natural Brother, L'Abbé de la Fai, at Newmarket, L'Abbé declaring it
possible to charm a Fish out of the Water, which being disputed
occasioned a Bett; and the Abbé stooped down over the water to tickle
the Fish with a little switch. Fearing, however, the Prince said play
him some Trick, he declared he hoped the Prince would not use him
unfairly by throwing him into the water. The Prince answer'd him that he
would not upon his Honor. The Abbé had no sooner began the operation by
leaning over a little Bridge when the Prince took hold of his Heels and
threw him into the Water, which was rather deep. The Abbé, much enraged,
the moment he got himself out run at the Prince with great violence, a
Horse-whip in his Hand, saying he thought very meanly of a Prince who
cou'd not keep his word. The Prince flew from him, and getting to the
Inn locked himself in one of the Rooms."
"Prince of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Duke and Dutchess of
Cumberland, and Miss Pigott, Mrs. F.'s companion, went a Party to
Windsor during the absence of _The Family_ fm. Windsor; and going to see
a cold Bath, Miss P. expressed a great wish to bathe this hot weather.
The D. of C. very imprudently pushed her in, and the Dut. of C. having
the presence of mind to throw out the Rope saved her when in such a
disagreeable State from fear and surprise as to be near sinking. Mrs. F.
went into convulsion Fits, and the Dut. fainted away, and the scene
proved ridiculous in the extreme, as Report says the Duke called out to
Miss P. that he was instantly coming to her in the water, and continued
undressing himself. Poor Miss P.'s clothes entirely laid upon the Water,
and made her appear an awkward figure. They afterwards pushed in one of
the Prince's attendants."
So much for High Life at the close of the eighteenth century. It is more
difficult to realize that we are separated only by some sixty years from
a time when a Cabinet Minister and a brother of the Sovereign conducted
a business-like correspondence on the question whether the Minister had
or had not turned the Prince out of the house for insulting his wife.
The journals, newspapers, and memoirs of the time throw (especially for
those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that
hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political
system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard
drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and
great estates were constantly changing owners at the gaming-table.
The fifth Duke of Bedford (who had the temerity to attack Burke's
pension, and thereby drew down upon himself the most splendid repartee
in literature) was a bosom-friend of Fox, and lived in a like-minded
society. One night at Newmarket he lost a colossal sum at hazard, and,
jumping up in a passion, he swore that the dice were loaded, put them
in his pocket, and went to bed. Next morning he examined the dice in the
presence of his boon companions, found that they were not loaded, and
had to apologize and pay. Some years afterwards one of the party was
lying on his death-bed, and he sent for the duke. "I have sent for you
to tell you that you were right. The dice _were_ loaded. We waited till
you were asleep, went to your bedroom, took them out of your waistcoat
pocket, replaced them with unloaded ones, and retired."
"But suppose I had woke and caught you doing it."
"Well, we were desperate men--_and we had pistols_."
Anecdotes of the same type might be multiplied endlessly, and would
serve to confirm the strong impression which all contemporary evidence
leaves upon the mind--that the closing years of the eighteenth century
witnessed the _nadir_ of English virtue. The national conscience was in
truth asleep, and it had a rude awakening. "I have heard persons of
great weight and authority," writes Mr. Gladstone, "such as Mr.
Grenville, and also, I think, Archbishop Howley, ascribe the beginnings
of a reviving seriousness in the upper classes of lay society to a
reaction against the horrors and impieties of the first French
Revolution in its later stages." And this reviving seriousness was by no
means confined to Nonconformist circles. In the eighteenth century the
religious activities of the time proceeded largely (though not
exclusively) from persons who, from one cause or another, were separated
from the Established Church. Much theological learning and controversial
skill, with the old traditions of Anglican divinity, had been drawn
aside from the highway of the Establishment into the secluded byways of
the Nonjurors. Whitefield and the Wesleys, and that grim but grand old
Mother in Israel, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, found their
evangelistic energies fatally cramped by episcopal authority, and, quite
against their natural inclinations, were forced to act through
independent organizations of their own making. But at the beginning of
the nineteenth century things took a different turn.
The distinguishing mark of the religious revival which issued from the
French Revolution was that it lived and moved and had its being within
the precincts of the Church of England. Of that Church, as it existed at
the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
the characteristic feature had been a quiet worldliness. The typical
clergyman, as drawn, for instance, in Crabbe's poems and Miss Austen's
novels, is a well-bred, respectable, and kindly person, playing an
agreeable part in the social life of his neighbourhood, and doing a
secular work of solid value, but equally removed from the sacerdotal
pretensions of the Caroline divines and from the awakening fervour of
the Evangelical preachers. The professors of a more spiritual or a more
aggressive religion were at once disliked and despised. Sydney Smith was
never tired of poking fun at the "sanctified village of Clapham" and its
"serious" inhabitants, at missionary effort and revivalist enthusiasm.
When Lady Louisa Lennox was engaged to a prominent Evangelical and
Liberal--Mr. Tighe of Woodstock--her mother, the Duchess of Richmond,
said, "Poor Louisa is going to make a shocking marriage--a man called
_Tiggy_, my dear, a Saint and a Radical." When Lord Melbourne had
accidently found himself the unwilling hearer of a rousing Evangelical
sermon about sin and its consequences, he exclaimed in much disgust as
he left the church, "Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is
allowed to invade the sphere of private life!"
Arthur Young tells us that a daughter of the first Lord Carrington said
to a visitor, "My papa used to have prayers in his family, but none
since he has been a Peer." A venerable Canon of Windsor, who was a
younger son of a great family, told me that his old nurse, when she was
putting him and his little brothers to bed, used to say, "If you're
very good little boys, and go to bed without giving trouble, you needn't
say your prayers to-night." When the late Lord Mount Temple was a youth,
he wished to take Holy Orders; and the project so horrified his parents
that, after holding a family council, they plunged him into fashionable
society in the hope of distracting his mind from religion, and
accomplished their end by making him join the Blues.
The quiet worldliness which characterized the English Church as a whole
was unpleasantly varied here and there by instances of grave and
monstrous scandal. The system of Pluralities left isolated parishes in a
condition of practical heathenism. Even bare morality was not always
observed. In solitary places clerical drunkenness was common. On
Saturday afternoon the parson would return from the nearest town
"market-merry." He consorted freely with the farmers, shared their
habits, and spoke their language. I have known a lady to whom a country
clergyman said, pointing to the darkened windows where a corpse lay
awaiting burial, "There's a stiff 'un in that house." I have known a
country gentleman in Shropshire who had seen his own vicar drop the
chalice at the Holy Communion because he was too drunk to hold it. I
know a corner of Bedfordshire where, within the recollection of persons
living thirty[8] years ago, three clerical neighbours used to meet for
dinner at one another's parsonages in turn. One winter afternoon a
corpse was brought for burial to the village church. The vicar of the
place came from his dinner so drunk that he could not read the service,
although his sister supported him with one hand and held the lantern
with the other. He retired beaten, and both his guests made the same
attempt with no better success. So the corpse was left in the church,
and the vicar buried it next day when he had recovered from his debauch.
While the prevailing tone of quiet worldliness was thus broken, here
and there, by horrid scandals, in other places it was conspicuously
relieved by splendid instances of piety and self-devotion, such as
George Eliot drew in the character of Edgar Tryan of Milby. But the
innovating clergy of the Evangelical persuasion had to force their way
through "the teeth of clenched antagonisms." The bishops, as a rule,
were opposed to enthusiasm, and the bishops of that day were, in virtue
of their wealth, their secular importance, and their professional
cohesiveness, a formidable force in the life of the Church.
In the "good old days" of Erastian Churchmanship, before the Catholic
revival had begun to breathe new life into ancient forms, a bishop was
enthroned by proxy! Sydney Smith, rebuking Archbishop Howley for his
undue readiness to surrender cathedral property to the Ecclesiastical
Commission, pointed out that his conduct was inconsistent with having
sworn at his enthronement that he would not alienate the possessions of
the Church of Canterbury. "The oath," he goes on, "may be less present
to the Archbishop's memory from the fact of his not having taken the
oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach
to take it for him--a practice which, though I believe it to have been
long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A
proxy to vote, if you please--a proxy to consent to arrangements of
estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Fly to take
the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business
or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he
presides--all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary
indolence ever recorded in history." In this judgment the least
ritualistic of laymen will heartily concur. But from Archbishop Howley
to Archbishop Temple is a far cry, and the latest enthronement in
Canterbury Cathedral must have made clear to the most casual eye the
enormous transformation which sixty years have wrought alike in the
inner temper and the outward aspect of the Church of England.
Once Dr. Liddon, walking with me down the hall of Christ Church, pointed
to the portrait of an extremely bloated and sensual-looking prelate on
the wall, and said, with that peculiar kind of mincing precision which
added so much to the point of his sarcasms, "How singular, dear friend,
to reflect that _that person_ was chosen, in the providential order, to
connect Mr. Keble with the Apostles!" And certainly this connecting link
bore little resemblance to either end of the chain. The considerations
which governed the selection of a bishop in those good old days were
indeed not a little singular. Perhaps he was chosen because he was a
sprig of good family, like Archbishop Cornwallis, whose junketings at
Lambeth drew down upon him the ire of Lady Huntingdon and the threats of
George III., and whose sole qualification for the clerical office was
that when an undergraduate he had suffered from a stroke of palsy which
partially crippled him, but "did not, however, prevent him from holding
a hand at cards." Perhaps he had been, like Bishop Sumner, "bear-leader"
to a great man's son, and had won the gratitude of a powerful patron by
extricating young hopeful from a matrimonial scrape. Perhaps, like Marsh
or Van Mildert, he was a controversial pamphleteer who had tossed a
Calvinist or gored an Evangelical. Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and
Monk, a "Greek Play Bishop," who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a
Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage. "Young Crumpet is sent to school; takes
to his books; spends the best years of his life in making Latin verses;
knows that the _Crum_ in Crumpet is long and the _pet_ short; goes to
the University; gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews;
takes Orders; becomes a bishop's chaplain; has a young nobleman for his
pupil; publishes a useless classic and a Serious Call to the
Unconverted; and then goes through the Elysian transitions of
Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and
power."
Few--and very few--are the adducible instances in which, in the reigns
of George III., George IV., and William IV., a bishop was appointed for
evangelistic zeal or pastoral efficiency.
But, on whatever principle chosen, the bishop, once duly consecrated and
enthroned, was a formidable person, and surrounded by a dignity scarcely
less than royal. "Nobody likes our bishop," says Parson Lingon in _Felix
Holt_. "He's all Greek and greediness, and too proud to dine with his
own father." People still living can remember the days when the
Archbishop of Canterbury was preceded by servants bearing flambeaux when
he walked across from Lambeth Chapel to what were called "Mrs. Howley's
Lodgings." When the Archbishop dined out he was treated with princely
honours, and no one left the party till His Grace had made his bow. Once
a week he dined in state in the great hall of Lambeth, presiding over a
company of self-invited guests--strange perversion of the old
archiepiscopal charity to travellers and the poor--while, as Sydney
Smith said, "the domestics of the prelacy stood, with swords and
bag-wigs, round pig and turkey and venison, to defend, as it were, the
orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all
the famished children of Dissent." When Sir John Coleridge, father of
the late Lord Chief Justice, was a young man at the Bar, he wished to
obtain a small legal post in the Archbishop's Prerogative Court. An
influential friend undertook to forward his application to the
Archbishop. "But remember," he said, "in writing your letter, that his
Grace can only be approached on gilt-edged paper." Archbishop Harcourt
never went from Bishopthorpe to York Minster except attended by his
chaplains, in a coach and six, while Lady Anne was made to follow in a
pair-horse carriage, to show her that her position was not the same
thing among women that her husband's was among men. At Durham, which was
worth £40,000 a year, the Bishop, as Prince Palatine, exercised a
secular jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, and the Commission at the
Assizes ran in the name of "Our Lord the Bishop." At Ely, Bishop Sparke
gave so many of his best livings to his family that it was locally said
that you could find your way across the Fens on a dark night by the
number of little Sparkes along the road. When this good prelate secured
a residential canonry for his eldest son, the event was so much a matter
of course that he did not deem it worthy of special notice; but when he
secured a second canonry for his second son, he was so filled with pious
gratitude that, as a thank-offering, he gave a ball at the Palace of Ely
to all the county of Cambridge. "And I think," said Bishop Woodford, in
telling me the story, "that the achievement and the way of celebrating
it were equally remarkable."
This grand tradition of mingled splendour and profit ran down, in due
degree, through all ranks of the hierarchy. The poorer bishoprics were
commonly held in conjunction with a rich deanery or prebend, and not
seldom with some important living; so that the most impecunious
successor of the Apostles could manage to have four horses to his
carriage and his daily bottle of Madeira. Not so splendid as a palace,
but quite as comfortable, was a first-class deanery. A "Golden Stall" at
Durham or St. Paul's made its occupant a rich man. And even the rectors
of the more opulent parishes contrived to "live," as the phrase went,
"very much like gentleman."
The old Prince Bishops are as extinct as the dodo. The Ecclesiastical
Commission has made an end of them. Bishop Sumner of Winchester, who
died in 1874, was the last of his race. But the dignified country
clergyman, who combined private means with a rich living, did his county
business in person, and performed his religious duties by deputy,
survived into very recent times. I have known a fine old specimen of
this class--a man who never entered his church on a week-day, nor wore a
white neckcloth except on Sunday; who was an active magistrate, a keen
sportsman, an acknowledged authority on horticulture and farming; and
who boasted that he had never written a sermon in his life, but could
alter one with any man in England--which, in truth, he did so
effectively that the author would never have recognized his own
handiwork. When the neighbouring parsons first tried to get up a
periodical "clerical meeting" for the study of theology, he responded
genially to the suggestion: "Oh yes; I think it sounds a capital thing,
and I suppose we shall finish up with a rubber and a bit of supper."
The reverence in which a rector of this type was held, and the
difference, not merely of degree but of kind, which was supposed to
separate him from the inferior order of curates, were amusingly
exemplified in the case of an old friend of mine. Returning to his
parish after his autumn holiday, and noticing a woman at her cottage
door with a baby in her arms, he asked, "Has that child been baptised?"
"Well, sir," replied the curtsying mother, "I shouldn't like to say as
much as that; but your young man came and _did what he could_."
Lost in these entrancing recollections of Anglicanism as it once was,
but will never be again, I have wandered far from my theme. I began by
saying that all one has read, all one has heard, all one has been able
to collect by study or by conversation, points to the close of the
eighteenth century as the low-water mark of English religion and
morality. The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a
great revival, due chiefly to the Evangelical movement, and not only,
as in the previous century, on lines outside the Establishment, but in
the very heart and core of the Church of England. That movement, though
little countenanced by ecclesiastical authority, changed the whole tone
of religious thought and life in England. It recalled men to serious
ideas of faith and duty; it curbed profligacy, it made decency
fashionable, it revived the external usages of piety, and it prepared
the way for that later movement which, issuing from Oxford in 1833, has
transfigured the Church of England.
"I do not mean to say," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "that the founders
of the Oxford School announced, or even that they knew, to how large an
extent they were to be pupils and continuators of the Evangelical work,
besides being something else.... Their distinctive speech was of Church
and priesthood, of Sacraments and services, as the vesture under the
varied folds of which the Form of the Divine Redeemer was to be
exhibited to the world in a way capable of, and suited for, transmission
by a collective body from generation to generation. It may well have
happened that, in straining to secure for their ideas what they thought
their due place, some at least may have forgotten or disparaged that
personal and experimental life of the human soul with God which profits
by all ordinances but is tied to none, dwelling ever, through all its
varying moods, in the inner courts of the sanctuary whereof the walls
are not built with hands. The only matter, however, with which I am now
concerned is to record the fact that the pith and life of the
Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our
Lord to be the woof and warp of preaching, was the great gift of the
movement to the teaching Church, and has now penetrated and possessed it
on a scale so general that it may be considered as pervading the whole
mass."
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Lord Holland's _Memoirs of the Whig Party_, ii. p. 123.
[7] The property of Colonel Davies-Evans of Highmead.
[8] Written in 1897.
VII.
SOCIAL EQUALIZATION.
It was a characteristic saying of Talleyrand that no one could conceive
how pleasant life was capable of being who had not belonged to the
French aristocracy before the Revolution. There were, no doubt, in the
case of that great man's congeners some legal and constitutional
prerogatives which rendered their condition supremely enviable; but so
far as splendour, stateliness, and exclusive privilege are elements of a
pleasant life, he might have extended his remark to England. Similar
conditions of social existence here and in France were similarly and
simultaneously transformed by the same tremendous upheaval which marked
the final disappearance of the feudal spirit and the birth of the modern
world.
The old order passed away, and the face of human society was made new.
The law-abiding and temperate genius of the Anglo-Saxon race saved
England from the excesses, the horrors, and the dramatic incidents which
marked this period of transition in France; but though more quietly
effected, the change in England was not less marked, less momentous, or
less permanent than on the Continent. I have spoken in a former chapter
of the religious revival which was the most striking result in England
of the Revolution in France. To-day I shall say a word about another
result, or group of results, which may be summarized as Social
Equalization.
The barriers between ranks and classes were to a large extent broken
down. The prescriptive privileges of aristocracy were reduced. The
ceremoniousness of social demeanour was diminished. Great men were
content with less elaboration and display in their retinues, equipages,
and mode of living. Dress lost its richness of ornament and its
distinctive characteristics. Young men of fashion no longer bedizened
themselves in velvet, brocade, and gold lace. Knights of the Garter no
longer displayed the Blue Ribbon in Parliament. Officers no longer went
into society with uniform and sword. Bishops laid aside their wigs;
dignified clergy discarded the cassock. Coloured coats, silk stockings,
lace ruffles, and hair-powder survived only in the footmen's liveries.
When the Reform Bill of 1832 received the Royal Assent, the Lord
Bathurst of the period, who had been a member of the Duke of
Wellington's Cabinet, solemnly cut off his pigtail, saying, "Ichabod,
for the glory is departed;" and to the first Reformed Parliament only
one pigtail was returned (it pertained to Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for
Frome)--an impressive symbol of social transformation.