The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Vol. 1-4). Robert Thomas Wilson

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      MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD, FROM THE CHERWELL.

      at War, Lord Ellenborough President of the Board of Control, and the Duke of Wellington leader of the House of Lords, without office. These were the principal appointments, and they constituted a Government of considerable ability. The chief strength of the new Cabinet, however, lay in Sir Robert Peel himself. During his former short-lived Government, in 1834-5, he had combined the functions of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was hoped that this arrangement would now be repeated; but the inferior office, as we have seen, was conferred on Mr. Goulburn. Still, it was well known that Peel would be the directing financial genius of the Administration. His abilities as a financier were generally admitted, and have probably never been surpassed. If the country was to be dragged out of the abyss of its ever-increasing embarrassments, Peel was the man most likely to perform the feat. But the deficit was alarming, and, shortly after the reassembling of Parliament, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he must ask for a vote of £2,500,000, adding that he would in time state how he proposed to meet the existing deficiency. In the meanwhile, the distress of the working classes was becoming every day more intense, and in the manufacturing districts great dissatisfaction was expressed that Sir Robert Peel not only refused to adopt Free Trade in its integrity, but even repudiated Lord John Russell’s project for a small fixed duty upon corn. Peel favoured what was known in those days as the Sliding Scale, by which foreign wheat was allowed to be imported at a variable duty,—greater when the price of home-grown wheat was low, and lower when the price was high. The truth is that neither the Whigs nor the Tories had made up their minds to accept the principles of Free Trade, while both sought to postpone the threatened day by contrivances more or less objectionable, and more or less futile. But the General Election had returned to Parliament a man who in the course of a few years was to carry the Free Trade banner triumphantly on to the Treasury benches themselves. Richard Cobden now sat for the first time in Parliament, and his “unadorned eloquence,” as Peel afterwards called it, was soon to produce an immense effect upon the minds of those who heard him.

      Among the many sources of agitation existing at that time, none was more remarkable, or in some respects more important, than the High Church movement, which had originated several years before, but which in 1841 was beginning to assume grave proportions. This turmoil of the religious mind had first shown itself in the University of Oxford towards the latter end of the reign of George IV. A number of enthusiastic young students—men of great mental power, and of unquestionable sincerity—began to be dissatisfied with the position, doctrine, and ceremonial of the Church for which they were being prepared, or which they had already entered. They considered that that Church had abnegated some of its most valuable functions; that it was lax in its ideas, somnolent in its teaching, forgetful of tradition, slovenly in its ritual, and indifferent to its authoritative powers. There had in truth been a good deal of dull and formal worldly-mindedness amongst the clergy for the last hundred years; but it must not be forgotten that this period of repose had had inestimable advantages in the softening of dogma, the development of toleration, and the growth of independent thought. To the Oxford ecclesiologists, however, these very circumstances were amongst the heaviest indictments which they brought against the Church as it was then constituted. They had grand visions of Apostolical succession, and certainly suggested, if they did not precisely state, that no one would be entitled to differ from the Church, if the Church were only reformed according to their ideas. Curious inquirers trace back the beginning of this movement to the lectures of Bishop Lloyd on the Prayer Book and the Council of Trent, which were delivered when he was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, about 1823. But, whatever impulse he may have given to subsequent speculations, Dr. Lloyd does not appear among the leaders of the great movement which afterwards shook the religious world of England to its centre. Those leaders were the Rev. John Keble, author of “The Christian Year,” and Fellow of Oriel; the Rev. J. H. Newman (now Cardinal Newman); the Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude (who, with Newman, was also a Fellow of Oriel); the Rev. E. B. Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christchurch; and the Rev. Isaac Williams, Fellow of Trinity, and author of “The Cathedral, and Other Poems.” Cambridge contributed the services of the Rev. Hugh Rose; but, on the whole, the sister University was little affected by the new ideas.

      The founders of the modern High Church were not long in using the press as the most effectual method of propagating their opinions. They issued a series of papers called “Tracts for the Times,” of which ninety numbers were published between the years 1833 and 1841; and articles to the same effect were also published in the British Critic. These manifestoes produced an extraordinary effect on a large portion of the clergy, and a certain number of the laity; but at the same time they aroused the bitterest opposition amongst numerous classes of churchmen and churchgoers. It was alleged that some of the most distinctive doctrines of the Romish Church were ostentatiously paraded by the reformers as irrefragable and indispensable doctrines of the English Church; though, in some instances at least, these doctrines might be fairly inferred from the Articles and the Prayer Book. What perhaps gave more offence than anything else was the scorn and hatred with which the Tractarians, as they were soon called, repudiated the word “Protestant,” as if it necessarily involved the most detestable of heresies. They called themselves “Anglicans,” and would admit no other description. The most bigoted of Romish divines could hardly have regarded Luther with greater dislike than was manifested by the more extreme members of the school. The days of the Reformation were stigmatised by High Church enthusiasts as days of degradation and wickedness, and every form of Dissent was an invention of the devil. All these vagaries induced many persons, who argued rather through the medium of their alarm and anger than by means of their reason, to believe that the Tractarians were consciously and designedly preparing the way for a return to Roman Catholicism. With some, indeed—notably with Mr. J. H. Newman—this was the actual result of their speculations. But, as a body, the High Churchmen had no such intention. They had not the slightest wish to subject their Church to the orders of an Italian priest holding his court at Rome. What they really desired was to subject the whole of England—the State as well as the individual—to their conceptions of ecclesiastical predominance.

      Most of the younger clergymen fell in with the Tractarian movement, as young men are generally disposed to fall in with anything new. A spirit of revivalism spread over the land. The writings of the Fathers, the ancient liturgies of the early Christian Church, the history and traditions of the Church in all ages, the lives of saints, the mediæval books of devotion and morals—all