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Bourne, Norfolk and the Irish Parliamentarians: Roman Catholics and the Education Bill of 19061

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

V. Alan McClelland
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Extract

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , October 1996 , pp. 228 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1996

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Footnotes

1

This article is based upon a paper read at the sixty-fifth Anglo-American Conference of Historians on the theme ‘Religion and Society’, held at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 3–5 July 1996.

References

Notes

2 The Tablet, 5 January 1935.

3 ‘Some Personal Impressions’ by the Rt. Hon. Viscount FitzAlan, K. G. Broadcast on 4 January 1935.

4 The Month, February 1935, p. 97.

5 Alban Goodier, S. J., in The Month, ibidem.

6 Leader in The Times, 2 January 1935.

7 Adrian, Hastings, A History of English Catholicism 1920–1985 (Collins, London 1986) pp. 273–274.Google Scholar

8 Edward, Norman, Roman Catholicism in England (OUP, 1985), p. 111.Google Scholar

9 Sapienti Consilio of Pius X, 1908. Canon Law had to wait for its detailed application in England until ten years later with the promulgation of the Codex Juris Canonici (1918).

10 Westminster Diocesan Achives (WDA), Vaughan to Propaganda, 29 January 1903.

11 See McClelland, V. A., ‘The “Free Schools” Issue and the General Election of 1885: A Denominational Response’ in History of Education, 5, 2, 1976, pp. 141–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Manning, H. E., ‘Is the Education Act of 1870 A Just Law?’ (1882). Reprinted in Manning, Miscellanies, vol. III, (London, 1877–88), pp. 5–20.Google Scholar

13 Snead-Cox, J. G., The Life of Cardinal Vaughan (Burns and Oates, London, 2 vols, 1910), 11, p. 89.Google Scholar

14 Henry, Parkinson, A Primer of Social Science (King & C.S.G., London & Oxford, 1936 ed). Earliereditions were published in 1913, 1919, 1920, 1922 and (after the author's death) 1926. The quotation is from p. 27.Google Scholar

15 WDA, Vaughan to Propaganda, 29 January 1903.

16 Ibidem.

17 Marjorie, Cruickshank, Church & State in English Education: 1870 to the Present Day (Macmillan, London, 1963), p. 86.Google Scholar

18 The Month, February 1935, p. 111.

19 Purcell, E. S., Life of Cardinal Manning (Macmillan, London, 1895, 2 vols.), 11, p. 631.Google Scholar

20 Davidson had married the daughter of the archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait who died in 1882 but there were no children of the marriage. Davidson's relationship with Archbishop Benson who died in 1896 was also close, although not so with Frederick Temple whom he succeededat Canterbury.

21 Cruickshank, op. cit, p. 88.

22 Dingle, R. J., Cardinal Bourne at Westminster (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London, 1934, 1934), p. 14.Google Scholar

23 WDA, Communication of Mgr. William Brown, 13 February 1917.

24 Ibidem.

25 Acta, Annual Meeting of the Bishops, 7 June 1904, Part 111 Education. Resolution 1.

26 Acta, Meeting of Bishops, 18 October 1904.

27 Ibidem. The bishops also insisted that Holy Days of Obligation were to be times in which Catholic schools should be closed.

28 Ibidem.

29 Leaflet on the London County Council Elections, Saturday March 5th 1904: An Extract from the Archbishop's Pastoral.

30 Ibidem.

31 Ibidem.

32 Francis, Bourne, Education and Morality (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London, 1929), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

33 Benjamin, Sachs, The Religious Issue in the State Schools of England & Wales 1902–1914 (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1961), p. 189.Google Scholar

34 Bourne's Lenten Pastoral Letter of 1906.

35 Pamela, J. Mackenzie: ‘A Critical Analysis of the Christian School Movement in England & Wales’, Ph.D thesis, University of Reading, 1994, p. 144.Google Scholar

36 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 6 December 1904.

37 Ibidem.

38 WDA, Acta of the meeting of the Bishops, 14 February 1905.

39 WDA, letter of Boume to each bishop of the Province, 13 April 1905.

40 Ibidem. Most of the lay members were nominated by diocesan authorities. It is noteworthy that the episcopal nominees numbered ten clerics out of a total of sixteen. The bishops who nominated laymen were the bishops of Welsh sees (John Cuthbert Hedley OSB, of Newport and Francis Mostyn of Menevia, together with the bishop of Shrewsbury, Samuel W. Allen), the bishop of Portsmouth (John Baptist Cahill). the bishop of Leeds (William Gordon) and the bishop of Plymouth (Charles Graham). Among the gentry named by diocesan associations were Norfolk (Westminster), the Earl of Denbigh (Birmingham), Fitzherbert-Brockholes (Liverpool), Lord Hemes (Middlesbrough), Lord Howard of Glossop (Nottingham), Lord Edmund Talbot (Southwark) and Viscount Southwell (Menevia).

41 Viscount Grey of Falloden: Twenty Five Years, 1892–1916 (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1925, 2 vols). 1, p. 66.Google Scholar

42 A good account of the main issues can be found in Asa Briggs “The Political Scene’ in Simon, Nowell-Smith (ed.): Edwardian England 1901–1914, (OUP, 1964), pp. 68 Google Scholar et.seq.

43 Ibidem, p. 71.

44 WDA, Acta. Meeting of the Bishops, 19 December 1905.

45 Grey, op. cit, p. 65.

46 WDA, document BOI/179, 1906.

47 WDA, Statement of London Municipal Society, 4 December 1906.

48 Birrell, A., Things Past Redress (1937). p. 189.Google Scholar

49 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne and the bishops, 30 January 1907.

50 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 6 January 1907.

51 Laurence Eyres was to write shortly after Roland Knox's death in 1926: “There was just one visitor (to St. Edmund's College) and he the most distinguished of them all, in whose company Ronnie's shyness persisted to the end. Only last year several of us heard him say “I was always terrified of Cardinal Bourne”!’ (Laurence, Eyres, Mgr. Roland Knox: Some Edmundian Memories, privately printed, n.d. but probably 1927), p. 1 Google Scholar Roland Knox became a Catholic in 1917.

52 Mackenzie, op. cit, p. 64.

53 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne and the bishops, 30 January 1907.

54 Ibidem.

55 Ibidem.

56 WDA, Bourne's Lenten Pastoral Letter, 1906. See also: Sacks, op. cit, pp. 189 et seq, and Reynolds, E. E.: The Roman Catholic Church in England & Wales: A Short History. (Anthony Clarke, London, 1973), pp. 355–356.Google Scholar

57 Edmund Talbot was 41 years old and Norfolk's surviving brother. He took the name of Talbot in connection with the will of the seventeenth Earl of Shrewsbury. In 1905 he had been a junior lord of the treasury and he had been an intimate friend of Cardinal Vaughan. He was a great entertainer of Tory cabinet ministers throughout his long life. Created a peer in 1921 on his appointment as first (albeit short-lived) Catholic Viceroy of Ireland, he lived until he was almost ninety-two, not dying until 1947.

58 WDA Norfolk to Bourne and the bishops 30 January 1907.

59 WDA, Memorandum by Mgr. William Brown to Archbishop Bourne, 13 February 1907.

60 Sacks, op. cit, p. 183.

61 WDA, Norfollk to Bourne and the bishops, 30 January 1907. There were thirty-four Catholic peers who were members of the House of Lords at this time. In addition to the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquess of Bute and the Marquess of Ripon there were five earls (Abingdon, Ashburnham, Denbigh, Gainsborough and Westmeath), a viscount (Llandaff) and twenty-five barons (Acton, Arundell, Bellew, Brampton, Braye, Camoys, Clifford, de Freyre, Dormer, Emly, Fingall, Gerard, Gormanston, Granard, Hemes, Howard of Glossop, Kenmare, Killanin, Lovat, Mowbray and Stourton, North, O'Brien of Kilfenora, Petre, Stafford, Vaux).

62 WDA, Memorandum of Mgr. William Brown to Archbishop Bourne, 13 February 1907. It was thought that less than thirty Catholic schools would be at risk under the new proposals.

63 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne and the bishops, 30 January 1907.

64 Ibidem.

65 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne, 2 January 1907.

66 Ibidem.

67 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 3 January 1907.

68 Ibidem.

69 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne and the bishops, 30 January 1907.

70 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne, 5 January 1907.

71 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 7 January 1907.

72 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 6 January 1907.

73 Ibidem

74 Ibidem.

75 Ibidem.

76 Ibidem.

77 Briggs, op. rit, p. 95.

78 WDA, Memorandum to the bishops from Norfolk headed ‘Memorandum re Deputation to the Marquis of Lansdowne’, dated 30 January 1907.

79 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 6 January 1907.

80 Ibidem.

81 WDA, Talbot to Bourne, 9 March 1907.

82 WDA, Bourne to Talbot, 12 March 1907.

83 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 6 January 1907.

84 WDA, Norfolk to Bourne, 8 January 1907.

85 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 10 January 1907.

86 WDA, Norfolk to Boume, 12 January 1907.

87 Ibidem.

88 WDA, Bourne to Norfolk, 18 January 1907.

89 Ibidem.

90 Ibidem.

91 Ibidem.

92 WDA, Letter of Bourne to each individual bishop, 4 January 1907.

93 Nigel, Abercromby: The Life and Works of Edmund Bishop (Longmans, London, 1919), p. 366.Google Scholar

94 WDA, Burton to Boume, 5 January 1907.

95 Ibidem.

96 WDA, Burton to Norfolk, 3 January 1907 (handwritten copy from Burton).

97 Ibidem.

98 Ibidem.

99 Ibidem.

100 Ibidem.

101 Ibidem.

102 WDA, Norfolk to Burton, 5 January 1907.

103 WDA, Bourne to the bishops of Clifton, Salford and Birmingham, 7 January 1907.

104 Ibidem.

105 WDA, Bishop Edward Ilsley to Bourne, 4 January 1907.

106 WDA, Bishop Allen to Boume, 4 January 1907.

107 WDA, Bourne's written endorsement on Allen's letter of 4 January 1907.

108 WDA, Bishop Louis Charles Casartelli of Salford to Boume, 6 January 1907.

109 Ibidem.

110 Ibidem.

111 WDA, Bishop Robert Brindle of Nottingham, 8 April 1907.

112 Ibidem.

113 Ibidem.

114 Ibidem.