ABSTRACT
The Maynooth Question, which occupied so much public attention in 1845 (which Harriet Martineau remarked was ‘the great political controversy of the year—the subject on which society seemed to be going mad’) 1 in fact comprised several issues of unequal significance. As a political question, it lured the Conservative party to the point of grave division; it was a dress-rehearsal for the Com Law split in the following year. It was also an incident in the Irish policy of the great Peel ministry, a part of the general reconstitution of higher education in Ireland, and an attempt, together with the Charitable Bequests Act and the creation of the Queen’s Colleges, to conciliate moderate Catholic opinion and syphon off some quantity of O’Connell’s abundant support. In its leading tendency to readjust the relationship of Church and State, as an object lesson in what was called the national espousal of sin’, and as an experiment—which many supposed Peel intended to follow up—in the ‘concurrent endowment’ of a religious denomination out of public money, the Maynooth question was seen to involve the defence of Protestantism and the defence of the Constitution. The question may indeed be taken also, not on its own merits, but as the occasion to lay bare the workings of a great popular organization for agitation—as a sort of text-book example of the getting up of public protest in an age which, with Anti-Corn Law Leaguers, Chartists, Ten Hours’ Day operatives, and Church-rate abolitionists on every side, had an abundance of such things. It was also, perhaps with the exception of the ‘Papal Aggression’ episode in 1850, the clearest nineteenth-century demonstration of the abiding popularity of the ‘No-Popery’ cry. Those seeking an early false-start in ecumenicalism can find one here: serious attempts were made to turn the united Protestant opposition to Maynooth in 1845 into a sustained and 24permanent Evangelical organization, containing the various brands of churchmen and the whole range of dissenters who had then hastily found, not without some awkward surprise, that they had something in common—the Reformation. Again: because the question ripped open the relationship of the state to religious opinion—and especially because in the event the state was found to be proposing an extended application of public funds to religious purposes—that swelling body of radical non-conformists who were beginning to articulate their opposition to all state endowments and all religious establishments, took the opportunity, seemingly sent from above, to use the Maynooth question as a vehicle for the propagation of their ‘Voluntaryism’. This split the Protestant front, but it gave a coherence and a sense of strength to the radical nonconformists which did nothing but grow. And because the life of Gladstone was a sort of barometer of the variations in public religious policy in the nineteenth century, the Maynooth question was a point of division in his career too; ‘Mr State-conscience Gladstone’, an opponent nastily called him during one of the great London protest meetings. 2 Two-thousand delegates cheered. Gladstone himself was not unmoved by Protestant dismay at his volte face on Church-State relations. To W. F. Hook, who after intense reflection and excruciating flexibility of conscience had finally written to say that he agreed with his changed views, Gladstone was able to turn for some consolation. ‘I greatly rejoice in these slippery days,’ he replied to Hook, ‘to find myself supported by your concurrence in the question.’ 3 And as if all this was not enough, the Maynooth question led to a critical re-examination of the Act of Union with Ireland. O’Connell and his Repealers had, of course, pressed this with some urgency; but in the clammy luxuriance of 1845, a roused English opinion trying to decide whether there really had been a ‘compact’ to maintain the expense of Maynooth as part of the settlement in 1800, the construction of the Act of Union, in at least that particular, passed out of the legislative chamber and into—if not the market-place—at least the dissenting chapel and the parish church.
