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Engaging the Liberal State II: Cardinal Manning and the Royal Commission of 1886
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2021
Abstract
As Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning had been much involved in negotiations over the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (Forster’s Act), which aimed at establishing a national system of elementary education. By the early 1880s, Manning was dissatisfied with the operation of the Act, because the secular board schools, financed from rates, had become substantial competitors with the voluntary denominational schools, which were supposed to be the backbone of the system. This established, in effect, a dual system of secular and denominational education, which Manning believed the Act had never envisioned. He lobbied for a Royal Commission to amend the Act, which Lord Salisbury granted in 1886 (the Cross Commission), with Manning as a member. In his work on the Commission, Manning was motivated by three principles, which he believed were critical for the engagement of religious bodies with the liberal state. The first was cross-denominational collaboration in support of religious education. The second was voluntarism so as to prevent state control. The third was localism as opposed to centralization, which was eventually realized with the creation of County Councils by the Local Government Act of 1888, upon whom the supervision of schools eventually devolved.
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- © Trustees of the Catholic Record Society 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Henry Edward Manning was Archbishop of Westminster 1865-1892, and created cardinal 1875.
2 William Edward Forster, (1818-1886), Liberal MP 1861-1886, and vice-president of the Council in William Gladstone’s first administration, 1868-1874; also Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1880-1882. See Patrick Jackson, Education Act Forster (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997).
3 For Manning’s involvement in the Act, see V.A. McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), especially chapter III, ‘The Act of 1870 and its Consequences’, 61-86; D.E. Selby, ‘Henry Edward Manning and the Education Bill of 1870’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 18:2 (June, 1970): 197-212; Jeffrey von Arx, ‘Cardinal Manning and His Political Persona: The Education Act of 1870’, in Sheridan Gilley, ed. Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland (Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society, 2005), 1-11; Eric G. Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 71-87. Manning had been willing to forego rate aid for denominational schools in order that they not be subject to inspection and supervision by the local boards. He distrusted such supervision due to his unfortunate experiences of the anti-Catholicism of local bodies like the Poor Law Guardians in his efforts to rescue Catholic children from the workhouses.
4 D.E. Selby, Towards a Common System of National Education: Cardinal Manning and Educational Reform, 1882-1892 (Leeds: Educational Administration and History: Monograph no. 6, 1977), 1.
5 Ibid., 2.
6 Ibid., 3.
7 Manning, ‘Is the Education Act of 1870 a Just Law?’ The Nineteenth Century 12 (December 1882): 962. Also in Manning, Miscellanies (London: Burns and Oates, 1888), 3:11.
8 Manning, ‘Pastoral Letter on the Feast of the Sacred Heart [6 June] 1880’, St. Edmund’s College Archives, 15/10, 11a in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, 5.
9 Manning to Herbert Vaughan, 8 June 1882, 210 in Vaughan Correspondence, Manning Papers, Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster.
10 Manning, ‘Pastoral Letter, Feast of the Sacred Heart, [18 June] 1882’, Archives of St. Edmund’s College, 15/10, 13, in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, 3.
11 Ibid., 4-5.
12 Sir Richard Assheton (later 1st Viscount) Cross (1823-1914), Conservative politician, Home Secretary 1874-1880, 1885-1886.
13 Manning to Cross, November 1, 1882, Cross Papers, British Library, Ad. Mss. 51, 273, ff. 159-160, quoted in D.E. Selby, ‘Cardinal Manning and Free Education, 1885-1891’, in K. Dent, ed. Victorian Education (History of Education Occasional Publications, 2, 1976), 24. See also Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902, 104.
14 Manning, ‘Is the Education Act of 1870 a Just Law?’ 959, Miscellanies, 3:4.
15 Ibid., 959, Miscellanies, 3:5.
16 Ibid. Miscellanies, 3:6.
17 Ibid ., 960, Miscellanies, 3:6.
18 See Selby, ‘Cardinal Manning and Free Education, 1885-1891’, 24-33, for Manning’s opposition to Chamberlain’s proposals for free education in the ‘unauthorized Programme’ of 1885 and his final, unwilling acquiescence in the Free Education Act of 1891 passed by Lord Salisbury’s ministry.
19 Ibid ., 26-27.
20 Manning, ‘Is the Education Act of 1870 a Just Law?’ 966, Miscellanies, 3:18. There was, of course, a reason internal to the Roman Catholic community in Great Britain that made voluntarism in education so important. As Tenbus argues so convincingly, it was the campaign to assure an elementary education for the increasing number of Catholic children (due to Irish immigration) that was the most important cause in uniting the disparate English Catholic community: poor Irish immigrants, Old Catholic aristocrats and gentry and new converts. Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902. It was also, as we shall see, the most important place where the English hierarchy engaged the mostly Catholic MPs of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
21 Manning, ‘Religion and the Rates’, The Nineteenth Century, 13 (February 1883): 322. Also published in Miscellanies under the title ‘The Working of the Education Act of 1870 Unequal: Therefore Unjust’, 3:40.
22 Ibid .
23 Ibid ., 323, Miscellanies, 3:42.
24 Manning, ‘Is the Christianity of England Worth Preserving?’ The Nineteenth Century, 13 (April 1883): 618. Also published in Manning, Miscellanies, 3:51. Manning is quoting the observations of the American, Richard Grant White (1822-1885), prominent literary and social critic. Richard Grant White, ‘The Public School Failure’, North American Review, December 1880.
25 Ibid ., 623, Miscellanies, 3:60.
26 Ibid .
27 See his ‘Caesarism and Ultramontanism’, an address to the Academia of the Catholic Religion, delivered on 23 December 1873, as a response to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, published in Manning, Miscellanies (London: Burns and Oates, 1877) 2:115-162. This stimulated a controversy with Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) the noted jurist, in the pages of the Contemporary Review. See Jeffrey von Arx, ‘Archbishop Manning and the Kulturkampf’, Recusant History, 21, 2 (October 1992): 254-266.
28 See especially the controversy with William Gladstone over the Vatican Decrees. Jeffrey von Arx, ‘Interpreting the Council: Archbishop Manning and the Vatican Decrees Controversy’, Recusant History, 26, 1 (May 2002): 229-242.
29 Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), British statesman, who began his political career as a radical Liberal, became a Liberal Unionist over the Home Rule issue in 1886, in coalition with the Conservative party for the rest of his career. He was President of the Board of Trade 1880-1885.
30 ‘Is the Christianity of England Worth Preserving?”, 629-30, Miscellanies, 3:70-71.
31 Ibid ., 632-33, Miscellanies, 3:76.
32 Ibid ., 633-34, Miscellanies, 3:78.
33 Manning, ‘How Shall Catholics Vote in the Coming Parliamentary Election?’ Dublin Review (1885), 411, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System of National Education, 4. Manning’s effort was, of course, part of a much larger effort on the part of the Catholic bishops in England, which he helped to coordinate, to bring the education issue to the attention of Catholic voters in England and encourage them to vote Conservative. See Vincent Alan McClelland, ‘The “Free School” Issue and the General Election of 1885: A Denominational Response’, in History of Education 5, 2 (1976): 141-154.
34 For this question and the election of 1885 in general, see Dermot Quinn, Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 145 and ‘Appendix: Constituency Catholicism’, 217-255; also C.H.D. Howard, ‘The Parnell Manifesto of 21 November 1885 and the Schools Question’, English Historical Review, 29 (January 1947): 42-51. See also von Arx, ‘Engaging the liberal state: Cardinal Manning and Irish home rule’, British Catholic History 35, 1 (May 2020), 49-53.
35 Eric G. Tenbus points out that the election of 1885 was ‘a convergence of the education and Irish questions on the same side for the first time.’ English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902, 112. He goes on to show how, after Manning’s death, and especially under his successor, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, cooperation between the Old Catholic, Conservative Vaughan and the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, especially John Dillon and T.P. O’Connor, advanced the cause of Catholic education in England toward its final resolution in 1902, when ‘the nearly complete unity on education … represents a high water mark in Catholic cooperation.’ 132-5, 143-4, 153-4, quote at 153.
36 D. E. Selby, Towards a Common System of National Education: Cardinal Manning and Educational Reform, 1882-1892 (Leeds: Museum of the History of Education, 1977) and Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902, 114-116.
37 See von Arx, ‘Cardinal Manning and his Political Persona’, 7.
38 The reform of local government aimed to replace the ancient administration of the counties by justices of the peace at quarter session with democratically elected county councils. The other important incentive for local government reform was the desire to centralize at the county level the operation of a plethora of ad hoc local boards and commissions in such areas as public health, roads and - significantly - education. The movement to reform local government culminated in the Local Government Act of 1888. See Kingsley Bryce Smellie, A History of Local Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), Bryan Keith-Lucas, English Local Government in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Historical Association, 1977).
39 Manning’s ‘Secret. To Amend the Education Act of 1870,’ is quoted extensively in Selby, Towards a Common System. This document was in the Manning Papers and available to Selby when he prepared his study in the 1970s. It is not extant in that portion of the Manning Papers that have been returned to the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster and is presumably in the collection of Manning Papers taken from England to France by the late Abbe Alphonse Chapeau and still not available to scholars. See Selby, Towards a Common System, 9.
40 Manning, ‘Secret. To Amend the Education Act of 1870’, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 10.
41 Salisbury was not the only person to whom Manning expressed himself on the dangers of centralization and his fear that Chamberlain might become the English Gambetta. On Good Friday, 30 March 1888, he wrote to Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, ‘the County Bill will, I hope, decentralize education and protect us from a French Gambetta Chamberlaine [sic] Government Atheism’. Manning to Ullathorne, Ullathorne Correspondence, Manning Papers, # 327; also quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 11.
42 Ibid .
43 Selby, Towards a Common System, 11. See C.C. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880-1890, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 95. Manning’s role in the affair of Chamberlain’s Central Board scheme and his reasons for supporting it are described in von Arx, ‘Engaging the Liberal State’, 49-53.
44 Selby, Towards a Common System, 14-15.
45 Thomas William Allies (1813-1903), convert (1850), historian of the early church. As longtime secretary to the Catholic Poor School Committee (1853-1890), he was probably the most influential layman in the cause of Catholic education. See a forthcoming biography of Allies by Michael Trott.
46 Selby, Towards a Common System, 17.
47 Allies, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 18.
48 Sir Francis (later Lord) Sandford (1824-1893), Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Committee of Council on Education (1870-1884).
49 Selby, Towards a Common System, 24-26; Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902, 115.
50 Selby, Towards a Common System, 26-27.
51 Selby quotes the relevant Acta of the hierarchy from their annual Low Week meeting: ‘The Bishops concurred in believing that the control of Education will hereafter be largely transferred to the County Councils, and were of the opinion that justice required that the Voluntary Schools shall partake of the Education Rate. And, inasmuch as it is certain that the local ratepayers will claim some share or guarantee in the administration of the Schools, the appointment of Committees of Management on which some member or members will be appointed by the County Councils.’ Selby, Towards a Common System, 36-27. See also Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902, 115.
52 Cross Commission, Final Report, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 29.
53 Manning, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate’, in The Fortnightly Review, XLV, new series (1 May 1889): 753.
54 Manning was deeply involved in both temperance reform as founder of the Catholic temperance association, the League of the Cross, and in the amelioration of the living conditions of the poor. He was a member of the 1884 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. On the former, see A.E. Dingle and B.H. Harrison, ‘Cardinal Manning as Temperance Reformer,’ in The Historical Journal, 12, 3 (1969): 485-510; on the latter, see McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence 1865-1892, 137 ff.
55 Manning, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate’, 755.
56 Ibid.
57 See Selby, Towards a Common System, 7ff., 27ff.
58 Ibid, 28.
59 Edward Lyulph Stanley, 4th Baron Stanley of Aderley (1839-1925), Liberal MP 1880-1885, House of Lords 1903-1925.
60 Stanley to Manning, October 11, 1888, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 37-38.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 41.
63 Manning, ‘Fifty Reasons why the Voluntary Schools of England ought to share in the School Rates’, quoted in Selby, Towards a Common System, 41.
64 Ibid., 50.
65 Ibid., 51.
66 Ibid, 52.
67 On the ‘desecration’ or secularization of society from Manning’s point of view, see von Arx, ‘Manning’s Ultramontanism and the Catholic Church in British Politics’, Recusant History 19:3 (May 1989): 332-347.
68 Manning, ‘The Education Commission and the School Rate’, 749-750.