Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone

In 1867, and the early part of 1868, Sir John Acton wrote regularly for the Chronicle, a weekly paper of high repute during its brief existence, contributing a narrative of current events in Italy during the period of Mentana and the second French occupation of Rome. On the 10th of March 1868 he lectured again at Bridgnorth on the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Empire.[1] This is in my opinion the best popular lecture that Acton ever gave, and I do not know where I could lay my hands on a better. It is clear, spirited, eloquent, and so perfectly well arranged that the whole story of Louis Napoleon's Mexican Expedition, with its plausible pretext, and its miserable failure, was told, not meagrely but completely, in the compass of an hour. The joint intervention of England, France, and Spain in the affairs of Mexico did not last long. Its object, like the object of the Anglo-German intervention in Venezuela, was to obtain redress for injuries to European residents, and payment of debts due to subjects of the three Powers. England and Spain soon discovered that the French Emperor had quite other designs, being minded to substitute a Mexican Empire for the Mexican Republic. Sir John Acton explained why in his opinion, which has not been justified by experience, Mexico was unable to stand alone. "A society so constituted could not make a nation. There was no middle class, no impulse to industry, no common civilisation, no public spirit, no sense of patriotism. The Indians were not suffered to acquire wealth or knowledge, and every class was kept in ignorance and in rigorous exclusion; when therefore the Mexicans made themselves independent, the difficulty was to throw off not the bondage but the nonage in which they had been held, and to overcome the mental incapacity, the want of enterprise, the want of combination among themselves, and of the enlightenment which comes from intercourse with other nations. They formed a Republic after the model of their more fortunate neighbours, and accepted those principles which are so inflexible in their consequences, and so unrelenting in their consistency." Between the Mexican Republic and the Republic of the United States there is no doubt all the difference between Alexander the Coppersmith and Alexander the Great. But Benito Juarez was both a better and an abler man than Acton gave him credit for being, and his successor, Porfirio Diaz, proved himself to be a most efficient ruler. A Civil War in Mexico, simultaneous with Civil War in the United States, gave Napoleon the opportunity he wanted. The one furnished a pretext, the other removed a barrier, and it was not till long after the Austrian Archduke Maximilian had been put upon his pinchbeck throne that President Johnson was in a position to order the French troops out of the American Continent. The poor Archduke himself, basely deserted by the unscrupulous potentate who had sent him to his doom, showed a chivalrous honour and an unselfish courage that fully justify Acton's description of him as "almost the noblest of his race." The lecture describes the pathetic isolation of Maximilian in a passage of singular power. "There was nothing for him to look forward to in Europe. No public career was open to the man who had failed so signally in an enterprise of his own seeking. His position in Austria, which had been difficult before, would be intolerable now. He had quarrelled with his family, with his Church, and with the protector to whose temptations he had hearkened. And for him there was to be no more the happiness of the domestic hearth.[2] In Mexico there were no hopes to live for, but there was still a cause in which it would be glorious to die. There were friends whom he could not leave to perish in expiation of measures which had been his work. He knew what the vengeance of the victors would be. He knew that those who had been most faithful to him would be most surely slaughtered; and he deemed that he, who had never been seen on a field of battle, had no right to fly without fighting. Probably he felt that when a monarch cannot preserve his throne, nothing becomes him better than to make his grave beneath its ruins." Sir John Acton closed his lecture with the expression of a hope that the United States would not undertake the government of Mexico. "A confederacy," he observed, "loses its true character when it rules over dependencies; and a democracy lives a threatened life that admits millions of a strange and inferior race which it can neither assimilate nor absorb." The warning was unneeded, for the days of American Imperialism were not yet. But the words have a perennial wisdom which the new owners of the Philippines might find it worth their while to consider.

Sir John Acton stood again for Bridgnorth, this time unsuccessfully, at the General Election of November, 1868. His personal friend and political leader, Mr. Gladstone, became Prime Minister in December of the same year, and his first legislative work was the disestablishment of the Irish Church. With this policy Sir John Acton, not as a Catholic, but as a Liberal, was in full and complete sympathy. He regarded it as "no isolated fact, but an indication of a change which is beginning to affect all the nations of Christendom, and bears witness to the consciousness that political obligation is determined, not by arbitrary maxims of expediency, but by definite and consistent principles." "The political connection," he added, that is, the Liberal party, "which, in spite of many errors and shortcomings, has been identified with the development of our constitutional liberties, and with the advance of science in our legislation, has entered on a new phase of its existence. And it follows a wise and resolute leader, at whose call the nation has arisen, for the first time in history, to the full height of its imperial vocation" (Edinburgh Review, No. 404, p. 516).

Although, as has been said, Acton held that the two great political questions of the time were first the relations of the Church with the State, and secondly, the reform of the Land Laws, events were impending which affected him for a time far more deeply than either. Believing, as he did, that "the full exposition of truth is the great object for which the existence of mankind is prolonged on earth," he could not allow the Papal Syllabus to deter him from following truth with all the knowledge and ability he could command. The Chronicle, for which he had written so often, came to an end in 1868. But the same editor, Mr. Wetherell, took over next year the North British Review, to which Acton contributed a learned essay on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, marshalling the facts in favour of the theory that the murder of the Huguenots had been premeditated at Rome. Researches such as these, and the consequences which they involved, were not congenial to the Vatican, nor to the personally amiable, dogmatically unbending Pontiff who was still under the protection of foreign bayonets. But to no one was Acton's freedom of speculation and inquiry more repugnant than to the able and ambitious prelate who had succeeded Wiseman as Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. Dr. Manning was at that time a rigid supporter of extreme Ultramontane doctrine, and of authority as opposed to freedom in opinion. With the ardent zeal of a convert, and a convert, as his recent appointment (1865) showed, much in favour at Rome, he strove to suppress the religious independence of the English Catholics. But an historical controversy with Acton was a serious affair. It resembled nothing so much as going in for a public examination with a reasonable certainty of being plucked, and that prospect did not smile upon dignified ecclesiastics impressed with a due sense of their own importance. Moreover, Manning was already absorbed in a policy which would put down moral and intellectual rebellion in the Church of Rome once for all.

So early as the 8th of December 1867 the Pope had signed a Bull, convening the whole episcopate of his Church to an Œcumenical Council at Rome in the same month of 1869. Although it was not officially stated, it was perfectly well known, that the object of the Council was to proclaim the infallibility of the still Sovereign Pontiff. A famous book, emanating from Munich, "The Pope and the Council," by "Janus," which from the Catholic point of view combated the doctrine of Infallibility, received appreciative notice from Lord Acton in the North British Review. This magazine, though short-lived, and never very widely circulated, appealed more successfully than any of its contemporaries to the lettered and learned class. Some of its articles, such as the essays of Thomas Hill Green, the Hegelian philosopher of Balliol, occupy a permanent place in the literature of metaphysics. The article on "The Pope and the Council" was therefore sure to be read by those who, by voice or pen, exercise an influence over the minds of others. The reviewer did not mince his words. He pointed out to the bishops that they had already committed themselves to a very grave extent. In 1854 they had allowed the Pope to proclaim a new dogma, the Immaculate Conception. In 1862 nearly all of them had pronounced in favour of the temporal power. In 1864 they accepted the Syllabus. In 1867 they expressed their willingness to believe whatever the Pope might teach them. "Janus" had passed lightly over the Council of Trent, the subject of a work by Fra Paolo Sarpi which Macaulay considered second only in historical value to the books of Thucydides. Lord Acton, who had much in common with Fra Paolo, expressed his own view with unmistakable energy and force. "The Council of Trent," he said, "impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age, and perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an austere immorality." It should be the object of the forthcoming Council to reform, to remodel, and to adapt the work which had been done at Trent.

What actually happened was very different from that which Acton desired, though not very different from what he expected. Sir John went to Rome some time before the opening of the Council, full of interest in the result, and full of sympathy with the distinguished minority who were prepared to resist the forging of fresh chains upon their freedom. Among this minority the most conspicuous was Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, whose tragic death at the hands of the Commune encircled his name with the halo of a martyr and a saint. "The Archbishop of Paris," wrote Acton, "had taken no hostile step in reference to the Council, but he was feared the most of all the men expected at Rome. The Pope had refused to make him a Cardinal, and had written to him a letter of reproof, such as has seldom been received by a bishop. It was felt that he was hostile, not episodically to a single measure, but to the peculiar spirit of this pontificate. He had none of the conventional prejudices and assumed antipathy which are congenial to the hierarchical mind. He was without pathos or affectation, and he had good sense, a perfect temper, and an intolerable wit" (Edinburgh Review, No. 404, page 521). By the end of December 1869 Darboy had exacted a promise that the dogma of Infallibility would not be proclaimed by acclamation, so as to take the majority by surprise. Lord Acton wrote frequent reports of the Council and its proceedings, chiefly to Mr. Gladstone and Professor Döllinger, some of which were afterwards collected and published as the "Letters of Quirinus" in the Allgemeine Zeitung. Lord Acton considered that the cause of the minority was lost when, on the 24th of April 1870, the Council adopted the Supplement to the First Decree. This was to the effect that the judgments of the Holy See must be observed, even when they proscribe opinions not actually heretical. Lord Acton's comment upon this vote of the episcopal majority does not lack incisiveness. "They might," he wrote, "conceivably contrive to bind and limit dogmatic infallibility with conditions so stringent as to evade many of the objections taken from the examples of history; but in requiring submission to Papal decrees on matters not articles of faith, they were approving that of which they knew the character; they were confirming, without let or question, a power they saw in daily exercise; they were investing with new authority the existing bulls, and giving unqualified sanction to the inquisitor and the index, to the murder of heretics and the deposing of kings. They approved what they were called on to reform, and blessed with their lips what their hearts knew to be accursed."

A private letter to Mr. Gladstone, written a month before the first meeting of the Council, shows how gloomy were Lord Acton's apprehensions. "Everything," he says, "is prepared here for the production of Papal infallibility, and the plan of operations is already laid down in a way which shows an attentive study of Sarpi's 'History of the Council of Trent.' They are sure of a large majority." A majority, however, would scarcely do. Œcumenical Councils, if not absolutely unanimous, are supposed to attain that moral unanimity which the insignificance of a minority implies. The attitude of the French, and still more of the German and Austro-Hungarian bishops, inspired the Vatican with some alarm. Darboy and Dupanloup were names known and esteemed throughout the Catholic world. Bishops Strossmayer and Hefele, the latter a man of prodigious learning, were still more strongly opposed to the Papal policy than their French colleagues. Against the expediency of promulgating the doctrine there was a resolute and well-organised mass of opinion in the Council. There were few prepared to call the doctrine itself false, and therefore ready to resist it in the last extremity. To drive a wedge between the majority of the minority and the minority of the minority was the obvious tactics of the Pope and his Ultramontane advisers. "If the Court of Rome is defeated," Lord Acton wrote, "it can only be by men of principle and of science." He believed that a letter from Mr. Gladstone, dealing with the secular side of the question, and with the effect which the decree would have upon the future of English and Irish Catholics, might do much to counteract the influence of Manning. It was impossible for the English Premier to interfere directly with the affairs of another Church. But he allowed Lord Acton to state what he thought about the effects of Ultramontanism on the prospects of educational measures in England. Lord Acton estimated that the bishops opposed to the expediency of the dogma were about two hundred in number, while only as many score would vote against its truth.

No sooner did the Council meet than regulations were issued which gave the Pope the sole right of making decrees and defining dogmas. To this the Council submitted. "The sole legislative authority," Lord Acton wrote on the 1st of January 1870, "has been abandoned to the Pope. It includes the right of issuing dogmatic decrees, and involves the possession of all the Infallibility which the Church claims." "We have to meet," he added, "an organised conspiracy to establish a power which would be the most formidable enemy of liberty as well as science throughout the world. It can only be met and defeated through the Episcopate, and the Episcopate is exceedingly helpless." So it proved. But Lord Acton, besides helping the minority with the resources of his knowledge and the power of his logic, endeavoured to invoke the secular arm. He was sanguine enough to hope that, as the Pope had anathematised modern civilisation and progress, the governments of Catholic and even of Protestant countries would take some steps in self-defence. The opposition in the Council, he held, was "almost sure to prevail if it were supported, and almost sure to be crushed if it were not." The change of Ministry in France at the beginning of 1870, and the substitution of M. Ollivier for M. Rouher, alarmed the Vatican, although the French ambassador, the Marquis de Banneville, declared that there would be no change of policy. De Banneville was wrong. The new French Government announced that if the dogma were carried the French troops would be recalled, although Cardinal Antonelli assured Count Daru, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the Council was purely theological, and had nothing to do with secular affairs. The threat, however, had no effect. The Pope had gone too far to recede, and the forces of the opposition became daily weaker. There was no hope, and no future, for those bishops who set themselves against the majority of their colleagues and the head of their Church. Except in France, they could not look for the protection of the Government, and the French Emperor was a bruised reed. "Two days ago," wrote Lord Acton on the 16th of February, "a definite message was sent by the Emperor to Cardinal Antonelli, in which the Emperor declared that he could not afford to have a schism in France, where all the employé class, all the literary class, and even the Faubourg St. Germain are against the Infallibility of the Pope. He added that it would dissolve all the engagements existing between France and Rome." But Antonelli, a remarkably shrewd specimen of the Italian diplomatist, calculated that if the bishops yielded, the rest of the practising Catholics would follow them. In another passage of the same most interesting letter Lord Acton says that the Schema de Ecclesiâ, already adopted by the Council, "makes civil legislation on all points of contract, marriage, education, clerical universities, mortmain, even on many questions of taxation and common law, subject to the legislation of the Church, which would simply be the arbitrary will of the Pope. Most assuredly no man accepting such a code could be a loyal subject, or fit for the enjoyment of political privileges. In this sense the French bishops have written to the French Government, and that is what they ask me to write to you." How deep an impression this letter made upon Mr. Gladstone's mind became apparent when, a few years afterwards, he entered into controversy with the Church of Rome. Strange as it may seem, these Gallican prelates appealed through Lord Acton to the Government of the Queen, seeing "no human remedy for this peril other than the intervention of the Powers." But the British Government could not have acted, even in concert with France, unless they had been prepared to face a storm of indignation, Protestant as well as Catholic, which no British interest required them to encounter.

After the decree of Infallibility had been produced, the German prelates made an important protest against bishops without sees, chiefly Roman Monsignori, being allowed to vote, and also complained, in words furnished by Lord Acton himself, that the claim to enact dogmas by a majority endangered the freedom, as well as the universality, of the Council. But "the minority were in great confusion and uncertainty, and disposed to rely on external help." That help they never received. Lord Acton put the danger as strongly as he could. Catholics, he declared, would "at once become irredeemable enemies of civil and religious liberty. They would have to profess a false system of morality, and to repudiate literary and scientific sincerity. They would be as dangerous to civil society in the school as in the State." But between Catholics who held that with such matters it would be profane for any Protestant to meddle, and Protestants who rejoiced that now at last the Catholics were coming out in their true colours, the Cabinet, if they had taken Lord Acton's advice, would have had an uneasy, and barely defensible, position. So what Acton calls "this insane enterprise" of conferring upon the Pope an unconditional and unlimited infallibility was suffered to proceed without any political remonstrance from England. Mr. Odo Russell, afterwards Lord Ampthill, Lord John's nephew, was instructed to keep the Foreign Office informed of what happened the Council, but his information was much less copious than Lord Acton's. He was not instructed to do anything more, and officially he was a member of the Legation at Florence. While other governments did nothing, the Italian Government, in Lord Acton's opinion, made matters worse. Their measures of what he called confiscation against the property of the Church would, he thought, prevent some Italian bishops from voting in the minority who would otherwise have been disposed to do so. Yet, if Lord Acton were right in his description of the Papal policy, he could hardly have been surprised that Liberal governments in Catholic countries should regard the Church as an enemy.

On the 15th of March 1870, a curious protest was presented to the Council by some bishops of the United Kingdom. The substance of it is thus described by Lord Acton: "They state that the English and Irish Catholics obtained their emancipation, and the full privileges of citizenship, by solemn and repeated declarations that their religion did not teach the dogma now proposed; that these declarations made by the bishops, and permitted by Rome, are, in fact, the conditions under which Catholics are allowed to sit in Parliament, and to hold offices of trust and responsibility under the Crown; and that they cannot be forgotten or overlooked by us without dishonour." Lord Acton complained bitterly of France because she maintained the temporal power of the Pope, and excluded Italians from their national capital, by her troops, while yet she would not attempt to restrain him from abusing the jurisdiction she enabled him to exercise. "The religious houses are suppressed, the schools of divinity reduced, the priesthood almost starved, because France is determined to keep the Pope on his despotic throne. It is a policy which degrades the Italian Government in the eyes of the nation, nurses the revolutionary passion, and hinders the independence of the country, and which can no longer be defended on the score of religious liberty. The French Protectorate has become as odious to Catholicism as to the Italian State, and it is about to prove as pernicious to other countries as it is to Italy." When a division was taken on the dogma of Infallibility, 451 bishops voted with the Pope, 88 against him, and 62 for further inquiry. Then the minority gave up the struggle, and when, on the 18th of July, three days after the declaration of war between France and Germany, the principle was formally defined, only two bishops resisted the acclamation of 533. A few weeks later the French troops left Rome, and the temporal power was at an end.

Such was the miserably futile result of the Opposition led by Darboy, Dupanloup, Rauscher, Schwartzenberg, Kenrick, Conolly, Hefele, and Strossmayer. They were borne down by the dead weight of numbers, and the traditional authority of the Holy See. Catholics were offered the choice of submission or excommunication. The official head of the English Catholics, Manning, was among the most zealous supporters of the Papacy. Newman deeply deplored, but humbly submitted. So even did Strossmayer, the brave and eloquent Croat, who had been shouted down at the Council in violent and abusive language when he denied that Protestantism was the source of Atheism, and pleaded for the old Catholic rule of unanimity. Döllinger, challenged by the Archbishop of Munich to accept the decree, refused, and was cut off, like Spinoza, to his eternal honour, from the congregation of the faithful. Lord Acton, on the other hand, the stay and support of the minority throughout the Council and before it, was not molested, perhaps because he was a layman, perhaps because he was a peer.

While he was at Rome, in November 1869, Acton had received from Mr. Gladstone, and accepted, the offer of a barony. For a young man of thirty-five this was a great and most unusual distinction. It was made all the greater by the fact that his name occurred in the first list of such recommendations submitted by the Prime Minister to the Queen. At that time the general public hardly knew Sir John Acton's name. But he had all the usual qualifications for a peerage, except wealth, being connected with the aristocracy by birth and marriage, the head of an old English family, and the inheritor of an old English baronetcy, who had gained six years' political experience in the House of Commons. "His character," Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Queen, "is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day" (Morley's "Life of Gladstone," ii. 430). No praise could be better deserved, or expressed with more studious moderation. Lord Acton pursued in the House of Lords the same silent course that he had adopted in the House of Commons. He remained, unlike many peers of Mr. Gladstone's creation, faithful to the Liberal party, at that time, and for so many years afterwards, led by his step-father, Lord Granville.