ABSTRACT
Religion and the Church of England, as the Established Church, were central to mid-Victorian Conservatism. They were also fundamental to the thinking of the two most prominent Conservatives of the 1850s and 1860s, Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli. Both saw the Anglican Church as an integral part of the constitution and essential to the life of the nation.
For Derby, the Church and its liturgy safeguarded the moral character of the nation as the bedrock of its institutions. Instructed in evangelical Anglicanism by his mother as a boy, he published Conversations on the Parables in 1828 and The Miracles of Our Lord Explained in 1839. However, his defence of the Church establishment never hardened into harsh Protestant bigotry. He never regretted his vote, as a young Whig, for Catholic Emancipation in 1829, although his hope that the measure would attach Catholic subjects in Ireland more firmly to the Union was disappointed. As party leader, he opposed exciting Protestant prejudice as a Conservative rallying cry. He defended the Maynooth Grant against the hostile motions of the ultra-Protestant Conservative backbencher Richard Spooner during the 1850s. The vehemently anti-Catholic National Club, largely Conservative in membership, he regarded as ‘a mischievous body whose extreme pretensions and views must not be encouraged’ (Derby to Disraeli, 15 November 1853, Derby Mss., 920 DER (14) 182/1). The passions of ultra-Protestant Conservative MPs such as Charles Newdegate, William Beresford, and Richard Spooner were to be discouraged, he insisted in 1853, ‘by the negative means of avoiding in debate, or in meetings of the party, language which may unnecessarily frossier their … views’ (Ibid.).
Yet, for Derby, the British national identity was rooted in the Reformation, when Papal authority was cast off. The Protestant constitution was enshrined in the monarch as both ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England and head of state. The Providential blessings of Britain’s stability and ordered freedoms were embodied in the Anglican Church. Derby believed that all Protestant and Catholic British subjects should have full and free exercise of their religion. Nevertheless, the status of the Church of England as the Established Church was fundamental to institutional stability and social order. His ideal of ecclesiastical preferment embodied scholarly clergy of moderate views, inclining to Low Church sympathies. While prime minister, he assured the Queen that he held ‘as strong an objection to the Ritualist clergy as Her Majesty’ (Derby to General Grey, 19 October 1867, Derby Mss., 920 DER (14) 194/1).
Although discounted by some recent scholars, religious faith was also central to Disraeli’s thinking. However, his mind engaged with the philosophical discussion of religion, rather than dogma. He rejected rigid doctrinal dispute fostering sectarianism and religious factionalism. Rather, he believed that the individual and the nation were incomplete without God and recognition of the moral duties and stewardship each member of society owed to others. Disraeli and his father, Isaac D’Israeli, wrote about the vital role of religious faith to the health of a nation. Doctrine, as peoples evolved, was amended, but transcendent religious truths were intrinsic to the well-being of society. The nation, defined by its distinct historical experience, was a moral entity. In 1835, Disraeli declared religion and the future welfare of the people to be of greater importance to the English nation than their political condition.
Amid the pervasive theological controversy and intellectual contention of the nineteenth century, preserving England’s religious faith through the Church of England was a major theme in Disraeli’s novels, writings in which Byronic Romanticism, his study of Jewish history, the quest for genius, and his belief in England as a great ordained nation, came together. The moral void of Utilitarianism and scientific materialism, as he saw it, and sectarian disputes splitting society were the threats to be determinedly resisted. His ‘Young England’ trilogy of the 1840s elaborated the necessity of faith to political stewardship and wisdom. His 1870 novel Lothair portrayed the requirement of belief to face down the forces of irreligion and unbelief. Disraeli’s novels also explored the potency of religious belief in shaping leaders, societies, and nations, within narratives influenced by Old Testament accounts of exile, redemption, and kingship, the great leader, possessing spiritual insight, rising up and delivering the nation back to truth.
For Disraeli, the Jews offered the prototypical example of a people whose religion gave them an enduring identity and a sacred place in human history. Divine revelation was granted to the ancient Jews. Through them God had entered the human narrative. The Jewish theocracy had been the core of their traditional institutions, rituals, and religious practice. Disraeli saw a theological continuity between Judaism and Christianity. The fundamental Jewishness of Christianity was a theme in Chapter 24 of Disraeli’s 1852 biography of Lord George Bentinck. Medieval Catholicism, before the Reformation, also represented, for Disraeli, a venerable creed promoting unity and concord. Embodying reverence, mysticism, and faithfulness to ritual and tradition, it supported a moral stewardship towards society upheld by an elite aware of the duties inherent in privileged status. For his contemporaries Disraeli saw the Church of England as the sacred constitutional embodiment of the same religious truth, safeguarding the moral basis of English society.
A baptised and practising Anglican, Disraeli regarded the England of his day as a nation, like the Jews, blessed by Providence. England was the Israel of his imagination, its Anglican constitution shaped by its historic identity. Like the Jews, the English were a ‘chosen’ people with a sacred constitution. Land, the soil of England, and aristocracy buttressed the Providential status of the nation. The link between the Anglican faith and the soil of England was indissoluble. Land ownership, the basis of the territorial constitution, he asserted, was a form of religious inheritance. Just as the Holy Land held the key to the religious revelation imparted to the Jews, the geographic genius of place, so the soil of England rooted the moral identity of the English race. For Disraeli the term ‘race’ was synonymous with ‘people’ and ‘nation’. It was a cultural historical concept, not a biological or genetic construction. Like ‘people’ and ‘nation’, it brought together an historic cluster of cultural characteristics. Racial differences comprised, he believed, variations in spiritual and religious capacity. Influenced by scripture, it formed part of the larger Providential narrative framing England’s special status as a ‘chosen people’.
The nineteenth century saw the urgent attempt to revitalise the Church of England, marking a remarkable institutional and spiritual revival. This was accompanied by increasing tensions between the Protestant, Catholic, and liberal traditions within Anglicanism, the Evangelical revival and the Oxford Movement. From the 1840s to the 1870s theological controversy, especially the rise of scientific materialism and the impact of German Biblical criticism, increasingly occupied Disraeli’s thinking on religion. A concern that was prompted by Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, English translations of David Strauss’s Life of Christ and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Francis Newman’s The Soul, W. R. Greg’s The Creed of Christendom, the liberal Anglicanism of Essays and Reviews (1860), and Bishop Colenso’s disputing of the authenticity of the Pentateuch in 1860. The authors of Essays and Reviews refuted the existence of miracles, denied the doctrine of eternal punishment, and proposed that the Bible be studied as a book like any other. The subsequent controversy, Disraeli lamented, rendered the state of the Anglican Church critical, from dissension and heresy among its own children, handing the Church over to narrow-minded and ignorant fanaticism.
An important part of Disraeli’s practical religious faith, inextricably bound up with his sense of social order, moral duty, and political stewardship, was rooted in the parish of his country house at Hughenden. When at Hughenden he regularly attended services and received communion. He exercised with care his patronage of the living at Hughenden. The rituals and responsibilities of parish life constituted an integral part of his vision of himself as a benevolent conscientious landowner and gentleman. Disraeli requested that, after his death, he be buried at Hughenden Church. Since the 1830s, however, the Anglican parochial system had been the object of a sustained parliamentary campaign by Nonconformists to abolish Church rates: a parish tax levied on all occupiers of land or a house for the benefit of the Anglican parish church. In July 1859 leading Liberals such as Palm-erston, Russell, and the Home Secretary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, declared their support for the abolition of Church rates. The conversion of such prominent national politicians to the cause of Church rates abolition added to Disraeli’s sense of crisis concerning the standing of the Established Church, striking at its parochial foundations that were woven into the fabric of local communities.
In the 1860s, Disraeli embarked on a full-scale rebuttal of scientific materialism and Anglican sectarianism, calls for the disestablishment of the Church, and unbelief. He campaigned for a faithful nation and a robust Church–State alliance. Supported by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, he delivered a series of speeches calling for a unified Church, and diocesan and parochial reform. In a speech at Aylesbury in November 1861, he declared the Church in danger from German Biblical criticism, the heretical arguments in Essays and Reviews, and the call for disestablishment. At High Wycombe in October 1862, he proposed a strengthening of the Church as a national institution by continuing its influence over education, by an extension of the Episcopate, by increasing the lay presence in the Church’s administration, by maintaining the existing parochial system, and by giving its clergy sufficient remuneration. His call to fortify the Anglican Church as the sacred depository of Divine truth culminated in his ‘Apes and Angels’ speech, delivered at the Oxford Sheldonian Theatre in November 1864. In the debate on whether man was ‘an ape or an angel’, he pronounced, ‘My Lord, I am on the side of the angels’.
