THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND.
[Sidenote: 1832--"Dark Rosaleen"]
A saying which has been ascribed to a well-known living Englishman, who
has made a name for himself in letters as well as in politics, may be
used as the introduction to this chapter. The saying was that no man
should ever be sent as Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland who could not prove that he had thoroughly mastered the meaning
of the noble Irish poem rendered by Clarence Mangan as "Dark Rosaleen."
The author and statesman to whom we refer used to point the moral of
his observation, sometimes, by declaring that many or most of the
political colleagues for whose benefit he had spoken had never heard
either of Clarence Mangan or of "Dark Rosaleen." Now, as it is barely
possible that some of the readers of this volume may be in a condition
of similar ignorance, it is well to mention that Clarence Mangan was an
Irish poet who was dear to the generation which saw the rise of the
Young Ireland movement during O'Connell's later years, and that the
dark Rosaleen whom Mangan found in the earlier poet's ballad is
supposed to typify his native country. The idea of the author and
statesman was that no Englishman who had not studied this poem, and got
at the heart of its mystery, so far as to be able to realize the deep
poetic, pathetic love of the Celtic heart for the soil, the traditions,
and the ways of the Celtic island, could attempt with any success to
undertake the government of the country. We have now come to a period
in this history when the Irish question, as it is called, came up once
again, and in a new form, to try the statesmanship of English rulers.
We have told the story of '98, and how the rebellion ended in complete
defeat and disaster. Up to the {206} time at which we have now arrived
there was no more talk of rebellion in the field, but in the sullen
heart of Irish discontent there still lived all the emotions which had
animated Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet.
[Sidenote: 1832--The tithe question in Ireland]
When the rebellion was put down the Government of King George the Third
abolished the Irish Parliament, and then all loyal and sensible persons
in Westminster assumed, of course, that there was an end of the matter.
The rebellion had been put down, the principal rebels had been done to
death, Grattan's troublesome and tiresome Parliament had been
extinguished, Ireland had been merged into complete identification with
England, and surely nothing would be heard of the Irish question any
more. Yet the Irish question seemed to come up again and again, and to
press for answer just as if answer enough had not been given already.
There was a clamor about Catholic Emancipation, and at last the Irish
Catholics had to be emancipated from complete political
disqualification, and their spokesman O'Connell had been allowed to
take his place in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel had carried
Catholic Emancipation, for, although a Tory in many of his ways of
thinking, he was a statesman and a man of genius; and now Lord Grey,
the head of the Whig Government, had no sooner passed the Reform Bill
than he found himself confronted with the Irish question in a new
shape. We could hardly wonder that Sir Robert Peel or Lord Grey did
not try to inform their minds as to Irish national feeling through a
study of "Dark Rosaleen," for the good reason that no such poem had yet
been given to the world. But neither Peel nor Grey was a type of the
average Englishman of the times, and each had gradually borne in upon
him, by a study of realities if not of poetic fancies, that the
national sentiment of the Irishman was not to be eradicated by any Act
of Parliament for his denationalization. Lord Grey, as the friend and
pupil of Fox, who had always been the friend of Ireland, must have
acquired, as a part of his early political training, the knowledge that
Ireland's grievances were not all {207} sentimental, and that if they
were to be dealt with by Acts of Parliament these Acts must take the
part of relief and not of repression. It may well be questioned
whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental
grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of
statesmanship does not always regard the existence of what is called a
sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether
there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint.
Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable
enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as
well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William
himself.
Just at this time, as we have seen, a school of Englishmen was
springing up: Englishmen whose minds were filled with new ideas, and
who thoroughly understood the tendencies of the reforming age to which
they belonged. The Irish tithe question had come up for settlement.
The Irish tithe question was only a part of the Irish State Church
question. The Irish State Church was an institution bestowed upon
Ireland by her conquerors. Five-sixths, at least, of the population of
Ireland belonged to the Church of Rome and were devoted to the religion
of that Church. The island was nevertheless compelled to maintain the
State Church, which did not even represent the religious belief of the
one-sixth of the population that was not Roman Catholic. One of the
privileges of the State Church was to exact tithes from all the farmers
of the country for the maintenance of its clergymen. Ireland was
almost altogether an agricultural country, and had but little to do
with manufacturing industry, and in three out of the four provinces of
Ireland the farmers, almost to a man, held to the religion of their
Catholic forefathers and worshipped only at the altars of their faith.
It would be seen, therefore, that the imposition of tithes for the
support of the State Church ministers was not merely a sentimental
grievance, but a very practical grievance as well. It was practical
because it exacted the payment of a tribute which the farmer believed
he ought not to be called {208} upon to pay, and it was sentimental
because, while it extorted the money from the farmer's pocket, it also
insulted his nationality and his faith.
[Sidenote: 1832--Difficulty in collecting the tithes]
The result was that a sort of civil war was perpetually going on in
Ireland between those who strove to collect the tithes and those from
whom the tithes were to be collected. The resistance was sometimes of
the fiercest character; the farmers and their friends resisted the
forces sent by the Government to seize the cattle of those who refused
to pay, as if they were resisting an army of foreign invaders. Blood
was shed freely and lavishly in these struggles, and the shedding of
blood became so common that for a while it almost ceased to be a matter
of public scandal. Sydney Smith declared that the collection of tithes
in Ireland must have cost in all probability about one million of
lives. Police, infantry, and dragoons were kept thus in constant
occupation, and yet it could not possibly be contended that those who
claimed the tithes were very much the better for all the blood that was
shed on their behalf. For when a farmer's cattle had been seized by
the police after an obstinate fight with the farmers and their friends,
and when the cattle had been driven off under the escort of infantry
and cavalry soldiers, the clergyman who claimed the tithes was not
always any nearer to the getting of that which the law declared to be
his own. The familiar proverbial saying about the ease with which a
horse may be brought to the water and the difficulty there may be in
getting him to drink when he has been brought there was illustrated
aptly and oddly enough in the difference between seizure of the
farmer's cattle and the means of raising any money on them when they
had been seized. The captured cattle could not in themselves be of
much use to the clergyman who claimed the tithes, and they would
naturally have to be sold in order that he might get his due, and the
question arose who was to bid for them. All the farmers and the
peasantry of the country were on the one side, and on the other were
the incumbent, a few of his friends, and the military and police. It
was certain that the soldiers and the policemen would not bid for the
cattle, and probably {209} could not pay for them, and the population
of the district would have made the place very uncomfortable for any of
the clergymen's friends who showed an anxiety to buy up the impounded
beasts. In some cases when cattle were sold by public auction no
bidder ventured to come forward but the farmer himself who owned the
cattle, and they had to be knocked down to him at a purely nominal
price because there was no possible competitor. The farmer drove home
his beasts amid the exultation of the whole neighborhood, and the
clergymen was as far off his tithes as ever. The passive resistance in
fact was harder to deal with, as far as practical results went, than
even the resistance that was active. Summon together by lawful
authority a number of soldiers and police, and it is easy to shoot down
a few unarmed peasants, and to dispose for the hour of popular
resistance in this prompt and peremptory way. But what is to be done
when the resistance takes the form of a resolute organized refusal to
pay up the amounts claimed or to offer any price for the cattle seized
in default of payment? There were in every district numbers of quiet
Catholic parishioners who would much rather have paid their share of
the tithes to the Protestant clergymen than become drawn into quarrels
and local disturbances and confusion. But such men soon found that if
they paid their tithes they put themselves in direct antagonism to the
whole mass of their Catholic neighbors. Intimidation of the most
serious kind was sometimes brought to bear upon them, and in any case
there was that very powerful kind of intimidation which consists in
making the offender feel that he has brought on himself the contempt
and the hatred of nearly all his fellow-parishioners and his
fellow-religionists. In those days it was not lawful to hold a public
political meeting in Ireland, but there were anti-tithe demonstrations
got up, nevertheless, over three parts of Ireland. These
demonstrations took the outward form of what were called hurling
matches, great rivalries of combatants, in a peculiar Irish game of
ball. Each of these demonstrations was made to be, and was known to
be, a practical protest against the collection of the tithes. {210}
Whenever it became certain that the recusant farmer's cattle were to be
seized, a great hurling match was announced to be held in the immediate
vicinity, and the local magistrates, who perhaps had at their disposal
only a few handfuls of police or soldiery, were not much inclined to
order the seizure in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses. Nor
would any Catholic parishioner who had quietly paid up his tithes
without resistance have felt very comfortable if he had happened to
come near the hurling field that day, and to hear the loudly expressed
comments of his neighbors on his line of conduct. To make the troubles
still deeper, it often happened that the claimant of the tithes was an
absentee--the incumbent of many a parish in Ireland left his curate to
look after his flock and his tithes alike--and the absentee was almost
as much hated in Ireland as the tithe-collector.
[Sidenote: 1832--The tithe question in Parliament]
Now it must not be supposed that there were not many of the Protestant
clergy in Ireland who utterly disapproved of the tithe system. One
Protestant clergyman in England, from whom we have just quoted, the
Rev. Sydney Smith, had denounced the system over and over again in
language the most indignant and the most scornful that even his
scathing humor could command. But there were numbers of Protestant
clergymen in Ireland who saw and proclaimed its injustice and its
futility. The Archbishop of Dublin declared that no Government could
ever accomplish the collection of tithes in Ireland otherwise than at
the point of the bayonet. Protestant country clergy often found that
the very attempts to collect the tithes only brought increased distress
and hardship upon themselves.
Many a poor Protestant clergyman saw the utter injustice of the system,
and disliked and detested it almost as much as the Roman Catholics
themselves could have done. There were many such men, too, who put up
with miserable poverty rather than make any attempt to recover such an
income by force. Great English speakers and writers were beginning to
denounce the whole system. Macaulay stigmatized it as severely as
Sydney Smith had done. George {211} Grote, the historian of Greece,
who had then a seat in the House of Commons, had not only condemned it,
but had condemned the whole State Church system of which it was only a
part. In our own days the ordinary English reader finds it hard to
understand how any such system could have been carried on under a
civilized European Government. Such a reader will readily admit that
Sydney Smith had not gone beyond the limits of sober assertion when he
declared that "there is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in
all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have ever heard of
Timbuctoo." The subject had been brought up in Parliament by some of
the advanced reformers of the day, and, indeed, it was bringing itself
before the notice of Parliament every week through the official reports
of the disturbances which were taking place in various parts of Ireland.
The House of Lords had appointed a committee to inquire into the whole
subject. The committee reported that a complete extinction of the
tithe system was demanded, not only in the interests of Ireland but in
the interests of the State Church itself, and suggested, as a means of
getting out of the difficulty, that the tithes might be commuted for a
charge upon land or by an exchange for an investment in land. This
meant, in other words, that the collection of tithes should be devolved
upon the landlord, leaving him to repay himself by a corresponding
addition to the rent which he asked from his tenants. The House of
Commons also appointed a committee to inquire into the subject, and the
recommendation of that committee was in substance very much the same as
the recommendation made by the committee appointed by the House of
Lords.
The Government then took up the question, and in 1832 Lord Althorp
announced that it was the intention of ministers to submit to the House
of Commons a scheme of their own as a temporary settlement of the Irish
tithe question, and out of which was to be developed, in time, a
measure for the complete removal of the difficulty. A very brief
description will serve to explain the nature of {212} this measure.
The Government proposed to advance a certain sum of money for the
relief of the tithe-owners who had not been able to recover what the
law held to be their due, and in the meantime to apply themselves to
the preparation of some scheme which might transfer the tithe burden
from the occupiers to the owners of the land. The Government thus
admitted that at the moment they did not see their way altogether out
of the tithe difficulty, but promised to apply their minds to the
discovery of some final and satisfactory settlement, and undertook
until then to pay to incumbents the arrears of tithes, and to collect
the money as well as they could from the indebted occupiers. In point
of fact, Lord Althorp and his colleagues proposed to become the
tithe-collectors themselves and to let any loss that might be incurred
fall, for the time, upon the State and the national taxpayers. The
plan was tried for a while, and we need hardly say that it proved
altogether unsatisfactory. The Government had no better means of
compelling the farmers to pay the tithes than those means which they
had already vainly put at the disposal of the tithe-owners. The farmer
who could not be coerced by the police and the military into settling
his accounts with the incumbent was not likely to be any the more ready
to pay up because the demand for payment was made by the
Lord-Lieutenant.
[Sidenote: 1834--Henry Ward and the Irish Church]
It was becoming more and more evident every day that the whole
conditions of the State Church in Ireland were responsible for the
trouble of which the tithes difficulty was only an incident. Already a
party was forming itself in the House of Commons composed of
intellectual and far-seeing men who recognized the fact that the Irish
State Church was in its very principles an anomaly and an anachronism.
On May 27, 1834, a debate on the whole question of the Irish State
Church and its revenues was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Henry
Ward, one of the most advanced reformers and thoughtful politicians
whom the new conditions of the franchise had brought into Parliament.
Henry Ward was a son of that Plumer Ward who was at one time famous as
the author of a novel {213} called "Tremaine." If any memory of
"Tremaine" lingers in the minds of readers who belong to the present
generation, the lingering recollection is probably only due to the fact
that in Disraeli's "Vivian Grey" there is an amusing scene in which the
hero makes audacious use of an extemporized passage, which he professes
to find in Plumer Ward's novel. Henry Ward, the son, afterwards won
some distinction by his administration of the Ionian Islands while the
islands were under the charge of Great Britain. In our Parliamentary
history, however, he will always be remembered as the author of the
first serious attempt to obtain a national recognition of the principle
which, within our own times, secured its final acknowledgment by the
disestablishment of the Irish Church. The resolution which was
proposed merely declared that the Protestant Episcopal Establishment in
Ireland exceeded the wants of the Protestant population, and that, it
being the right of the State to regulate the distribution of Church
property in such manner as Parliament might determine, it was the
opinion of the House that the temporal possessions of the State Church
in Ireland ought to be reduced. This resolution went no further in
words, as it will be seen, than to ask for a reduction of the revenues
of that Church on the ground that it had already more funds than were
required for the full discharge of its duties among those who attended
its ministrations. But then the resolution also assumed the right of
the State to institute an inquiry into the application of the revenues
and the needs of the surrounding population, and would necessarily
carry with it the assertion of the principle that the Irish State
Church existed only to minister to the wants of the Protestants of
Ireland. It is clear that if once this principle were recognized by
the State the whole theory of the Established Church in Ireland could
no longer be maintained. That theory was that the State had a right to
uphold and a duty to perform in the maintenance of a Protestant
Establishment in Ireland for the purpose of converting to its doctrines
that vast majority of the Irish population who could not be driven,
even at the bayonet's point, to attend the {214} services conducted by
a Protestant pastor. Only a few years after this time the great
statesman who was afterwards to obtain from Parliament the
disestablishment of the Irish Church was arguing, in his earliest
published work, that the fewer the Protestants in Ireland the greater
was the necessity for the State to be lavish of its money with the
object of converting the outer population of Ireland to the established
religion. Mr. Ward, in his speech, set himself to make it clear to the
House of Commons that the collection of tithes in Ireland was, at that
time, the principal cause of the disturbance and disaffection which
brought so much calamity on the unhappy island, and prevented any
possibility of its becoming a loyal part of the British dominions. He
showed by facts and figures that the opposition to the collection of
tithes was not any longer confined to the Catholic population alone,
but had spread among the Protestants of dissenting denominations, and
was showing itself in the North of Ireland, as well as in the provinces
of the South and the West and the Midlands. He pointed to the fact
that it was found necessary to maintain in Ireland, for the purpose of
collecting the tithes, an army larger than that which England needed
for the maintenance of her Indian Empire, and that, nevertheless, it
was found impossible to collect the tithes in Ireland, and that the
Government could suggest nothing better than a project for the payment
of the tithes out of the pockets of the national taxpayer. Mr. Ward
made it clear to the House of Commons that the revenues of the State
Church in Ireland were not distributed with anything like a view to the
fair and equal remuneration of its clergy. In numbers of cases the
clergy of the higher ranks had enormous incomes, quite out of all
proportion to any duties they were even supposed to perform, while the
clergymen who actually did the work were, as a general rule, screwed
down to a pitiful rate of payment which hardly kept soul and body
together. Twenty pounds a year was not an uncommon stipend among the
curates who did the hard work, while an annual revenue of sixty pounds
was regarded as something like opulence. Where the curate received his
thirty {215} or forty pounds a year or less, the incumbent usually had
his two thousand a year, and in many instances much more. As we said
before, the incumbent deriving a rich revenue from his office was often
habitually an absentee, who left the whole of his work to be performed,
as best it might be done, by the curate, half starving on a miserable
pittance. Mr. Ward made out a case which must have produced some
impression on any Parliamentary assembly, and could hardly fail to find
attentive listeners and ready sympathy among the members of the first
reformed House of Commons.
[Sidenote: 1834--George Grote]
The motion was seconded by a remarkable man in a remarkable speech.
Mr. George Grote, afterwards famous as the historian of Greece, was one
of the new members of Parliament. He was a man of a peculiar type, of
an intellectual order which we do not usually associate with the
movement of the political world, but which is, nevertheless, seldom
without its representative in the House of Commons. Grote was one of
the small group of men who were, at that time, described as the
philosophical Radicals. He acknowledged the influence of Bentham; he
was a friend and associate of the elder and the younger Mill; he was a
banker by occupation, a scholar and an author by vocation; a member of
Parliament from a sense of duty. Grote, no doubt, was sometimes
mistaken in the political conclusions at which he arrived, but he
deserved the praise which Macaulay has justly given to Burke, that he
was always right in his point of view. With Grote a political measure
was right or wrong only as it helped or hindered the spread of
education, human happiness, and peace. He was one of the earliest and
most persevering advocates of the ballot system at elections, and
during his short Parliamentary career he made the ballot the subject of
an annual motion. Some of us can still well remember George Grote in
his much later days, and can bear testimony to the fact that, to quote
the thrilling words of Schiller, he reverenced in his manhood the
dreams of his youth. We can remember how steady an opponent he was of
slavery, and how his sympathies went with the cause of the North during
the {216} great American civil war. One can hardly suppose that
Grote's style as a speaker was well suited to the ways of the House of
Commons, but it is certain that whenever he spoke he always made a
distinct impression on the House. Some of us who can remember John
Stuart Mill addressing that same assembly at a later day, can probably
form an idea of the influence exercised on the House by the man who
seemed to be thinking his thoughts aloud rather than trying to win over
votes or to catch encouraging applause. Grote's speech on Ward's
motion brought up one view of the Irish Church which especially
deserved consideration. Grote dealt with the alarms and the
convictions of those who were insisting that to acknowledge any right
of Parliament to interfere with the Irish State Church would be to
sound in advance the doom of the English State Church as well. He
pointed out that, whatever difference of opinion there might be as to
the general principle of a State Establishment, the case of the two
Churches, the English and the Irish, must be argued upon grounds which
had nothing in common. Every argument which could be used, and must be
used, for the State Church of England was an argument against the State
Church in Ireland. The State Church of England was the Church to which
the vast majority of the English people belonged. It ministered to
their spiritual needs, it was associated with their ways, their hopes,
their past, and their future. If an overwhelming majority in any
country could claim the right, by virtue of their majority, to set up
and maintain any institution, the Protestant population of England
could claim a right to set up a State Church. But every word that
could be said in support of the English State Church was a word of
condemnation and of sentence on the State Church in Ireland. The Irish
State Church was the Church of so small a minority that, when allowance
had been made for the numbers of dissenting Protestants in Ireland, it
was doubtful whether one in every twelve of the whole population could
be claimed as a worshipper in the temples maintained and endowed by
law. Moreover, the Irish State Church was a badge of conquest, and was
{217} regarded as such by the whole Celtic population of the island.
The tithe exacted from the Irish Catholic farmer was not merely a
tribute exacted by the conqueror, but was also a brand of degradation
on the faith and on the nationality of the Irish Celt who was called
upon to meet the demand. The student of history will note with some
interest that, at a day much nearer to our own, the Lord Stanley whose
name we shall presently have to bring up in connection with this debate
on Mr. Ward's motion made use, in the House of Lords, of an appeal
which suggested the idea that he had not heard or had forgotten George
Grote's speech on which we have just been making comment. Not very
long before his death Lord Derby, as he had then become, was declaiming
in the House of Lords against the proposal to disestablish the Irish
State Church, and he warned the House that if the fabric of the Irish
Church were to be touched by a destroying hand it would be in vain to
hope that the destruction of the English State Church could long be
averted. [Sidenote: 1834--Lord Derby] Lord Derby had always a very
happy gift of quotation, and he made on this occasion a striking
allusion. He reminded the House of that thrilling scene in Scott's
"Guy Mannering" where the gypsy woman suddenly presents herself on the
roadside to the elder, the Laird of Ellangowan and some of his friends,
and, complaining of the eviction of her own people from their
homesteads, bids the gentlefolk take care that their own roof-trees are
not put in danger by what they had done. Lord Derby made use of this
passage as a warning to the prelates and peers of England that, if they
allowed the Irish State Church to be disestablished, the statelier
fabric of their own Church in England might suffer by the example. It
was pointed out at the time, by some of those who commented on Lord
Derby's speech, that George Grote had answered this argument by
unconscious anticipation, and had shown that the best security of the
English State Church was the fact that it rested on a foundation
totally different from that of the State Church in Ireland.
The Government were greatly embarrassed by all this {218} discussion as
to the condition, the work, and the character of the Establishment in
Ireland. Lord Grey, whose whole nature inclined him to move along the
path of progress with slow, steady, and stately steps, began to chafe
against the eagerness with which the more Radical reformers were
endeavoring to hurry on the political movement. It was necessary that
the Government should announce a purpose of one kind or another--should
either give a general sanction to the inquiry into the claims and
merits of the Irish Church, or declare themselves against any movement
of reform in that direction. It was found hardly possible for the
Government to ally themselves with the followers of old-fashioned
Toryism, and it soon began to be rumored that Lord Grey could only keep
on the reforming path at the cost of losing some of his most capable
colleagues. Before long it was made publicly known that the rumors
were well founded. Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham resigned their
places in the Ministry. Graham afterwards held office in more than one
Administration that might well be called Liberal, but Lord Stanley
passed the greater part of his Parliamentary life in the ranks of
uncompromising Toryism. He had begun his public career as an
enthusiastic champion of Parliamentary reform, and he was the
figure-head of reform again at a much later date, but on all other
questions he remained a steadfast and a most eloquent advocate of
genuine Tory principles. It may fittingly be mentioned here that the
existence of the Radical party, recognized as such and regarded as
distinct from the ordinary Liberals, began with the debates on the
State Church in Ireland. The passing of the Reform Bill divided the
Whigs and Tories into Liberals and Conservatives, and the discussions
on the Irish Church divided those who had once been Whigs into Liberals
and Radicals.
[Sidenote: 1834--King William and the Irish State Church]
Meanwhile poor old King William was greatly concerned by the attacks
which were made upon the State Church in Ireland. William the Fourth
had a simple sort of piety of his own, and was perhaps somewhat like
the man whom Doctor Johnson commended because, whatever {219} follies
or offences he might have committed, he never passed a church without
taking off his hat. The King knew little or nothing, we may well
suppose, about the Irish Church and the way in which it fulfilled, or
had any chance of fulfilling, its sacred office. But he took off his
hat to it as a Church, and, more than that, he shed tears and
positively blubbered over its hard fate in having to stand so many
attacks from its enemies. The King received, on one of his birthdays,
a delegation from the prelates of the Irish Church, and to them he
poured out his assurances that nothing should ever induce him to
abandon that Church to its ungodly foes. He reminded the prelates that
he was growing an old man, that his departure from this world must be
near at hand, that he had nothing left now to live for but the rightful
discharge of his duties as a Protestant sovereign, and he bade them to
believe that the tears which were bedewing his countenance were the
tears of heartfelt sympathy and sorrow. The King nevertheless did not
get into any quarrel with his ministers on the subject of the Irish
Church, and when any documents bearing on the question were presented
to him for signature he ended by affixing his name and did not allow
his tears to fall upon it and blot it out. The Duke of Cumberland,
too, stood by the Irish Church to the best of his power. A member of
the House of Lords has a privilege which is not accorded to a member of
the House of Commons--he can enter on the books of the House his
written protest against the passing of any measure which he has not
been able to keep out of legislation. The Duke of Cumberland entered
his protest against some of the resolutions taken with regard to the
Irish State Church, and he declared that the sovereign who affirmed
such resolves must do so in defiance of the coronation oath. That
coronation oath had not been brought into much prominence since the
days of George the Third, when it used to be relied upon as an
impassable barrier to many a great measure of political justice and
mercy. The Duke of Cumberland was not exactly the sort of man who
could quicken it anew into an animating influence, and King {220}
William did what his ministers advised him to do, and the world went on
its way. The King, however, liked his ministers none the more because
he did not see his way to quarrel with them when they advised him to
make some concessions to public feeling on the subject of the Irish
tithes. Thus far, indeed, the concessions were not very great, and the
important fact for this part of our history is only that the tithe
question brought up the far more momentous question which called into
doubt the right to existence of the Irish State Church itself. The
Government went no farther, for the time, than to offer the appointment
of a commission to inquire into the incidence and the levying of the
tithes, and endeavored to evade the question of appropriation, that is,
the question as to the right of Parliament to decide the manner in
which the revenues of the Irish State Church ought to be employed. The
tithe question itself was finally settled for England before it came to
be finally settled for Ireland. But its settlement involved no such
consequences to the English State Church as it did to the State Church
in Ireland. For our present purposes it is enough to record the fact
that the earliest clear indications of the national policy, which in a
later generation disestablished the Irish State Church, were given by
the first Reform Parliament. Meanwhile the controversy raised as to
the position of the Irish Establishment had had the effect of
disturbing Lord Grey, who did not like to be driven too rapidly along
the path of reform; of greatly angering the sovereign, who grumbled all
the more because he could not openly resist; and of dissatisfying men
like Ward and Grote and Lord Durham, and even members of the Cabinet
like Lord John Russell, who could not regard mere slowness as a virtue
when there was an obvious wrong to be redressed.
{221}