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Church Establishment, Disestablishment and Democracy in the UK and Ireland 69 Church Establishment, Disestablishment and Democracy in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1870-1920 Keith Robbins Prelude In June 1895, a historian who had once threatened to detonate a mine when he was in Rome observing the Vatican Council in 1870 - where it was decreeing what he thought ought not to have been decreed - delivered his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History in the University of Cambridge. His text ran to seventy-four pages, the notes to fifty-seven, but the smaller print of the notes meant that they contained many words more than the lecture. No man in the England of his time had thought more about ‘church and state’ over the long European past than the lecturer, Lord Acton. No man had brooded more intently on the path to freedom, as he put it, in a country whose present was linked with the distant past to an exceptional degree. No man had felt more strongly within himself the conflict between legitimism and the desire for freedom . He read and read. He took lots of notes. As a boy he had been incarcerated with a private tutor in Edinburgh with a view to going to Cambridge. However, three of its colleges turned him down because he was a Catholic. He became a Cambridge man only on becoming a professor. It was an indication that much, though not all, had changed in the England of his lifetime with regard to diversity of religious belief and practice. This Englishman, however, was not a ‘typical Englishman’, nor, in the end, a ‘typical Catholic’. He was born in Naples and was to die at Tegernsee, Bavaria, in 1902. He was half a Rhinelander and married a Bavarian. He lived, one might say, at cross-roads. The expectations these terms aroused, experience taught him, changed with their environment. He sat in the House of Commons for six years from 1859 representing the Irish constituency of Carlow. He knew ‘Europe’ (or that part of it which ‘mattered’) better than his own country. Human society, he supposed, was in progress. Absolutism, he thought, was dead. As a Catholic, he praised English seventeenthcentury puritan Dissenters. With the Dutch, they had paved the path towards reli- Keith Robbins 70 gious liberty. ‘England’ was a country which made its adjustments piecemeal rather in the form of declaratory statements of principle. It was often difficult for foreigners to discern the scale of change in a country apparently so adept at investing old forms and institutions with new meanings. No pretence is being made here that Lord Acton is a ‘representative figure’. A cosmopolitan aristocrat turned ‘professional’ historian is too idiosyncratic (and perhaps too attractive) a phenomenon to receive that designation . Yet, for the period under consideration, his experiences and attitudes provide an intriguing way into considering ‘reform’ as viewed from the perspective of the ‘state’ in the United Kingdom in the latter decades of the century. His inner conflicts were complex, but the issues with which he was concerned were those debated by the British political, cultural and intellectual elite in a country with a variety of ecclesiastical balances and arrangements in its component parts. ‘The state’, could not be indifferent to the manifestly shifting patterns of religious allegiance and their significance for national identity and political stability. The United Kingdom, as it had existed since 1801, as Professor Brown has explained in this volume and elsewhere, was a semi-confessional state. Subjects were expected to conform to the worship and discipline of the established church in whichever historic kingdom they resided. His chapter has demonstrated the stresses and strains placed upon this expectation over subsequent decades. Even in 1801, however, expectation and reality were distinct. Dissent, as it were, was firmly ‘established’ and could not be eradicated. Dissent, however, had endemic dissidence, embracing different organisational structures and theological persuasions: Baptists, Congregationalists (Independents ), Presbyterians (in England) and the new and fissiparous phenomenon of Methodism, to which might be added Unitarians and Quakers. Ever since 1732, elected laymen from London congregations of the first three bodies, the ‘Protestant Dissenting Deputies’, had worked diligently to protect the Civil Rights of Dissenters and to protest against the restrictions and exclusions which still applied to them. Religious Dissent could be equated with political dissent, though not universally. The tide of the time, as the previous chapter has made clear, appeared to be with them. There were still matters - for example...

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