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Gladstone, Lord Ripon, and the Vatican Decrees, 1874
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
In August 1874, the Marquess of Ripon, until recently a Liberal Cabinet Minister, decided to convert from the Church of England to that of Rome. The Times, which like the rest of the English political world assumed that this ended Ripon's public career, denounced the moral “obliquity” of the man who “has renounced his mental and moral freedom, and has submitted himself to the guidance of the Roman Catholic Priesthood.” In October, the former Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, asserted in an article on ritualism that the High Church position could not lead to Rome because, among other things, “no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.” Remonstrances from Catholics (among them Ripon) on the issue of civil loyalty led Gladstone to develop his position fully in a pamphlet in November, The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, which in turn provoked one of the major Church-State controversies of the century. Historians have generally assumed that Ripon's conversion was causally connected with Gladstone's outburst.” It was, but with a difference.
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References
1 The Times, September 5, 1874, p. 8.
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13 The first paragraph of Gladstone's letter does not follow any single clear line of argument, but rather sputters in a spontaneous expression of Gladstone's “stunned” immediate reactions, until he comes to the “absolute duty” of long inquiry, after which it is coherent enough. It is wonderful to see how the recognition of a “duty” can restore Gladstone's purposivencss.
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