‘Underhand Dealings with the Papal Authorities’: Disraeli and the Liberal Conspiracy to Disestablish the Irish Church

During the parliamentary election of 1868, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli sent a ‘gentleman spy’ to Ireland to seek evidence showing that William Gladstone had agreed to disestablish the Church of Ireland in return for the Vatican's promise of Irish catholic votes. Proof of this conspiracy, Disraeli hoped, would prompt an anti‐catholic backlash and tip the election to the Conservatives. Disraeli's spy spent four weeks interviewing various Liberal politicians and Irish catholic prelates and claimed to have discovered not only a secret agreement between Gladstone and the bishops, but also a vast Vatican conspiracy to use Irish nationalist agitation to undermine the English constitution. Unfortunately, he never found written proof of any either scheme. The Liberals won the election by a large margin and soon passed an act disestablishing the Church of Ireland. Although out of office, Disraeli remained in contact with his secret agent, using him for further missions in England and on the continent. Despite its failure, the spy's mission offers fresh insight into Disraeli's character and policies. Disraeli combined opportunistic political scheming with a weakness for conspiracy theories. His agent's mission to Ireland was certainly an intrigue meant to turn the political tables on the Liberals but was based on Disraeli's belief that Rome actually had conspired with Gladstone. Recognition of Disraeli's faith in the existence of papal conspiracies helps to make his public statements about disestablishment more comprehensible and suggests a new explanation for his ongoing inflexibility in regard to Irish grievances and reforms.     

Unfinished Business: Confirming Australia's Constitution as an Act of Political Settlement

This paper sympathises with both conservatives who oppose continual tampering with the Constitution and progressive reformers wishing to improve its democratic character. It suggests a constitutional reconciliation between the two is feasible if both take more account of the position advanced by federal constitutionalists. Such a reconciliation would leave the mainframe of the Constitution intact and establish it more securely as an authoritative framework for political association. Doing so would also resolve much of the normative confusion surrounding the polity, help establish a more coherent philosophy of government in Australia, and subsume the translation to a republic.     

Antipodeans Abroad: Trends and Issues in the Writing of New Zealand Mission History

There has been a paucity of reflective and contextual analysis of New Zealand's historical involvement in the international missionary movement. This article suggests that existing literature falls into four categories: denominational/organizational histories; biographies and personal narratives; unpublished university theses; and a small body of more reflective and contextual works. Historical analysis since 1990 reflects wider historical discourses, rather than being the specific product of mission history. Valuable analysis has focused on women's involvement, culture contact, and the relationship between New Zealand missions, European colonialism and indigenous nationalist movements. Yet the theological nature of missionary involvement has been less extensively understood, obscuring the nuanced nature of things like missionary motivation and the relationship with colonialism. A lacuna still exists with respect to: a comprehensive and comparative analysis of post‐1945 missionary involvement; micro and macro‐historical analysis of missionary support; the gendered nature of missionary support; and the role of children and young people in missionary structures and discourse.     

A Taxing Task: Combating Britain's Relative Decline in the 1960s

The 1960s was a particularly rich period in the history of UKtax reform The decade also saw an ambitious attempt by the UKgovernment to reverse Britain's relative economic decline viathe adoption of a ‘Keynesian-plus’ package of enhanceddemand management, incomes policy, and indicative planning.This article argues that the two phenomena were closely related.It argues that the new Keynesian-plus policy framework transcendedparty ideology and led both the Conservative government andits Labour successor to use the tax system in a constructiveattempt to intervene in the economy to try and raise growth.Nevertheless,despite a high level of elite consensus on the need to makethe tax structure more growth oriented, and despite a good dealof policy continuity between the two governments, viewed asa whole the changes that were made lacked coherence. A combinationof Britain's adversarial party system, a tradition of secretivegovernment Policy-making, and the profound fragmentation ofBritish policy-making, institutions made it impossible to deviseand implement a strategic programme of reform.