In 1845, the parliament of Great Britain and Ireland passed an act establishing the three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland – Belfast, Galway, and Cork – with the stipulation that any ‘religious’ instruction carried out in the colleges would have to be sponsored by voluntary contributions, not by the state. These were not the first British experiments in secular higher education; as any graduate or employee of University College London (U.C.L.) knows, the institution presided over by the spirit (and cadaver) of Jeremy Bentham was the United Kingdom’s original ‘Godless college’.Footnote 1 Yet, in the parliamentary debates of 1845, as many M.P.s cited similarities between the proposed colleges in Ireland and U.C.L. as reasons to reject the proposal, as heralded the similarities.Footnote 2 In any case, parliament’s role had only been to charter London University as an examining body – the colleges that affiliated with it could offer as much or as little ‘religious’ education as they chose – so its relevance as a frame of reference for the Irish colleges scheme was questionable (and, indeed, called into question).Footnote 3 Most importantly, as Catherine Hall reminds us, Ireland was, in the eyes of most M.P.s, ‘not England’.Footnote 4
Prior to 1845, parliament’s approach to providing spiritual guidance in state-run institutions in Ireland, such as schools and prisons, is best characterised as ‘concurrent endowment’ – assuring that in any setting where there was a mix of individuals representing different denominational backgrounds, religious specialists from each of the concerned denominations would be appointed to work in the institution. For example, from 1826 on, the Prisons (Ireland) Act required that Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican chaplains serve their respective portions of the prison population in each gaol that housed any of their co-denominationalists.Footnote 5 Or, for another example, the national schools that were created by act of parliament from 1831 had to set aside time for ‘religious education’, and the theory was that each student would be taught by someone of their own denominational background for this part of their elementary education. But with the Queen’s Colleges (Ireland) Act, 1845, parliament mandated that denominational interests themselves would have to foot the bill if they wanted their young men to study theology or any other ‘religious’ subject – history and moral philosophy included – at university level.Footnote 6
Nevertheless, this article argues that the Irish colleges bill gained assent from the liberal wing of parliamentary opinion precisely because it appeared, paradoxically, to represent the logic of concurrent endowment. That is, liberals promoted the bill as an embodiment of the principle of equal state support for each denominational interest, not as an experiment in church–state separation. This article considers how they could see and represent secular university-level education as an encouragement to each denomination to police its own boundaries and shore up its own version of orthodoxy.
Previous discussions of the ‘university question’ in nineteenth-century Ireland have overestimated the eagerness of intellectuals and politicians to espouse the principle of church–state separation in educational matters as of 1845. For example, T. W. Moody concluded in an overview that, ‘on the whole’, Westminster ‘policy on the university question since 1845 had endeavoured to follow the theory that the state ought not to endow denominational teaching for the laity’.Footnote 7 As Moody explains, the ‘university question’ came, by the end of the nineteenth century, to refer to the issue of how to meet Catholic nationalists’ demands both for more university-level instruction in Ireland in general and for at least one college as prestigious and palatable to Catholics as Trinity College was to Irish Anglicans. However, in 1845, attempts to address the shortage of ‘academical education’ available to the Catholic majority in Ireland were in their infancy. The simplest indication that policymakers had not yet settled on any single strategy for manifesting ‘religious’ impartiality is the fact that the Irish colleges bill passed as one leg of a reform package that also included a trebling of the annual grant afforded by parliament to Maynooth College, i.e., earmarked for the training of priests. If, as Susan Parkes (following Moody’s lead) has put it, part of the reasoning behind the Irish colleges bill of 1845 was the ‘increasingly popular principle that the state should not endow any religion’, it is difficult to see how and for whom this principle would have been decisive in the 1840s.Footnote 8
In fact, this article examines some of the leading liberal ideologues of the 1840s and finds that their advocacy for the Irish colleges bill diverged, quite consciously, from whatever intellectual affinity they professed for ‘voluntaryism’: the view that the state should extract itself from all commitments to endow or support any particular church. In other words, if the belief that the state should require self-described ‘religious’ entities to rely exclusively on voluntary financial contributions had motivated the likes of Lord John Russell, Thomas Babington Macaulay or Charles Buller, Jr., to favour the Irish colleges bill, then they would have been particularly likely to highlight the bill’s congruence with voluntaryism in their attempts to influence others. But they did no such thing. Instead, the liberal supporters of the Peel government’s plan in 1845 not only accepted but also reinforced a colonialism-inflected definition of state ‘neutrality’, signifying the intent to make parliament a kind of ‘parallel patron’ of several ‘religious’ constituencies all at once.Footnote 9 (Clearly, Tories who spoke out against the ‘Godless colleges’ can only have objected less to the practice of state endowment for ‘religious’ teaching; they, after all, were the ones who cast themselves as guardians of the established church and of the Tory tradition of safeguarding that church’s entitlement to instruct not just its flock but the populace as a whole.)
As of 1845, few Whig, Radical, or liberal Tory policymakers objected in principle to state support for denominationally-inscribed institutions in Ireland or elsewhere in the empire. The wider empire is significant because, as we shall see, liberals’ habits of thinking across an entire ‘imperial social formation’ informed the ideology behind their claims on behalf of Peel’s proposed Irish reforms.Footnote 10 Indeed, the whole frame of the debate on the ‘Godless colleges’ can only have nurtured the expectation that the state’s duties included some bolstering of ‘religions’.
I
Context goes a long way toward explaining how the impetus behind secular higher education in Ireland originated with Robert Peel’s Tory ministry. The notoriously ‘Orange’ Peel government began to conciliate Irish Catholics in the mid-1840s in an effort to siphon support away from the repeal movement.Footnote 11 The year 1843 had seen Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings asking for immediate repeal of the 1800 Act of Union. These demonstrations culminated in O’Connell’s arrest after a battle of wills with Peel over a planned million-person meeting at Clontarf scheduled for 8 October. Peel sent a sizeable military contingent across the Irish Sea to enforce a last-minute suppression of the meeting; O’Connell was arrested and imprisoned on charges of sedition despite having agreed to call off the meeting.Footnote 12 A trial that many liberals and Whigs perceived as unfair only increased their sympathy for O’Connell in early 1844.Footnote 13 In these circumstances, Peel felt he had little choice but to admit, ‘I know not what remedy there can be for such an evil as this but the detaching from the ranks of Repeal … a considerable portion of the respectable and influential Roman Catholic population’.Footnote 14 For Peel, then, the creation of a system of higher education for Irish laymen was part of a programme of ‘liberal concession’Footnote 15 aimed at ‘disuniting, by the fair legitimate means of a just, kind and conciliatory policy, the Roman Catholic body and thus breaking up a sullen and formidable confederacy against the British connexion’.Footnote 16 The aim for the Tory government, in other words, was to appear gracious and generous.Footnote 17
When the Whigs in parliament had opportunities to criticise Peel’s measures, they simply questioned whether Peel’s government would come across as generous enough. In debate on the second reading of the colleges bill, the opposition leader Lord John Russell asked Peel and his home secretary, Sir James Graham, why they had not taken every precaution to meet the demands of the four Irish Catholic archbishops.Footnote 18 Russell knew that a delegation consisting of the four prelates had presented Lord Heytesbury, the lord lieutenant, with a memorial asking for alterations in the bill after its first reading on 9 May 1845. The archbishops wanted guarantees that a sizeable percentage of the new professorships created would go to Catholics, and they wanted governing boards for the colleges to include some designated positions for bishops.Footnote 19 The prelates might have been surprised to find Russell sympathising with these pleas; he was known for his antipathy to Catholic doctrine and for his willingness to use his anti-Catholic credentials to curry favour with the Dissenter (and accordingly voluntaryist) component of the Whigs’ electoral base.Footnote 20 But Russell was simply appealing to the same standard of liberality in matters of religious concession that had become all but instinctive for Whigs by the 1830s and 1840s.
The remainder of this article highlights how the idea that secular education should appease multiple denominational leaderships all at once percolated throughout the careers of the Catholic Whig M.P. for Waterford Thomas Wyse, the liberal Radical M.P. Charles Buller, and the Whig imperialist par excellence T. B. Macaulay. The three case studies have been chosen as representative of key strands of liberal parliamentary and extraparliamentary opinion in the formative years of what became the British Liberal Party constituency. Wyse was known as a champion of public education; no discussion of the 1845 Irish colleges bill would be complete without him. He was twice appointed to head commissions of inquiry into the state of Irish education in the 1830s. He staunchly advocated ‘mixed education’, i.e., education in which pupils of different denominational backgrounds learned together; indeed, he collaborated with William Smith O’Brien, his Protestant parliamentary counterpart from Waterford, to lead a local voluntary society aimed at having a ‘provincial college’ created for Munster to which Catholics and Protestants were to have equal access. Buller, perhaps thanks to having grown up with Thomas Carlyle as his tutor, was known for being (in both senses of the word) religiously irreverent.Footnote 21 The scion of an imperial family – the elder Charles Buller had been an East India Company functionary before returning to England to enter parliament as a cautious Whig – Buller’s political friendships ranged from John Stuart Mill to Robert Peel to Daniel O’Connell, but he was known to the end of his short life as a philosophical radical like the young Mill. As of the early 1840s, he had just come back from Canada where, as a contributor to the celebrated ‘Durham report’, he thought he had struck upon a strategy for colonial reform – ‘responsible government’ – that could quietly teach old foes such as the English and French settlers in the St Lawrence River region to reconcile their differences. Increasingly, he turned his attention to reforms that he hoped might settle old antagonisms in Ireland, and he began writing about them in the Edinburgh Review. On paper, he liked ‘voluntaryism’ – he certainly would have heard plenty of early ‘Grit’ ideologues like William Lyon Mackenzie touting its virtues during his stay in North AmericaFootnote 22 – but, as we will see, his route to supporting the godlessness of the Irish colleges ran along a strikingly different track. Finally, to round out our sketch of the liberal imperial mindset, we turn to Macaulay. Macaulay wrote history for a rising middle class and used his seat in parliament to counsel the nation on how to draw upon that history to run an empire. Macaulay has attracted the most historiographical interest, and for good reason: as Ted Koditschek has recently argued, he put into writing the kind of history-as-progress narrative that many middle-class Britons carried around in their heads and that fired their imaginations regarding the possible good to come of imperial commitment.Footnote 23
Of course, it was precisely during the 1830s and 1840s that the middle classes exerted an unprecedentedly strong influence in British politics; not coincidentally, domestic and imperial policy trended in a liberal direction between the reform act of 1832 and the succession of laissez-faire economic reforms that exacerbated the Irish Famine in the 1840s.Footnote 24 In this context, ‘liberal’ refers, in a general way, to a habitual suspicion of over-governance and, more specifically, to commitments to ‘the values of equal human dignity, freedom, the rule of law, and accountable, representative government’, as Jennifer Pitts has neatly outlined it.Footnote 25 After the 1832 reform act enlisted the middle classes as part of the British political nation, their champions – Macaulay was an outspoken one – in the collision over aristocratic privilege worked hard at keeping the middle-class allegiances that they had just garnered. In a short span of years, they led pushes to abolish slavery in the empire (1833); to eliminate the East India Company’s monopoly on the carriage trade east of the Cape of Good Hope (1833); to build national schools in Ireland (first established in 1831; numbering 789 by December 1833 and 3,367 by the end of 1846);Footnote 26 to prioritise English-language instruction in government-funded schools in India;Footnote 27 to reform the poor laws in England, Scotland and Ireland in ways that would subject more of their populations to raw market forces (1834, 1838); and to force, in the First Opium War (1836–7), the Chinese emperor to grant British traders special access rights in the name of ‘free trade’.Footnote 28 Tellingly, during these years, Macaulay received appointment as a special ‘law member’ of the governing council of India; his charge was the classically liberal one of streamlining Indian criminal law into a single code to apply throughout British Indian territory.Footnote 29 As historians have long pointed out, these interventions, aimed at ‘modernising’ people – in accordance with a particularly British vision of the ‘modern’ – in the colonies, around the globe and in the metropole, proved especially popular with a Protestant evangelical middle class that increasingly found causes in common with utilitarian reformers like the young J. S. Mill, Edwin Chadwick, and, indeed, the young Macaulay.Footnote 30 Yet in the case of the Irish colleges in 1845, Macaulay, Wyse, and Buller all thought it important to keep the evangelical (and even perhaps the ‘modernising’) impulse at bay.
Indeed, the secularism that Macaulay, who grew up in an evangelical Anglican household, carried around in his head has provoked several historians’ curiosity. This article concludes that its efflorescence in the spring of the Maynooth and the Irish colleges bill debates gives us the best keys to understanding that secularism’s precise nature. In turn, the article argues, in conjunction with several of Macaulay’s recent interpreters, that the historical consciousness that informed his politics and his secularism makes him an especially valuable touchstone for his generation’s brand of imperial liberalism.
II
There may never have been an Irish colleges bill without the single-issue reform efforts of Thomas Wyse.Footnote 31 Like most of the first cohort of Irish Catholics elected to parliament after 1829, Wyse had been among the first generation of Catholic graduates of Trinity College, the Irish parliament’s Catholic Relief Act of 1793 having opened up Trinity degrees to Catholic and Presbyterian students who could afford to attend.Footnote 32 From the time of his election as an M.P. for Waterford city, which he served alongside the Protestant and future Young Ireland rebellion leader William Smith O’Brien, Wyse touted the benefits of ‘mixed’ education for Catholics and Protestants. In 1831, he embraced the opportunity to support the national schools programme designed by Edward Stanley. He chaired the first parliamentary select committee that examined the national schools’ effectiveness as a primary education programme in 1835. In 1838, he and Smith O’Brien led a petition drive asking for the creation of a college in Munster. His report as chairperson, again of a select committee on education in Ireland, in the 1837–8 parliamentary session argued, with justification, that what the national schools were doing at primary level would soon create a demand for more higher-education outlets in Ireland. All of this activity earned him the nickname ‘M.P. for education’, and Peel called attention to his service to that cause during the floor debates on the Irish colleges bill in 1845.Footnote 33
Throughout 1844, the year after the ‘repeal year’ campaign of monster meetings that ended in O’Connell’s arrest, Wyse did his best to haunt his parliamentary colleagues with the memory of their prior bad grace. He reminded them, in the debate on the ‘State of Ireland’ instigated by Lord John Russell at the 1844 session’s outset, that ‘the delay in granting the Emancipation Act laid in Ireland the foundation of the Repeal Agitation. … You brought matters to the verge of civil war by inconsiderate rejection; you avoided it by abrupt concession.’ The lesson was clear: ‘By these habits, you ensure a continuation of disturbance.’Footnote 34 Wyse was particularly peeved that the jury selected (in Dublin!) to try O’Connell and his co-defendants had not included even one Catholic.Footnote 35 This was no way to convince his countrymen of the virtues of British justice, he thought, and he continued to chafe at the notion that ‘a great Catholic, the first of that powerful community, was tried and convicted, by a Jury from which Catholics, some say, were studiously excluded’ right through to the end of the session in August. It would, he said, make him ‘unworthy of … his bounden duty as a representative of an Irish constituency … if he had not protested, and did not continue to protest, in every possible way, against such a wrong. … By such a trial,’ he warned, ‘no law could have been vindicated, no seditious feeling could have been repressed, no confidence imprinted – nothing, in fine, but a deep and sullen indignation generated.’Footnote 36
Wyse couched his remarks on higher education in Ireland in 1844 within this frame of Catholic exasperation with the Union. When, toward the close of the session, he reminded the Commons of Peel’s promise to bring forth bills increasing the availability of ‘academical’ education in Ireland, he led with the ‘importance of due provision being made for the University Education of Her Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects in Ireland, especially of such as are intended for the priesthood’. He reiterated this goal of a well-trained priesthood before the speech ended, as well, saying, ‘Having declared the propriety of educating the people, it follow[s] that Parliament should be most careful to educate the educators, most careful, above all, of the religious education of the educators.’Footnote 37
Although it might seem that Wyse limited his aspirations at this point to what ultimately came to fruition a year later in the Maynooth bill, the inverse was true: he made other higher education opportunities into a natural offshoot of the mission of educating priests. As he put it:
steps should be taken by an enlargement and improvements of existing arrangements, either by opening the emoluments and honours to students of the University of Dublin to Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and raising the College of Maynooth to the dignity of a theological faculty of the said University or by founding or maintaining a Roman Catholic University, with equal rank, endowments, and privileges with those of the University of Dublin, or by some other means, adequately to supply the deficiencies now complained of, and, as far as may be, effectually provide for the future moral and intellectual wants of the Roman Catholic inhabitants; thus promoting the advancement and happiness, not of Roman Catholics only, but of all classes and persuasions of the Irish people.Footnote 38
With the emphasis he thus placed on creating a theology faculty for Catholics that would have parity in prestige with Trinity College, Wyse not only quietly concurred in the liberal Whigs’ assessment of how to achieve Irish ‘civilisational’ uplift (discussed further below), he also anticipated the agenda to which the Irish Catholic clerisy adhered for the next sixty years on the Irish ‘university question’. He clearly had his finger on the pulse of Catholic nationalism, yet, in contrast to many of Ireland’s Catholic prelates, Wyse was the Irish nineteenth century’s most persistent proponent of ‘mixed’ (multi-denominational) schools, i.e., of the feature of the ‘godless colleges’ (and, before them, the national schools) that set the most ultramontane clergymen and Daniel O’Connell against them.Footnote 39
The paradox that Wyse sought both to advance Catholic nationalism and renounce sectarianism in the same stroke calls out for resolution. On the one hand, his promotion of avowedly Catholic aims makes it hard to see Wyse as an obvious secularist; and it is not as though the claim to speak specifically in the Catholic interest disappeared from Wyse’s repertoire. When the Irish colleges bill came up for debate in May 1845, he endorsed it with explicit commentary on how, contrary to appearances, it afforded opportunities for ‘religious instruction’. Wyse ‘considered it desirable that theological chairs … in connexion with the different religious communities, should be established in the new Colleges’, and it seemed only sensible to him that the devotees ‘of any religion’ would spend the ‘pittance’ needed to pay ‘for the endowment of a single chair’ in their particular brand of theology at each of the new colleges. ‘He would’, he said, then ‘combine with the chair of religion those of metaphysics, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of history. … He thought, also, that the persons appointed to the religious chairs should be approved by the bishop of the diocese, and that such steps should be taken as would afford the fullest guarantee that the distinctive opinions of every religious persuasion would be maintained, and protection afforded against any attempts at proselytism.’ On the other hand, though, and this was the key to Wyse’s non-sectarian appeal, this precise balance of promiscuous mixing alongside ‘religious’ insularity was the guarantee that ‘from the constant communion which would exist among the pupils, an opportunity would be afforded them of comparing their several opinions, and of removing any undue exaggeration or prejudice’.Footnote 40 Apparently, interaction between youngsters who possessed wild, ill-regulated, ‘opinions’ would generate a less salubrious commerce than one among relatively orthodox practitioners of each respective faith.
Wyse’s conviction that the voluntaryist formula implied in the colleges bill offered guarantees of integrity to each denomination only grew stronger. On 2 June, Wyse refuted the charge that what was being proposed was a ‘gigantic scheme of Godless education’, saying, ‘The Government had not excluded; on the contrary, they had permitted, nay more, they had invited (by allowing the College rooms and the College hours to be applied to the purpose) the communication of religious instruction in these Colleges.’Footnote 41 By the time he wrote, in August 1845, to the regional pressure group with whom he had been collaborating since 1838 on getting a college established at Cork, he was able to report on the passage of the Queen’s Colleges (Ireland) Act. At this stage, he reiterated and refined the point: ‘The Act does not exclude, the Act simply does not endow but at the same time invites, encourages, protects endowment.’ He exhorted these constituents to put paid to their ‘sincerity; you have the power in your own hands – not by denunciation, but by contributions – to convert at once these “Pagan” Colleges into Christian Seminaries’.Footnote 42 In this manner, Wyse reframed the Irish colleges bill into one whose very purpose was to license prelates, ministers, and parents to assume that the promotion of discipline around the vulnerable edges of their communities was part of their ‘religious’ duty.
Wyse would, in fact, have been among the first to acknowledge that his language of encouragement, invitation, and protection for endowments designated as ‘religious’ drew from the longer story of British colonisation. Reflecting on the conceivable premises behind the colleges bill, Wyse suggested briefly that they might have stemmed from a belief that it would be wrong for a government to appoint ‘a professor for the purpose of giving instruction in a religion’ that the state did not endorse. But he dismissed the relevance of this kind of voluntaryist reasoning. After all, he ‘found, in the conduct of the State, frequent exceptions to this presumed general rule’, particularly, as he put it, ‘in her Colonial policy’. He named ‘the appointment of Catholic chaplains to regiments containing soldiers of that faith’ as his prime example of one such frequent occurrence in ‘colonial policy’ and then moved on, suggestively, to the ‘pointed’ departure from voluntaryism represented by the Maynooth bill, which had just passed its third reading in the Commons days before.Footnote 43 Wyse may or may not have intended to collocate policy for Ireland within the vein of colonial ‘toleration’ policy; it would not, as we shall see by way of Buller and Macaulay, have been misguided of him to do so.
III
The story behind Charles Buller the Younger’s support for Peel’s Maynooth and Irish colleges bills epitomises the tendency of early Victorian liberals to clothe ‘religious neutrality’ in the garb of partial favouritism. After O’Connell’s arrest and trial in late 1843, Buller acted as a mouthpiece for O’Connell with the Whig leaders in parliament. He reached out to O’Connell with a letter asking what could be done to pacify Ireland, and he faithfully conveyed O’Connell’s list of recommendations privately to Lord John Russell.Footnote 44 He agreed principally with O’Connell’s first demand: that ‘entire religious equality’ needed to be established in Ireland.Footnote 45 But Buller’s vision of how to achieve this entire equality differed from O’Connell’s. While O’Connell decried the prospect of ‘Godless colleges’ for Ireland, Buller promoted the creation of the three Queen’s Colleges because he believed that parliamentary liberality should ultimately overcome even the Liberator’s opposition.
It is striking that Buller did not indulge O’Connell’s concerns more in this instance – especially when even the less obliging Lord John Russell seems to have been willing to entertain them. One conceivable rationale might have been voluntaryism. Buller entertained the idea that ‘it might be very well to refuse to give to every Church Establishment’ in accordance with ‘the voluntary principle’.Footnote 46 But a little flirtation with voluntaryism was hardly enough to ground an anti-establishment agenda. Quite the contrary: in Buller’s first contribution to the Edinburgh Review (January 1842), which was an essay on the potential merits of paying the Irish Catholic clergy, he laid out what he called his ‘Erastian advocacy’. He wrote: ‘We never met with a rational argument for a connexion between Church and State in any country, that did not appear to us to tell with especial force for such connexion between the British Government and the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland.’Footnote 47 In his speech in the Commons on the grant to Maynooth College in May 1845, Buller concluded that ‘whatever might be the merits of the voluntary principle, it certainly could not be one of them that it should be applied capriciously’. The fact of the matter was that the Treasury of the United Kingdom ‘not only endow[ed] the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, but the Presbyterian Church in Ulster and even the Unitarian Presbyterians’ (by dint of the regium donum payments distributed to Irish Presbyterian ministers that had first begun under Charles II and had been augmented incrementally after). In these circumstances, refusing to fund the education of priests at Maynooth would be tantamount to saying that ‘one alone [of these Church Establishments] should not be established’. And ‘Surely it was not just to call upon the Catholics of Ireland to pay all these Protestant Establishments, and give nothing to their own Church.’Footnote 48 In short, as Buller put it, the reason to promote both the Maynooth seminary and the ‘excellent measure for academical education in Ireland’ – i.e., the ‘Godless colleges’ bill – was ‘above all, as they showed a spirit of conciliation toward Ireland’.Footnote 49
Buller’s faith in concession for conciliation’s sake carried over from his experiences as a pacifier of colonial agitation in British North America. In 1838, Buller accompanied John George (‘Radical Jack’) Lambton, Lord Durham, as part of a commission sent by parliament to restore order after the rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada (roughly present-day Ontario and Quebec, respectively).Footnote 50 The 1837 rebellions stemmed from frustration with the exclusiveness of the merchant oligarchies that ran these North American colonies. From the war of 1812 through to the 1830s, governors sent out from Britain generally packed their executive councils with members of the same elite urban families. In French-speaking Lower Canada, this ruling group, consisting mostly but not entirely of British merchants, earned the nickname the ‘Château Clique’ among its opponents (and went by the hardly more inspiring name ‘Parti Bureaucrate’ on ballots). In Upper Canada, the equivalent was called ‘the Family Compact’. In 1837, populist reforming politicians appealed to agrarian interests in the more remote regions of each colony and motivated them to attempt violent takeovers of the key cities of Toronto and Quebec. With the aid of Canadian militiamen, British regulars swiftly repulsed both uprisings. In Lower Canada, the issue of a ruling clique that primarily represented the small community of English-speaking, Protestant merchants in the colony added extra fuel to French Canadien and Patriote resentments.Footnote 51
Buller’s appointment as chief secretary of the Durham Commission gave him a crucial role in negotiations with the French Catholic hierarchy in Quebec; it also turned him into a major shaper of one of the most influential documents in British imperial history: the Durham report, completed in 1839. The Durham report offered a recipe for transforming colonies from, essentially, garrison states to self-governing dominions.Footnote 52 Called ‘responsible government’, the basic idea was that the executive authority in colonies needed to be made ‘responsible’, i.e., answerable, accountable, to colonial legislatures.Footnote 53 The implication was that, in those colonies that were ‘fit for representative institutions’, authority over local affairs should be vested in elected assemblies rather than in appointed governing councils.Footnote 54
Racialist thought was an implicit ingredient in the ‘responsible government’ formula: only colonies with significant proportions of ‘British’ settlers and their descendants ever got to implement responsible government. Buller hinted that this might be the case in his book on Responsible government for colonies (London, 1840),Footnote 55 but it is worth noting that, in the crucible of post-rebellion Canada, responsible government was supposed to be a mechanism for hastening French Canadians’ assimilation to British political norms. A residual British prejudice held that Lower Canada’s French and Catholic settlers were addicts to despotism;Footnote 56 the cure for their supposedly laggard political condition would be to give them a say in the election of representatives to a combined Upper Canada–Lower Canada legislature.Footnote 57 However, each province would receive the same number of representatives, despite Lower Canadians’ outnumbering of Upper Canadians by a ratio of about 1.4 to 1. French-speaking Lower Canadians would never be able to obtain a majority in the legislature unless their voting behaviour stretched beyond lines of ‘nationality’; numerical advantage would be their incentive to ‘enlarge’ their political views.Footnote 58 In this way, responsible government and the union of the legislative province called ‘Canada’ were conjoint aspects of the liberal imperialist reform programme laid out in the Durham report. Buller remained a proponent of ‘responsible government for colonies’ to the end of his life in 1848.
This assimilationist reformism makes Buller’s negotiations with Québécois Catholics especially intriguing. If his Edinburgh Review piece on state funding for the Irish Catholic clergy is anything to go by, he regarded Catholicism as ‘false and mischievous’ (at least when writing for an audience he could presume to be mostly Whig and, in substantial part, middle-class Dissenter).Footnote 59 Yet Buller’s eight days of interviews with the superior of the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Montreal, in October 1838, yielded an ordinance from Governor Durham’s Special Council that its monsignor, Joseph-Vincent Quiblier, cheered as ‘the most Catholic and Papist law that Britain has passed in three hundred years!’Footnote 60 The council’s edict recognised the Sulpician seminary’s claim to be the corporate freeholder of the island of Montreal, and it entitled the seminary to collect all outstanding seigneurial debts owed by its tenants, before commuting their properties into freeholds or non-seigneurial leaseholds. The Special Council justified awarding the seminary such a lucrative settlement because the income collected would go toward ‘the Cure of the Souls within the Parish (La Desserte de la Paroisse) of Montreal; the Mission of the Lake of the Two Mountains, for the instruction and spiritual Care of the Algonquins and Iroquois Indians; the Support of the Petit Séminaire or College at Montreal; the Support of Schools for Children within the Parish of Montreal; the Support of poor Invalids and Orphans’.Footnote 61
Yet what seems to have weighed more with Buller than the social utility of these Catholic institutions was the seminary’s record of empire loyalty. He repeatedly warned that failure to satisfy the Sulpicians would ‘be regarded … as an attack marking as little gratitude as prudence on the part of the British Government’, before closing by emphasising that the seminary’s ‘efforts, and the exercise of its influence at the most alarming crisis’ had assured ‘the security of the city from some of the most formidable dangers which menaced it’.Footnote 62 Loyalty’s just deserts were ‘gratitude’ and ‘prudence’; it mattered less to Buller’s sense of justice that a church fulfilled a disciplinary function in society than that it was perceived as integral to, or coextensive with, a nation. Here, it is helpful to bear in mind that early Victorian usage routinely interchanged ‘nation’ and ‘race’.Footnote 63 One of the Durham report’s best-known passages, for example, records Durham’s having arrived in Quebec to find ‘two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: … a struggle not of principles, but of races’.Footnote 64 For Buller, then, aid to the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1840s was aid to the Irish nation/race; by extension, aid to select Irish Catholics in the form of access to university education was a dispensation of justice to the Irish race/nation, as well. There was no need to make a separate argument on behalf of the Irish colleges bill when one had already made one in favour of the Maynooth College grant. One could not support the Maynooth bill without endorsing the principle of the Irish colleges bill; for Buller, that principle was not voluntaryism but parallel endowment.
Buller structured his speech on the Maynooth bill accordingly. First, he trotted out a recent history of acts passed by a reluctant parliament to soothe Irish Catholic demands: ‘little by little … but never except when there had been an absolute necessity for doing so’. To chide his colleagues, he described parliament as having been ‘obliged’ to furnish ‘Catholic chaplains for Irish regiments, Catholic chaplains for Irish gaols and workhouses, and Catholic clergy to attend to the wants of Irish colonists’; yet for his own part, he showed neither reluctance that these measures had been enacted nor even regret that they had been enacted reluctantly. What had been going on all along, he thought, was a slow blossoming of principled liberality: ‘now the time had come when these admissions, instead of being acknowledged as an anomaly, were to be recognised as a principle … the great principle of treating their church as a national institution’. And this conversion of ‘the recognition of the religion of 8,000,000 of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom’ from something anomalous to a ‘principle’ fuelled Buller’s optimism that Peel’s agitation-diminution programme of 1845 would be received in Ireland as evidence of a conciliatory spirit.Footnote 65
Like any Victorian liberal intellectual, Buller could, as he did as an Edinburgh Review contributor, have brought the civilisational ‘progress narrative’ to bear on the question. He habitually presumed that good governments could be expected to modulate their people’s degree of civilisation, just as bad governance had been known to degenerate societies.Footnote 66 Indeed, he thought he had only to look as far as Ireland for a case in point: ‘there has been, in every country, some period at which the influence of the priesthood over the popular mind has been such, that no great political effects could be brought about without their co-operation. Though we are now near the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland is, owing to English misgovernment, in a state in which the agency of the priesthood is the only permanent one through which we can at present hope to act effectually on the people.’Footnote 67 This was distilled Scottish Enlightenment racial theory, with political structure driving differentiation along a continuum of stages of societal ‘progress’.Footnote 68 Furthermore, in this ‘environmental’ model of social evolution, trends were reversible, not foreordained; there was room for dynamism.Footnote 69 Such race-thinking underpinned Buller’s comment that ‘if, unhappily, the religion be false and mischievous, the connexion [with the state] is even more desirable and urgent’. Or, to put it another way, ‘The priests of a sound faith need comparatively little watching … But the priests of false religions must be constantly and closely looked after, lest insensibly we find them encouraging a tendency to superstition, and degrading their faith in order to minister to the fancies and passions of an ignorant people.’Footnote 70 Fortunately, this guiding hand could be acquired at the simple cost of attuning governance to the ‘natural’ rhythm of things. Buller assumed that ‘in every priesthood, there exist certain leanings towards that state of ease, security, and dignity, which is incident to such a connexion’. In other words, the system of leverage that he envisaged, hinged on ‘a power existing, which is, in its very nature, essentially antagonistic to that democratic influence into an unnatural alliance with which it is forced by the impolitic course hitherto pursued by the Government … which only wants the countenance and funds of the Government … to strengthen and organize this power, and enable it to follow its natural course of directing itself into its service’.Footnote 71
But the readership of the Edinburgh Review was not the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons. It was with justification that Macaulay, among others, referred to the Edinburgh as ‘the Whig review’ and saw it as incumbent upon contributors to ‘expound and defend the Whig theory of government’ within its pages. (Significantly, the particular article that he had in mind, as he prodded its editor to be brazen in articulating Whig principles of governance, was one that Nassau Senior had written in favour of dual establishment in Ireland, that is, the creation of a fund for paying the salaries of the Catholic clergy in parallel with those of the Church of Ireland.)Footnote 72 In parliament, neither Macaulay nor Buller could expect Whig-liberal racial thought to carry universal appeal. Moreover, the argument from ‘priestcraft’ that Buller used in his Edinburgh Review piece would never have come across as very satisfying to the Catholics among the Irish members in the Commons.Footnote 73 With his elision of the Catholic Maynooth College and the to-be-built ‘godless colleges’ under the heading of ‘national institutions’ that deserved ‘justice’, Buller aimed his appeal at both the repealer wing and the Whig core of the Liberal Party in parliament.Footnote 74
IV
Thomas Babington Macaulay entered political life as a known critic of the control of entrenched religious establishments over education. In 1826, he authored a piece in the Edinburgh Review that lauded the creation of a university at London that would be open to all comers, in contrast to Oxford and Cambridge Universities which accepted only Church of England communicants. In supporting the proposal for ‘the London University’, Macaulay joined a coterie that included Henry Brougham, James Mill, the poet Thomas Campbell, and London Jewish leader Isaac Lyon Goldsmid.Footnote 75 Not all were utilitarian reformers, but they all took after Jeremy Bentham in opposing ‘Church-of-Englandism’, that is, the dominance of social, political, and educational institutions by the state church.Footnote 76 Macaulay devoted the bulk of his Edinburgh Review piece to a sweeping statement in favour of making utility the key determinant of what should be taught in universities.Footnote 77 He also objected to the suggestion that the university would be a ‘Godless institution’. He asked: ‘Have none of those who censure the London University on this account daughters who are educated at home, and who are attended by different teachers?’ Over the course of a given afternoon, those daughters might see ‘the music-master, a good Protestant’ and ‘the Italian master, a believer in the blood of Saint Januarius’. But in any case, ‘parents take upon themselves the office of instructing their child in religion. She hears the preachers whom they prefer, and reads the theological works which they put into her hands.’Footnote 78 Some liberals who supported the creation of the Irish colleges in 1845 praised the same feature in Peel’s bill: it kept responsibility for religious instruction with parents and their intra-denominational designees.Footnote 79
The most notorious example of Macaulay’s secularism comes from his work as the law member of the governing council of India, in Calcutta, during the mid-1830s. In Macaulay’s minute on English-language education, which he prepared on 2 February 1835 for Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, he roundly rejected the idea that simply because ‘Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written’ those languages should receive ‘peculiar encouragement’ in the form of government money earmarked for instruction in them. He acknowledged that:
Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects is a course hardly reconcileable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved.Footnote 80
Clearly, this insistence that ‘encouragement’ should go to scriptural languages solely on grounds of their sacredness would violate the form of government ‘neutrality’ Macaulay had envisioned in his advocacy for the London University scheme back in the 1820s.
Recently, however, Nandini Chatterjee has offered a thoughtful, counter-intuitive reading of Macaulay’s minute. She regards it as an expression of ‘a particularly mid-century Anglican and Liberal view of “establishment”’. This view, she contends, ‘did not entirely deplore a legally privileged state church’ so long as such an entity served the ‘public and national good’.Footnote 81 In this light, the problem with government subsidies for Hindu- and Muslim-oriented learning institutions was not with government funding for self-described ‘religious’ entities as such. Rather, the problem lay in subsidising schools likely, as Macaulay memorably put it, to ‘raise up champions of error’.Footnote 82 According to Chatterjee, attachment to this criterion of public utility also explains why, ten years later, Macaulay exempted Maynooth College in Ireland from similar excoriation.Footnote 83 In the House of Commons debate on raising the government grant for Maynooth in 1845, Macaulay much more nonchalantly maintained that it would be impossible to teach any truth ‘without some intermixture of error’.Footnote 84 Of both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, he asked, ‘when you endow and protect both these institutions, must you not in one case or the other be disseminating a certain amount of error?’Footnote 85 Importantly, this was not a call for disestablishment of either church – just Macaulay appealing to the idea that all theological claims are fallible. Nor did it follow that a government should refrain from endowing and protecting any and all churches; on the contrary, it was ‘much better that the people of Ireland should be Roman Catholics than have no religion at all’. Belabouring the point, Macaulay reiterated that ‘it is infinitely better that the Irish peasantry should live and die Roman Catholics, than indulge their passions without any religious restraints’.Footnote 86 But tellingly, as Chatterjee underscores, Macaulay also maintained that, ‘it is not logically necessary that we should go to the extreme of supporting Juggernaut and Kalee’.Footnote 87 Obviously, to call it an extreme to fund the training of priests devoted to these Hindu gods was to dismiss the suggestion that all types of devotion might be equally utile.
It seems correct, from the evidence just reviewed, to see utility as the anchor point of Macaulay’s view on ‘establishment’, but there still seems to be an inconsistency between his stance in the ‘London University’ essay of 1826 and his views on the Maynooth bill in 1845.Footnote 88 The ‘London University’ piece offered no defence of the established religion on grounds of utility. Rather, it ventured that ‘our objections to Oxford and Cambridge may be summed up in two words, their Wealth and their Privileges’; it judged that only those subjects that students would pay to learn ought to be taught. These assertions cannot have reassured anyone interested in guaranteeing the future of the established church. (Macaulay’s hint that one of the new university’s breaks with English university tradition would be ‘no oaths sworn only to be broken’ can only have further disquieted anyone who promoted the established church as a check against the libertine.Footnote 89 ) But in the Maynooth speech, Macaulay at least posed as someone who believed in the potential usefulness of religions. And we know, in addition, that Macaulay regretted that Catholic emancipation in 1829 had included no provision for state payment of ‘the Irish Catholic priests’.Footnote 90 Thus, at the same time that he was attacking two pillars of Anglican education in England, he was touting the utility of the Catholic priesthood in Ireland; yet, it seems likely that he saw no contradiction in any of this.
Ted Koditschek’s work on Macaulay offers crucial insight into the shifting way in which Macaulay assessed ‘utility’. Koditschek maintains that Macaulay thought world-historically, in terms of a stadial, Scottish Enlightenment-influenced ‘progress narrative’.Footnote 91 For example, as an historian Macaulay elaborated a Whig theory of government that accorded perfectly with his political activism in favour of parliamentary reform in 1831 and 1832. According to Koditschek, Macaulay thought that societies at different stages of refinement (or, to use one of his favourite words, ‘improvement’) permitted different degrees of incorporation of social groups in political decision-making. As Koditschek puts it, ‘Political participation and active citizenship were therefore not absolute rights, but contingent entitlements in which the precise lines of inclusion and exclusion would always have to be drawn in a provisional way.’ In other words, ‘Those who were included today might have been inadmissible in an earlier era. Those who were inadmissible today might be included in a future epoch.’ This liberal imperialist vision of progress implied, pace Marx, that class struggle might evaporate ‘if ruling elites granted concession in a timely, responsible way’. It was on this ground precisely that Macaulay agitated for an expanded franchise in the early 1830s.Footnote 92 And, indeed, as long as we recognise that Macaulay’s conception of ‘public utility’ was contingent on what he would have seen as historical criteria, then we can say that he was a utilitarian secularist.Footnote 93 Or we might just use his terms: Macaulay, the quintessential Whig historian, had a Whig approach to secularism as a legislator – which is to say that he held historical circumstance to matter more than fixed principle.Footnote 94
In the event, Macaulay actually stayed quiet during the debates about the Irish colleges bill in 1845. But his viewpoint is not hard to reconstruct; we have his testimony saying that he ‘cordially supported [the Irish colleges] measure’.Footnote 95 Moreover, in speaking about the Maynooth grant, it must have rankled with Macaulay that Peel would get credit for what, to his mind, was fundamentally a Whig measure.Footnote 96 After the Maynooth bill experience, Macaulay may well have thought that another essentially Whig measure, the colleges bill, was about to pass and that all he could do was rue that it, too, would end up on Peel’s list of accomplishments. Yet his support for the premise of the Irish colleges bill also took a more active form in spring 1845. In the Maynooth speech, Macaulay simultaneously endorsed the principle behind the grant to Maynooth College and expressed a preference for the ‘voluntary principle’ where applicable, such as in ‘the London University’, of course, or in the newly minted Irish colleges. After all, there was a presumable civilisational difference to take into account between the Irish peasants for whom Macaulay prescribed a strong Catholic church and the middle-class university students for whom he prescribed secular colleges.
In May 1845, Macaulay also got involved in a campaign to, as he put it, ‘save the Scotch Universities’.Footnote 97 In 1843, the Free Church of Scotland came into existence when nearly a third of the members of the Church of Scotland seceded from the Kirk. Led by the evangelical theologian Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church movement carried with it most of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and most of the Church of Scotland’s foreign missionaries, such as the celebrity missionary in Calcutta, Alexander Duff. Affiliation with the Free Church was an expression of evangelical piety; Chalmers and the other 400-plus former Church of Scotland ministers who formed the Free Church in the ‘Disruption’ of 1843 objected to the Church Patronage (Scotland) Act 1711, which gave major landlords the right to name pastors to their local presbyteries. They regarded this patronage system as an undue restriction on a potential outlet for the expression of individual faith: the role one might take in selecting one’s own minister. Since the universities in Scotland retained a number of religious tests as qualifications for employment, the professors at Edinburgh, St Andrews and Glasgow continued to identify with the established (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland.Footnote 98 The bill for the abolition of Scottish university tests grew out of a petition drive involving several Free Church congregations in April 1845.Footnote 99 It proposed to ‘save’ the Scottish universities by eliminating these religious tests, thereby ‘opening’ them once again to members of the new Free Church. Macauley joined the group managing the bill in parliament on 5 May. He quickly took charge, inviting a cadre of liberal allies, including Charles Buller, to speak on behalf of the bill.Footnote 100 In his speech at the second reading of the bill on 9 July – the day before the House of Commons was to pass the Irish colleges bill – Macaulay underscored the point that the two bills were identical in principle. He argued that members could not logically support the Irish colleges bill and reject the Scottish universities bill.Footnote 101
Yet Macaulay may even have failed to notice just how identical in principle an onlooker might have perceived the bills to be. After all, Macaulay may have been meaning to imply that ‘the principle’ the two bills had in common was ‘the voluntary principle’, but this realisation may very well have been lost on his audience. Macaulay had shown some intellectual affinity for voluntaryism in his speech on the Maynooth bill.Footnote 102 But he did not actually mention ‘the voluntary principle’ in his advocacy for the removal of theological tests from the Scottish universities. Instead, his rhetoric crescendoed into a ringing endorsement of the Disruption of 1843. ‘Every person who knows anything of the ecclesiastical history of Scotland’, he lectured, ‘must be aware that in the opinion of the great body of Scotch Presbyterians, the mode in which the pastors are appointed is a matter of great importance. From the time of the Reformation the great body of the Scotch Presbyterians held that in some form or other the people ought to have a share in the appointment of their ministers.’ However, Macaulay argued, back in 1712 the then-recently united parliament of the United Kingdom deprived Scottish congregations of that right to appoint pastors. From that point forward, ‘year after year the General Assembly [of the Kirk of Scotland] protested against the violation, but in vain’. Thus, when the Disruption occurred in 1843,
we saw, not perhaps with unmixed approbation, but with strong sentiments of admiration, 470 ministers leaving their parishes and manses, throwing up their stipends, and committing themselves, their wives and children, to the care of Providence in this cause. Their congregations adhered to them firmly, followed them in crowds, and surrounded by willing and delighted hearers, they preached in other churches, or, if none could be obtained, in tents and barns, or on those hills and moors to which in other times their ancestors fled.Footnote 103
In short, anyone picking up a newspaper the next day could be forgiven for failing to spot the proponent of voluntaryism behind the gallant protector of Free-Church Presbyterianism.
These examples from Macaulay’s rhetoric underscore two points. First, Macaulay could make the absence of discriminatory proscription appear tantamount to positive support for the formerly excluded, as he would quite likely have done had he spoken out in debate on the Irish ‘Godless colleges’. Second, for Macaulay, the stadial interpretation of class and other social differences was always ready-to-hand. (Notably, the fact that Gaelic-speaking Highland congregations backed the Disruption in 1843 even more universally than did middle-class, urban congregations escaped Macaulay’s mention, obscured, or perhaps even obviated, by the Free Churches’ accession to the principle of representative institutions.) The thread that linked these mental operations was Macaulay’s habitual historicisation, in particular, recourse to that popular and romantic schema of progress history that endeared him to his middle-class readers.Footnote 104 But one need not have been a historian of Macaulay’s stature to share his social evolutionary schema for racialising the globe’s people. As we have seen, Charles Buller measured out the value of the Catholic clergy as a partner in governance, given the ‘state’ (of civilisation) shared by Irish and French Canadian Catholics, on the same scale of ‘improvement’ versus ‘ignorance’.
V
This examination of liberal imperial thought in the instances of Maynooth and the ‘Godless colleges’ has lent support to Koditschek’s thesis that a certain, progress-narrative-infused historical consciousness formed the crux of early Victorian liberal imperialism. But, in addition, it has shown how, in their political praxis, the liberal imperialists of the 1840s expected to use contemporaries’ historical memories as a form of political capital. The article included discussion of Macaulay’s historiography as a touchstone for a broader pattern of social evolutionary historicisation that appealed to those British early Victorians who thought of their ‘state’ of society as peculiarly advanced – and this was a broad cross-section of British early Victorians. The article also looked at Buller and Wyse’s perspectives on the Irish colleges bill of 1845 to substantiate that claim – to indicate that the basic lineaments of a Macaulayan historical consciousness were common – and to imply that early Victorian liberals indulged colonialist sensibilities routinely, without a second thought. And these sensibilities developed easily when Enlightenment environmentalist race-thinking had come to imbue so many cultural forms.Footnote 105
Again, however, the liberal imperialists of the 1840s had another use for historical perceptions that were common among their contemporaries, i.e. to materialise absences, such as the historically-relative absence of barriers against Catholics implied in the opening up of the ‘Godless colleges’. Indeed, Buller, as we have seen, counted upon his hearers’ historical memory of formerly-criminalised Catholicism and reluctant parliamentary redress to construe an absence of special treatment for Protestants as a marker of positive ‘respect due’ to Irish ‘national institution[s]’. And Wyse’s self-presentation as a guardian of Irish Catholicism by way of embracing a voluntaryist outlook on the Irish colleges proposal could only have worked, in the performative sense, for an audience who regarded the rising Protestant evangelical pressure in post-Union Ireland as an historic change.Footnote 106 As Irene Whelan has shown, British missionary organisations’ dispatch of large numbers of Protestant proselytes to Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century contributed to a climate of heightened sectarian boundary-watching.Footnote 107 In this context, the idea that the state should refrain from dispensing favours to entities identified as ‘religious’ was more than ever an alternative rather than an established norm. It was an argument (among an array of them) to which the jilted might also take recourse to obstruct measures that did not promise a satisfying degree of state aid to the particular ‘religious’ interest they saw themselves as duty-bound to defend. That each such interest might look to the British state for some form of aid or ‘encouragement’ was not in dispute. Uniquely, in this particular debate, Wyse transformed the absence of any prohibition against voluntary ‘religious’ endowment into a sign of the state’s positive promotion of Catholic religiosity.
In the end, perhaps the Peelite who took to heart this most significant lesson from the passage of the Irish colleges bill was the one who had the least active role in passing it: William Gladstone. Gladstone had resigned his cabinet post after the Maynooth bill passed, explaining that even though he favoured the legislation himself he had made a promise to his constituents not to endanger the position of the Church of England or the Church of Ireland. As Liberal Party leader some twenty-three years later, Gladstone campaigned on a pledge to pacify Ireland by making generous concessions to Irish (majority) opinion. Within six months of recapturing the prime minister’s office from Disraeli in 1868, Gladstone’s Liberal government passed the Irish Church Act, 1869, eliminating the government’s entitlement to collect tithes to support the Church of Ireland, a church attended by just 12 per cent of Irish people.Footnote 108 In practice, of course, disestablishment did not necessarily remove payments for the upkeep and staffing of churches from families’ budgets, just those that a select segment of the population (mostly substantial farmers) paid indirectly to the Church of England as a rent charge collected by their landlords, regardless of the payers’ denominational belonging.Footnote 109 We should notice, nonetheless, that Gladstone managed the same feat of portrayal in 1868–9 that Wyse had attempted in his representation of the Queen’s Colleges (Ireland) Act. That is, he presented an absence of state patronage for the established Church of Ireland as a positive gift for the Catholic majority in Ireland. Gladstone had evidently learned how to bank upon Irish people’s everyday historical memory (of formerly-criminalised Catholicism and reluctant parliamentary redress) to construe the absence of special treatment for Protestants as a token of ‘respect’ for Irish ‘national’ institutions. As Gladstone himself had put it back in 1845, ‘to render, under the name of a boon, that which, under other circumstances, would be no boon’.Footnote 110
