‘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.     

Caricatures of clergymen in nineteenth-century Sweden

This article investigates caricatures of clergymen in the nineteenth-century Church of Sweden. It offers the first attempt in Sweden to study these images as an enduring historical source. As case study, six caricatures of bishops from 1790–1870 will be analysed in terms of both their motifs and their significance. The bishops have been selected as the object of study because of their visibility as ex officio members of Parliament and leaders of the clergy. It is argued that graphic satire was used as a medium to criticise the bishops' influential position in the government and their defence of the Parliament of the Estates. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that as the techniques used to produce caricatures improved during the period, the images were more widely spread and had a greater impact on Swedish society. Finally, it is shown that caricature in Sweden reached a peak in the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to the extended debate on parliamentary reform and restrictions on press freedom.     

The Members of the House of Lords and the Hanoverian Succession

This essay examines what happened in August and September 1714, from the death of Queen Anne on 1 August to the swearing-in of the new privy council on 1 October, specifically from the perspective of the membership of the house of lords. It confirms that most members were present in London during this period and active in parliament, the privy council, the regency, and politics generally. Very few were absent without a good reason.     

Bishops and Professionalization in Sweden,c. 1780–1880

This article investigates the concept of professionalization in terms of the bishops' role in the 19th-century Church of Sweden. Previous research has generally claimed that from the late 18th century until the mid-19th century, before the abolition of the Diet of Estates, the Swedish bishops amounted to secularized, conservative state officials who lacked the ability to effect religious reform. In this article, however, it will be argued that in the early 19th century, several decades earlier than previously assumed, the Swedish episcopate had begun to undergo a slow transformation that is best described as professionalization. It is posited that the bishops, inspired by Evangelical revival and Romanticism, became increasingly specialized in religion and theology in their education, thinking and practice. The episcopal profile also changed as the middle classes gained more influence from the early 19th century onwards, and this, in turn, prompted a higher standard of role performance.     

Parliament and the Reformation of Edward VI

This article explores the ways in which parliament was used to shape the accelerating protestant reformation undertaken by successive governments under Edward VI. It underlines the significance for constitutional history of Thomas Cromwell's extraordinary promotion of England's parliament to enact the break with Rome and evangelical religious change, and the corresponding use of parliament after Cromwell's fall by conservatives to combat evangelical gains, which at first constituted an obstacle to Protector Somerset's plans. There was a steady deliberate erosion of conservative episcopal votes in the Lords through political man?uvres from 1547; nevertheless, up to late 1549, the weight of conservative opposition in the Lords (without much obvious corresponding traditionalist support in the Commons) dictated crabwise progress in legislation. The convocations of Canterbury and York played a more marginal role in religious change. Somerset's unsuccessful attempt at populist innovation in parliament was, arguably, an important element fuelling the coup against him in autumn 1549. Thereafter, events moved much more rapidly, aided by further compulsory retirements of bishops. Attention is drawn to the frustration felt by some enthusiastic evangelicals at the pace of change dictated by parliament, leading the prominent refugee, Jan ?aski, sarcastically to characterise the Edwardian Reformation in retrospect as ‘parliamentary theology’. From late 1552, divisions between clergy and nobility in the evangelical leadership over plundering of church wealth led to confusion, ill will and the disruption of further progress, even before it was obvious that King Edward was rapidly dying.     

Clyve Jones and Parliamentary History

The ‘constitutional revolution’ which occurred in Ireland after 1691 meant that parliamentary management became one of the prime functions of the viceroyalty. Interest focused on the Commons, where supply legislation was drafted. But the upper House, though smaller, less busy, and on the whole more easily managed, could not be ignored, since it could still cause major problems for government. The situation for the incoming ministers in 1714 was problematic, since the Lords had been a tory stronghold, and the ‘Church party’, buttressed by the bishops, remained powerful. The situation was a mirror image of Westminster in 1710, when Robert Harley's tory ministry had to cope with a whig-dominated house of lords. This essay analyses the means by which Lord Lieutenant Sunderland (1714–15), and his successors, Lords Justices Grafton and Galway, brought the Irish upper House under control, constructing a court party with some of the elements which Clyve Jones has identified as having been crucial to Harley's strategy in 1710–14: moderate or non-party men, pensioners and placemen depending on government largess, new episcopal appointments and a block creation of peerages. In Ireland it was the new peers who played the most important part. The whigs were able to make some inroads into the episcopal bench, previously a stronghold of toryism, until the issue of relief for dissenters rekindled anxiety over the maintenance of the ecclesiastical establishment, prefiguring future problems.     

A Matter of Judgment: Politics,Law and the Trial of Bishop Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson's controversial expulsion from the bishopric of St David's – and hence from the house of lords – after a long and bitterly‐fought series of legal actions, raised fundamental and difficult questions about the right to control membership of the house of lords and about the relationship between politics and the law, as well as between church and state. This article explores both the local and the national political contexts that prompted Watson's ordeal, suggesting that subsequent demonisation by Gilbert Burnet has obscured the extent to which Watson was the casualty of William III's determination to cow his political opponents. It concludes that Watson was marked out for opprobrium precisely because, like Sir John Fenwick, his political and social insignificance enabled him to be victimised without risking a backlash of opposition from the social and political elite.