationalism and are Fenians, less its folly and violence” (Purcell 2: 275). The two archbishops could not be content with denouncing Fenianism, they had to explain their attitude to their flocks and express their sympathy with the Irish people, which they did in their pastoral letters. They could also exert political pressure – there were six million Catholics in the United Kingdom – and this, only Manning was able to do, owing to his former position in the Anglican church and to his earlier friendship with Gladstone. Fenianism was a threat, it could also be an opportunity: whereas it could compromise the Catholics, the latter could demonstrate that they were able to maintain public order in Ireland, provided England should adopt a wiser and more just legislation for Ireland. To Cullen he wrote: “I have never known a more propitious moment to make the government feel that they cannot do without us (Leslie, Manning 194).

In his Trinity Sunday Pastoral Letter of May 1866, Manning reminds the faithful that “the duty of every Christian people is to uphold authority by obedience and to exercise that authority for the widest possible benefit of those who are subject to it.” The Irish, he says, are filled with a just and reasoned discontent and no union is possible until Catholic Ireland shall be healed of its old wounds; these wounds, though, are not to be healed by sedition, or by revolution. Faith and patience will triumph in the end and Manning wishes God speed to those who “promote not only the healing and the happiness, but the raising of Ireland to its full participation in the public life and prosperity of the British Empire.”²

After the Fenians had tried to raise trouble in England in February 1867, Manning expresses in his Saint Patrick's Pastoral his sympathy for Ireland and its “faithful, noble and martyred people” and his confidence that the accumulation of evils under which it is suffering will be removed, provided violence does not hinder “the gradual and onward movement of England and Ireland to equality.”³

Manning sent this pastoral letter to Disraeli and Gladstone, that they might know what the Catholic Church said about Fenianism and his anxiety on the subject – an anxiety that “nothing but a large and adequate policy for Ireland” could lessen.⁴

In an unpublished document he meant to attach to a later pastoral letter, Manning gives vent to his emotion after the Clerkenwell explosion which, in December 1867, killed “4 or 5 poor and harmless working people and wounded above thirty more, of whom half were little children.”⁵

These strong words were never heard by his flock, but less than three months later, the Archbishop of Westminster publicly expressed his heart-felt sympathy with the Irish in an open letter to Earl Grey which reads like the draft of the Irish program that Gladstone was to implement during his first premiership. To win over the Irish and save the Union, Manning proposes nothing less than to grant them religious equality and an equitable land system.⁷

“My mission is to pacify Ireland” Gladstone is supposed to have said on hearing of his appointment as Prime Minister in December 1868. He immediately set about felling the “Upas tree” of protestant ascendancy; in 1869 the Irish Church was disestablished, despite the opposition of the House of Lords, and the Irish Land Act was passed in the following year. Wary not to change the law of contract which would have affected Scotland and Wales, Gladstone preferred a recognition of customary land relationships, a solution which fell far short of the Irish bishops' suggestions. On March 12, 1873 the University Bill – which proposed money to a University of Dublin amalgamating the existing colleges, on condition that it be religiously neutral – was defeated after Cardinal Cullen, opposed to mixed education, denounced it in a pastoral letter. Manning had advised his Irish counterpart “to get rid of the subject by accepting it”⁸

Though no longer so intimate with Gladstone as in his Anglican days, the Archbishop of Westminster had been working behind the scenes to ease the relations between the Irish hierarchy and the government (Leslie, Manning 203), a government which had first made sure that Manning had the full confidence of the Vatican. In a letter to Lord Clarendon, Cardinal Antonelli had said “how much impressed he had been by the archbishop's knowledge, opinions, sentiments, views and arguments and how entirely he subscribed to them” (Leslie, Manning 199). Not to leave anything to chance, Manning had encouraged one of his Oblates, Herbert Vaughan, to purchase the Tablet, which had become the chief difficulty of uniting the English and Irish bishops, in order to consolidate the union of the two hierarchies in front of Fenianism.

Gladstone's measures had sought to encourage constitutionalism as against Fenianism and according to his friend, they had apparently succeeded: separatism, Manning wrote, had lost ground, there was “a revived confidence in Parliament” and that was due “to your two chief Irish measures” (Leslie, Manning 206). But by then Fenianism had already ceased to be a danger; instead, the Home Government Association, established in 1870 by Isaac Butt to secure by constitutional means an Irish Parliament in Dublin for internal affairs, had been making rapid strides. Cardinal Cullen distrusted this movement which was composed of “professors of Trinity College and Orangemen … Their object appears to be to put out the present Ministry and get Disraëli into power” (Leslie, Manning 206). More politically minded, Manning was very tolerant about Home Rule; he compared it with vaccination to smallpox, adding “it has divided the Irishmen and reclaimed many Fenians” (Leslie, Manning 207). That he was partial to local government in Ireland is clear from the “Letter to the Archbishop of Armagh” he published in August 1873; he thought this constitutional movement could secure union:

Act II: The Land League

MANNING'S OPTIMISM was to be short-lived. Five years later, the situation had changed for the worse, and it became increasingly difficult for the archbishop to offer a united front with his counterpart in Dublin both versus the nationalists – be they Fenians or Home Rulers – and the Vatican. There was a new archbishop in Dublin, a new Pope in Rome and a quasi-revolutionary situation in Ireland. In Dublin, Edward McCabe had succeeded to Paul Cullen; in Rome, Leo XIII, who had replaced Pius IX, seemed more attentive to the “rich and idle” English Catholics who were surrounding him than to his own bishops; he was also anxious for good relationships with governments, and particularly the protestant government of England, a craving Manning did not share, but which others were ready to satisfy. In Ireland where distress was spreading as a consequence of a series of bad harvests, the number of evictions had dramatically increased. Michael Davitt, a convicted Fenian on ticket of leave, was organizing the resistance of the tenants, first in Connaught, then all over Ireland, and stressing the relevance of the land question to nationalism. In October 1879 he created the Land League, a movement which the majority of the Irish supported as it aimed at protecting the farmers; despite some of its methods, the Church was wary of disapproving a movement with such clear populist appeal, for fear of losing its leadership.

The president of the Land League was a protestant, Charles Stuart Parnell, a promising young MP soon to become a key figure in Isaac Butt's Irish party and in Ireland as a whole. Sympathetic or hostile to the League, the bishops were, to a man, “opposed to the intervention of Roman authorities that would do irreparable damage to ecclesiastical authority and their restraining influence” (Moody 339). Yet non-payment of rents and boycott were soon to evolve into agrarian crime and land war.

When Gladstone became PM in April 1880 the Land League was still in its infancy, there was suffering and confusion in Ireland, but not yet systematized disorder. After the rejection by the Lords of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, the growing tension made it clear that distress would have to be met by remedial legislation to balance the demand for coercion which by the autumn of 1880 was becoming hard to resist: the Land Bill would be introduced immediately after the Protection of Person and Property Act had been passed. Manning, now a cardinal, had been happy to see Gladstone back into power, though his pamphlets on Vaticanism had put an end, for the time being, to their friendly intercourse. To Lord Childers he wrote, “I am very Irish in my sympathies and I hope for some measure which will be felt in the homes of the poor” (Leslie, Manning 382). The head of the RC Church in England had “a million of people, priests and faithful, of Irish blood, faith and civilization alienated from English laws and legislature”¹⁰

Manning's long-time friend and protégé, Herbert Vaughan, now bishop of Salford, was the scion of an aristocratic family and he shared the prejudices of his class. For the first time their difference of opinion came into the open and it was all the more annoying as Vaughan was to spend eighteen months in Rome (January 1880 to June 1881) to represent the English hierarchy in their case against the religious orders. Whereas in December 1880 he had written to Manning: “while preserving the rights of the landlords to compensations and condemning crime, a generous solution should be found to the Irish problem,” a few days later he acknowledged that he did not want “to risk the mission of the Catholic Church to the English nation for the Irish” (Leslie, Manning 382). Worse, while telling the cardinal he was sure he “would handle the problem skilfully” – which of course Manning was trying to, informing cardinal Simeoni, Prefect of Propaganda, of the situation in Ireland, and commending Gladstone's Land Bill to the Irish Bishops – Vaughan was also discussing Ireland with Simeoni, and via Lady Herbert whose views he had espoused, offering his help to establish “without delay” diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the English government, something he knew the cardinal was strongly averse to. The Pope, he writes to Lady Herbert is “disposed to meet the wishes of the English Government wherever he can, not only in the nomination of such bishops as shall be likely to work harmoniously with the civil authorities, but in the use of his influence in Ireland and elsewhere (Leslie, Letters 325). Not only was he acting against Manning's wishes – and he did pursue the subject of diplomatic relations very actively with Lady Herbert – he was also informing the Vatican against the Irish bishops who, like Mgr Croke, the Archbishop of Cashel, supported the nationalists: “I had your note on Abp of Cashel read to the pope. Of course everyone here thoroughly disapproves of his conduct and he will receive a reprimand if he does not apologise. But with the Irish people gone mad, the Bishops become as difficult to govern as the people themselves” (Leslie, Letters 331–32). In consequence of English complaints, Archbishop Croke was sent for by the Pope “ad audiendum verbum.” Vaughan's influence at the Vatican was all the greater as the cardinal's health prevented him for three years from visiting Rome at this critical moment and, though Manning encouraged the Irish bishops to go and explain the situation to Leo XIII, the Pope was surrounded by English Catholics – Sir George Bowyer, Lord Robert Montague, Dr Brady, etc. – who all too easily convinced him that the Land Leaguers were “enemies of religion.”

The difference of appreciation of the situation in Ireland between the cardinal and his bishop is obvious when we compare their respective papers. At the beginning of 1881 Vaughan's paper was about to launch “a crusade against the revolution and the secret societies”:

Act III: Social Order and Irish Autonomy

MANNING HAD SUPPORTED Gladstone's policy because he thought it was the best for Ireland, not to curry favor with the Prime Minister with whom he was, for the moment, no longer on “writing terms.” In December 1881 it was Newman, recently made a cardinal by Leo XIII, that Gladstone contacted. After the arrest of Parnell in October, the situation in Ireland had deteriorated, agrarian crime had soared, and a few parish priests were delivering fiery sermons. “To abate the peril” Gladstone wanted the Pope – who he regarded, if apprised of the facts, as “responsible for the conduct of these priests” – to bring them “to fulfil the elementary duties of citizenship” (Gladstone 10: 179–80). The letter required no answer, but Newman who was great friends with the Duke of Norfolk, and some of the “rich and idle” Catholic landlords hovering around the Pope, must have acted on it: in February 1882 the Irish bishops condemned agrarian crime and McCabe was made a cardinal in the following month.

England as well as Rome seem to have been interested in establishing diplomatic relations. Leo XIII had several times taken the Government's advice and been praised at Westminster for his action on the Irish bishops. George Errington, an independent Roman Catholic gentleman and a friend of Lord Granville's, volunteered his services between 1881 and 1885 to no great avail. As to Cardinal Manning, he wanted no third party between Rome and the episcopate: his attitude is best summed up in his autobiographical notes: let the Holy See which names it, trust it, consult it and control it by letter or by calling it to Rome”¹²

Manning's loss of influence to the Upper Ten Thousand was partly due to his failing health which kept him away from Rome, but mostly to his siding with his Irish brethren and his early choice of Home Rule for Ireland. In Rome and in England the cause of Home Rule was identified with Charles Parnell and Charles Parnell was identified with terrorism and crime. The Phoenix Park murders occurring just after his release from Kilmainham Jail did not help. Yet, after the “Kilmainham Treaty,” the new departure of May 1882 is nothing if not constitutionalist. For two years Parnell fashioned his hold on the Irish National League, turning it into an electoral machine for the Irish party in anticipation of the next general election; he also consolidated his relations with the Irish Church, creating all priests ex officio delegates to all conventions for the election of parliamentary candidates out of a desire to have a strong conservative nationalist influence on his side against possible radical opposition. To Davitt he explained, “you know the clergy are very useful against extremists like yourself when we are away in London” (Davitt 317). As early as 1882 Gladstone was ready to bestow the widest measure of self-government compatible with the maintenance of the Empire and with the security of life and property in Ireland herself. But whereas Parnell was backed by his party and by Ireland, the opinion in England – even within the liberal party – was not ripe. Gladstone suggested to James Knowles of the Fortnightly Review a series of articles on Ireland, and a committee was created in Parliament for the purpose of assisting to create a well-informed public opinion in all that related to Irish reforms.

Not surprisingly, the English Catholics – mostly Tories and members of the landowning class – were hostile to Home Rule. Yet Gladstone had provided them with an opportunity for escape, the Land Purchase Bill – “a daring attempt to carry to the utmost our service to the men who we knew to be as a class the bitterest and most implacable of our political adversaries” (Matthews 44). Was Home Rule a source of danger, as they thought, or a source of strength as Gladstone asserted? (Daily Chronicle 24, 4 1886). At least it was a better future than rural violence and bombing – there were many terrorist attempts in England between 1883 and 1885 – and a Chamber in Dublin for Irish affairs would leave the House of Commons ample time to discuss what they considered to be the really important subjects. The reason of their hostility may have been the proposed withdrawal of the Irish MPs from the Imperial Parliament, something Manning also resented, speaking in private of “bad Home Rule at the cost of a breach in the Empire” (Leslie, Manning 407). Vaughan does not explain his opposition to Gladstone's bill but he shows little confidence either in the Tories' Irish policy:

Before the General Election Gladstone had declared that if the vast majority of those elected for Ireland should be for Home Rule, the satisfactory settlement of that subject would become the first duty of Parliament. In November 1885, eighty-five Home Rulers were returned in Ireland, and though Parnell had played the Conservatives against the Liberals, by the end of the year, Gladstone was committed to Parnell and Parnell to the Liberals. When Gladstone formed his third ministry in January 1886 Home Rule was top of the agenda. The bill – “the boldest of all possible attempts to save Ireland for constitutionalism and from Fenianism” (Matthew 506) – was introduced in April; two months later it was defeated in the House of Commons. In July the whole country rejected Home Rule: the General Election was a landslide victory for the Conservatives and the Unionists. Manning did write “I do not interpret this election as a refusal to Ireland but as a rejection of the mutilation of the Imperial Parliament” (Leslie, Manning 417). But Ireland which had expected a speedy settlement of its difficulties would not be taken in by such subtleties.

Act IV: Rome's Intervention

IN MARCH, Walsh had written to Manning, “I have no doubt that if some reasonable settlement be not made this time the people will take the Land Question into their own hands and solve it by a general refusal to pay rent” (Leslie, Manning 416). In October they did. When the new Parliament rejected Parnell's Tenants' Relief Bill and evictions increased, there was a spontaneous revival of the land movement, encouraged by Dillon and O'Brien, while Parnell kept aloof. So long as it deliberately avoided the criminal aspects of the land war of 1880–82, the Irish hierarchy were unanimous in supporting the Plan of Campaign. But things soured rapidly: the landowners reacted so violently to the rent strike that Mgr Croke, unable to keep calm in front of the distressing scenes occurring in Kerry, no longer “measured his words” and, but for the friendly relations between Lord Cross and Manning – they were both serving on the Royal Commission for Education – he might have been jailed. As it was, the Home Secretary only asked for some “public repudiation either at home or abroad of his doctrines” (Leslie, Manning 418) and the archbishop of Westminster, who had to calm things down with the Government, was left with the difficult task of defending in Rome the Irish bishops – “whose position, he said, is extremely difficult” – and the still more delicate job of encouraging the bishops of Ireland “to vindicate the law of God against English and Irish wrong-doers” (Leslie, Manning 419). The National League was not inactive either; to counter the influence of the “mischief-makers” who, in Rome, were trying to have the movement condemned lest the Church be identified with the revolution, it published on June 7th in Dublin “l'Irlanda nella sua condizione attuale,” the translation into Italian of a speech by Mr. Harrington, Secretary of the League, with an introduction by Mgr Walsh voicing the support of the Irish Church to a constitutional movement.

The fight for Home Rule which had begun as a fight for an Irish cause was fast becoming for democrats a fight against the laws that had once stood between the English workman and his liberty and self-respect, all the more so as Cardinal Manning supported the cause of labor in England as well as in America. On April 11, 1887 English and Irish workmen demonstrated together against the Crimes Act. One week later, the Times, possibly sensing danger, decided to finish off Parnell with the publication of its trump card, the facsimile of a letter supposedly written by him condoning the Phoenix Park murders. Parnell ignored the attack.

When, at the end of May, Leo XIII decided to send Mgr Persico, Archbishop of Damietta, to investigate the situation in Ireland, it seemed a foregone conclusion that his report would be unfavorable to the Irish movement. The Times of June 27th, whether misinformed or deliberately misinforming, announced that the Persico Mission had been revoked “at the instance (sic), apparently, of cardinal Manning and archbishop Walsh” adding “the active promoters of separatist intrigues are hardly the persons who should have a determining voice in the councils of the Church.” A piece of news and a statement the paper had to recant after Manning's flat denial but the accusation stuck to the cardinal.

After six months in Ireland Mgr Persico came to the conclusion that the Pope should trust the episcopate: “whatever is deemed necessary or useful for Ireland must be done with and through the bishops” he wrote to Manning, adding “Your Eminence understands the Irish Question thoroughly; I wish others in Rome understood it as Your Eminence does. As far as I am concerned, I shall not fail to make a proper exposé of things”¹⁶

Act V: The Last Act of the Tragedy

TO PROVE THE LINKS between Parnellism and crime, the Times had not been too concerned about the means; after Richard Piggott's full confession and Madrid suicide, the hitherto respectable newspaper was thoroughly humiliated, as was the Salisbury Government which had set up a Special Commission to examine the nature of the Land League and the involvement within it of the Irish Parliamentary party. Parnell's vindication was complete; when he appeared in the Commons on March 1, 1889, he was cheered by the Opposition benches. Though his status as leader had recently faded, Parnell reached overnight an almost mythical stature. Chafing under the Balfour policy, Ireland could expect Home Rule to be implemented when Gladstone and the Liberals won the next election. On December 18th Parnell was received at Hawarden to discuss the future; in the view of both parties at the time the meeting was “an unqualified success.” One week later, William O'Shea, who had been expecting for two months Cardinal Manning's answer about the divorce he planned on grounds of adultery, decided to take action, citing Parnell as co-respondent.

If in England the press was immediately critical, in Ireland trust in Parnell was an article of faith: for the man in the street, this could only be another trick of the English. Others thought that whether the allegations of adultery were true or not, they must stand by Parnell at all costs. The party remained loyal, expressing confidence in “the wisdom, honour and integrity of our great leader,” a confidence which was reinforced by the condemnation of the Times for libel in February 1890.

Since Parnell had always pretended that everything would turn out all right in the end, the revelations of the divorce proceedings and the ensuing judgment given on November 17th – adultery and no connivance – created shock and confusion in Irish nationalist circles, though their immediate instinct was to cover it up and present an outer “picture of unity” (Kee 556). The next day Gladstone expressed his surprise at what he called “the apparent facility with which the RC bishops and clergy appear to take the continued leadership” (Morley 3: 430). The Catholic Church which wanted the party to act first, remained silent even though it was frantically busy behind the scenes. Manning refused to speak but, confidently anticipating Parnell's resignation, he wrote to a member of the Irish party “let three or five of you be elected as a permanent direction” and he mentioned the names of Sexton, Healy, McCarthy, Dillon, and O'Brien, adding “If we keep morally right no harm will come to Ireland” (Leslie, Manning 436). He wrote twice on the same day to Walsh, and told Gladstone in a letter marked “private”: “Mr Parnell cannot be upheld as leader. No political expediency can outweigh the moral sense.” In the same letter he informed him that Croke was in favor of Parnell's retirement – the archbishop had thrown a bust of Parnell out of his hall, and said that he had flung him away from him for ever – and that Walsh had still to agree. He added “But it rests more with you than with any other man” (Leslie, Manning 437). Gladstone who had been told by Stead: “no power on earth will induce them [the Nonconformists] to follow that man to the poll, or you either, if you are arm in arm with him” (Kee 559) could only warn Parnell that the Liberals would lose the election if he did not resign.

At the usual eve of session meeting in London on November 25th, the Irish members, unaware of Gladstone's position, confirmed Parnell as chairman; when they knew of it, they required a new meeting which was eventually postponed until December 1st. Meanwhile, Parnell issued his manifesto “To the People of Ireland” denouncing what he called Gladstone's right of veto on the party's choice of leadership: it was in the papers on November 29th. That same day Manning urged Walsh with whom he had been in daily communication to speak out:

The English Catholics – the Old Catholics – who felt bound “to take a line of opposition to the revolution” while insisting at the same time on a “legislation of classes and privileges and private interests” were in fact the forerunners of revolution.¹⁹

As to the mission of the Catholic Church to the English nation – the mission they did not want to compromise for the Irish – it is precisely Manning's “extreme and mistaken views that achieved the best results. If the English Catholics – the Upper Ten Thousand – were hostile to Home Rule, the poor were very active in the Home Rule Movement in the industrial towns of England and Scotland and their leader was Manning, the head of the Catholic Church, who had always been with them, and particularly in their struggle with drink. His crusade against intemperance, the “national vice,” had brought him into contact with other denominations, giving a different image of the papists, and gradually winning for them the respect and confidence of the English people as they mixed with them in other works of charity where the Catholics had hitherto been conspicuously absent.

In forty years as a Catholic he had also come to realize that the future of the Church in England was not with any party but depended largely on the attitude it assumed towards the working classes and he encouraged his successor to go into the midst of people as he had done: