9 - Educating Papist Priests

Summary

Like Newman’s troubled journey towards Rome, Gladstone’s agonized change of mind in 1845 over the Maynooth grant for the training of Catholic priests in Ireland is charted in letters that reveal his vulnerability and uncertainty, and a nervousness that is uncannily reflected in the mechanics of the uniform penny post. One of Browning’s letters was left in the Barretts’ letterbox and one of Newman’s was dropped on the road. In Gladstone’s case, heightened tension leads to the blunder of a unsealed ‘secret’ letter being sent to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. And with a blizzard of such correspondence surrounding Gladstone’s concerns about the Maynooth grant, it seems to have been a leaked letter that enabled The Times to report his imminent resignation from the cabinet. This Gladstonian drama is played out in two acts, the first in private, the second in public through printed open letters regarding Maynooth.