E-Book, Englisch, 984 Seiten
Roberts Salisbury
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29417-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Victorian Titan
E-Book, Englisch, 984 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-29417-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Andrew Roberts
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
‘If he will work, and he has a working look, I will soon make a man of him.’
Soon after his election to Parliament, Cecil sat the examination for a Prize Fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford. There were sixteen candidates for two vacancies, six of whom Lygon told Cecil were ‘formidable’. ‘My own chance of All Souls – never high – has sunk to zero,’ a despondent Cecil told his family on being appraised of the odds in November 1863. He added that ‘the fact that “no Lord” has ever been elected’ would further count against him. This suspicion of an anti-aristocratic tone to the College could not have been more wrong. In fact, of the 274 fellows elected in the century after 1753, forty-eight were the sons of noblemen. Furthermore, Cecil counted as Founder’s Kin, being related to the brother of Archbishop Chichele, who founded the College in Henry V’s memory in 1438, through Catherine Howard, the wife of the 2nd Earl of Salisbury. Of the 113 fellows elected between 1815 and 1857, no fewer than seventy-eight were Founder’s Kin, meaning that the College was not only an intellectual power-house but also a giant system of indoor relief for Chichele’s brother’s extended gene pool.
After Thomas Chichele wrote to The Times in November 1853 announcing that Lord Robert Gascoyne-Cecil MP and a Mr A.G. Watson of Balliol had been elected, the Radical Mercury newspaper commented that the former hardly represented the class of ‘poor students’ for whom fellowships were designed. Yet there is no indication that Cecil’s background, rather than his fine intellect and examination results in Classical languages and an English essay, explained his success.
When Cecil had written to his father about Parliament being the sphere in which ‘a man can be most useful’, he was not referring to something primarily secular, or even political. He went to his grave with a profound disbelief in the capacity of legislation to affect the state of the human soul, which was in itself the only thing that truly mattered in life. He meant instead that in Parliament he could take his place in the Anglican Church’s rearguard action against the forces of atheism, agnosticism and disestablishmentarianism, which he believed were welling up in Victorian Britain and threatened to smash civil society.
Cecil’s Christian faith was total and unquestioning. According to his grandson, Lord David Cecil, he ‘underwent a momentous spiritual experience’ as a teenager, which ‘involved an intimate sense of what he believed to be the living and personal presence of Christ’. The only hint of this strange but possibly seminal event from his daughter Gwendolen’s writings appears in a single sentence in the first volume of her 1921 biography of her father: ‘The unique appeal which Our Lord’s revealed personality makes to the heart may well have been emphasised to the lonely child whose craving for affection was so meagrely fed in his human surroundings.’ Exactly where or when this ‘momentous spiritual experience’ took place we cannot now know. Nonetheless, it seems profoundly to have affected the nature of his faith.
‘The light is too dazzling for our weakened eyes,’ he wrote to his sister Blanche from Cape Town about the doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall of Man; ‘we must turn from it, lest it blind us. At the proper time we may logically test these doctrines, and if true accept them. But as a habit we must not think of them.’ Yet for Cecil there never was a proper time. He preferred to take the view that the ways of God were too unfathomable to be explicable to man, that no human experience could possibly come close enough to His to make any attempt to employ reason or logic worth while. ‘God is all-powerful, and God is all-loving and the world is what it is!’ he would say to his children when they attempted to apply logic to their faith: ‘How are you going to explain that?’
Cecil’s Christianity was both so monolithic and so personal to him, possibly because of his teenage spiritual experience, that he never felt the need to discuss his faith with anyone else. When one of his children told him he found it useful to talk about important subjects with other people, he ‘expressed surprise and almost incredulity’. The solitary childhood spent in the library at Hatfield had left him spiritually and intellectually self-sufficient, and he almost took solace from the very inexplicability of his faith. ‘We live in a small bright oasis of knowledge surrounded on all sides by a vast unexplored region of impenetrable mystery,’ he stated in a lecture in Oxford on Evolution in 1894, and for him the author of that mystery was God.
The very idea that mankind could even so much as guess anything useful about the ways of God struck Cecil as profoundly pretentious. During the American Civil War, he ridiculed the Liberal politician W.E. Forster’s contention that if the Confederacy won it would shake his faith in Providence. Cecil thought that this showed:
a want of mental perspective – an outrageous exaggeration of the dimension of the things which happen to be close to us. We cannot shake ourselves free from the arrogant idea that our own planet, our own race, our own generation, our own corner of the earth is the culmination of the Creator’s work, and that in the events which pass through our field of view the final issues of Creation are being fought out. If we could better preserve our sense of proportion we might recognise the humiliating fact that the events of our day, visible from our point of view, are but an infinitesimal atom in the great whole. No one to whose mind this truth was present would dream that, from the mere fragment of the vast drama that falls under his view, he can grasp its real meaning, or conjecture the intentions which it is accomplishing.1
For all that it was ‘humiliating’, this knowledge had its comforts for Cecil. He feared a future avalanche of infidelity, an onslaught of agnosticism and atheism which would deluge Christianity. He regularly predicted ‘widespread unbelief’ and in 1867 a neighbour at lunch at Hatfield reported that ‘he thinks we are rapidly approaching a state of religious chaos, what will come after it is hard to say’. Fortunately for Cecil’s febrile state of mind there was an answer, a salvation for England from the horrors which such an atheistic world threatened: the Oxford Movement.
In December 1900, in a characteristically oblique mood, his nephew Arthur Balfour remarked of his uncle that ‘the key to [his] character is contradictoriness and that is why he is a Christian. In his youth – at Oxford – his contemporaries who thought at all were not all religious – and therefore he became religious.’ This was unfair; Cecil was attracted to Tractarianism at Oxford for the best of scholarly and spiritual reasons. Reverence for the sacrament, frequent services, high standards of clerical life and dignified ceremonial were its hallmarks. Cecil worshipped every day in the chapel at Hatfield and twice on Sundays. When he was Prime Minister, he treated the appointment of bishops as seriously as that of government ministers, and he fought unyieldingly throughout his political life in defence of the rights and privileges, as well as the tithes, Church Rates and endowments, of the Church of England. Some colleagues believed that defending the Established Church motivated him more than anything else in politics, including the direction of foreign policy. Although an impulse for perversity undoubtedly did play a part in Cecil’s general psychological make-up, it played little or no part in his genuinely profound religious faith.
Religious life in Victorian Britain consisted of an unending struggle between sects, and Cecil threw himself into the fray with partisan gusto. Attacking a Papal Encyclical in 1865, he wrote that the Jesuits were once ‘a homage to the powers of intellect, and a recognition of the vital importance of its aid to the cause of religion. But now Rome … is content to base her power upon the credulity of women and of peasants.’2 The Broad Church tradition of the Church of England he decried as ‘a religion without dogma’, while the Low represented ‘haziness and undefinedness’. On Sir Morton Peto’s 1862 Bill to allow nonconformist ministers to conduct burials on Established Church land, Cecil said that since Welsh land was cheap, ‘let them procure a plot of land in each district where they can bury them in their own fashion without troubling their neighbours’.
Balfour recalled how, when it came to Presbyterianism, his uncle ‘respected the history of the church … hated its services and the Covenanters’. Missionaries, Cecil warned the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1899, ‘may have the ultimate result of giving a powerful and enduring stimulus to race-hatred on both sides’. Nor did Evangelicalism in general escape a pen-lashing. Cecil considered it had:
never made much way with the higher class of intellects. But it has stood its ground because it has always been popular with children, with women, and with half-educated men. The plumpness and almost juridical precision of its statements make it eminently suitable for minds that are too blunt for subtle distinctions, and both too ignorant and too impatient to be satisfied with half-truths.
It was, however, in criticising ultra-Protestant...
