=Source.=—_The Life of Lord Palmerston_, by the Hon. Evelyn
Ashley, vol. i., p. 245. (London: 1876.)
_Lord Palmerston to his Brother. January 27, 1851._
The Papal aggression question will give us some trouble, and give rise
to stormy debates. Our difficulty will be to find out a measure which
shall satisfy reasonable Protestants without violating those principles
of liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we shall
succeed. But all the newspaper stories of divisions in the Cabinet
on this or any other question are pure inventions, wholly devoid of
any foundation. The Pope, I hear, and the people about him by whom at
present he is guided, affect to treat lightly the excitement which his
measures have produced in this country, and they represent the clamour
as a thing got up by the Church—a parson agitation. They deceive
themselves; the feeling is general and intense all through the nation,
and the sensible Catholics themselves lament what has been done.
The thing itself, in truth, is little or nothing, and does not
justify the irritation. What has goaded the nation is the manner,
insolent and ostentatious, in which it has been done. The Catholics
have a right to organise their Church as they like; and if staff
officers called Bishops were thought better than staff officers called
Vicars-Apostolic, nobody would have remarked or objected to the change
if it had been made quietly and only in the bosom of the Church. But
what offended—and justly—all England, was the Pope’s published
Allocution and Wiseman’s announcement of his new dignities; the first
representing England as a land of benighted heathens; the second
proclaiming that the Pope had parcelled out England into districts—a
thing that only a Sovereign has a right to do—and that he, Wiseman,
and others were sent, and to be sent to govern those territorial
districts, with titles belonging thereto.