Church and politics in rural England

Richard West

The Barsetshire books which largely concern the life of Church of England clergymen, are not normally thought of with Trollope's political novels such as the Palliser series or the acerbic The Way We Live Now. Except for Framley Parsonage none of the six Barsetshire books contains any action at Westminster and little in London generally. Although many politicians make an appearance — including Plantaganet Palliser of the other great series — none is a central character except for the selfish MP who borrows money from and almost destroys the career of Mark Robarts, a worldly young clergyman. There are two Parliamentary elections in Barsetshire but neither is very pertinent to the political life of the country, as opposed to the county.

Yet the Barsetshire novels, so rich in detail of work, money, class relationships and social attitudes, tell us a lot about the political issues which bothered people, and influenced them in electing members to Parliament. Indeed the Pallisers in the other series held seats in Barsetshire (Wiltshire in fact) and a neighbouring county. They were traditionally Whigs, so that the Duke of Omnium, the head of the Palliser clan and the richest man in the county, controlled the Barsetshire seats in the Liberal interest, much to the disapproval of most of the Trollope clergymen. Most of the sympathetic characters, like Archdeacon Grantly are high-churchmen and Tories, while Bishop Proudie and his terribletempered, bossy wife are low-church and by implication Liberal, although I believe that Trollope does not say so explicitly.

If B arsetshire had been Lancashire rather than Wiltshire, and most of the characters had been starving mill-workers rather than well-fed clergymen, it would be fashionable now to call them 'political' books, just as Dickens is now, very wrongly. thought of as some kind of socialist and reformer. It is somehow imagined these days that 'politics' is only about industrial disputes, class war and violent change; yet rural, southern England was and still is quite as important a part of England generally as the industrial north or London.

'It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your ground' says Archdeacon Grantly, who is a man of great wealth. 'And then you see, land gives so much more than the rent. It gives position and influence and political power, to say nothing about the game'. Land in those days, the 1860s, was far more than a means of producing crops and livestock, or making speculative investment. It provided subsistence for most of the population of all classes. It provided the country's favourite amuse ments like shooting and fox-hunting. Its rents provided the marriage endowments and legacies that figure so big in Trollope's novels. Nobody could declare, after reading one of the Barchester novels, that rural England then was less materialistic than the growing industrial England of Manchester men, of Mr Gradgrind. Even the parsons of Barchester thought much of the size of their livings, the wealth or otherwise of their prospective sons and daughters-in-law, the cost of a second horse and the children's clothes.

The Church of England was not in those days set apart from the rest of society. Parsons aspired to be land-owners and country gentlemen; their sons might as easily choose a career as squire, army officer, civil servant or politician, as follow their fathers into the church. The older generation of parsons took part in worldly amusements like fox-hunting and whist, although such things were anathema to the low-church reformers like Mrs Proudie.

Trollope's contemporary, Karl Marx, referred to the 'imbecility' of country life from which he hoped that mankind would escape to new and eventually socialist cities. Life was indeed harsh for some of the Barsetshire poor, although conditions had improved since Cobbett described rural England, 30 years earlier. The brickworkers of Hoggleston, many of whom were migrant workers, are poorest of all the poor in Barsetshire, though scarcely more destitute than theinclergyman, Josiah Crawley, whose misery and whose false prosecution for theft are the theme of the final Barsetshire novel.

Yet even the Hoggleston brickworkers have some advantages over the modern country-dwellers. Each village in Barsetshire maintained a school, so that children did not have to travel miles each day to some distant, immense comprehensive. And children were actually taught to read and write instead of having to take part in boring creative play. In those days, the educational theories verged on the other extreme. '"What" said his [Dr Thorne's] sensible enemies, "is Johnny not to be taught to read because he does not like it?" '. Today, in those schools attended by country children, Johnny is not taught to read, even although he might like it.

And in their medical treatment. the Barsetshire people are much to be envied by modern readers. Young Dr Crofts visits The Small House at Allington regularly every day, although it must be admitted that he is in love with his patient's sister. However he also visits the sick in the poorest homes of his practice, for only £100 a year. In central London today, few doctors will visit the home of the sickest patient, even a child, and who can blame them, given the state of the National Health Service? Parsons in Barsetshire performed those ministrations of comfort to troubled, unhappy or lonely people that now are performed by social workers; when, that is, social workers are not on strike.

Nor did the postal workers strike in Barsetshire. This was a subject close to the heart of Trollope who worked many years as an inspector for the GPO and gained his knowledge of south-west England while engaged in making sure that letters went punctually to the remotest houses. Letters arrived the morning after posting except at Framley, which had chosen, on principle not to receive Sunday post. Neighbouring Plumstead had chosen the opposite, thanks to the influence of Archdeacon Grantly, who much enjoyed his fierce correspondence.

The train service which then connected Barchester (Salisbury) with Paddington rather than Waterloo, was frequent and quick. There is a very good scene at Paddington in The Small House at Allington when John Eames punches Adolphus Crosbie, and sends him sprawling among the newspapers of `Mr Smith's bookstall'. Readers of Private Eye, who cannot obtain the magazine at station bookstalls (there are three W.H. Smiths at Waterloo) might be surprised to know how long-standing is Smiths monopoly with the railways. When W. T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette published his exposé of child prostitution in 1885, a huge crowd gathered outside the office to buy a copy but curculation fell because W.H. Smith banned the Gazette at railway bookshops as unfit for respectable readers.

There was never a ban on The Jupiter, as Trollope, who did not like that newspaper, called The Times. Their Religious Affairs Correspondent, as he would now be called. is a radical reformer called Tom Towers, who starts the campaign, described in The Warden, to deprive Mr Harding of his sinecure. The Jupiter also persecutes Mr Robarts, who squanders his money on hunters and has his goods removed by the bailiffs. When Tom Towers arrives at a cabinet minister's party. Trollope sarcastically describes how he is fawned upon by the politicians present.

At the end of The Last Chronicle of Basset, Trollope replies to those critics wh said that: 'I have described many clergymen . . . but have spoken of them all as thoug their professional duties, their high calling, their daily workings for the good of thos around them, were matters of no moment . . In his defence, Trollope wrote that his aim had been `to paint the social and not the professional life of clergymen'; and that is the painting from which we still get so much pleasure.

Yet Trollope does not ignore the debate, almost a spiritual crisis, within the Church of England over the period of the Bar chester novels. It was, for a start, the age of Charles Darwin, whose writings on evolution caused many Victorians to question the very existence of God. Even those who retained their faith were inclined to ques tion the old-fashioned, worldly attitudes of an Archdeacon Grantly. Some Victorian clerics, of whom the most famous was Newman, made a return to the Roman Catholic church, although, as Trollope pointed out, many more funked the plunge.

(There is a Catholic convert in The Way we Live Now but none in the Barsetshire books.) We do have very high clergymen like the Rev. Caleb Oriel in Dr Thorne: 'He delighted in lecterns and credence-tables, in services at dark hours of winter mornings when no-one would attend, in high waist coats and narrow white neck-ties, in chanted services and intoned prayers, and in all the paraphernalia of Anglican for malities which have given such offence to those of our brethren who live in fear of the scarlet lady'.

None lived in greater fear of the scarlet lady than did Mrs Proudie, the militant low-church wife of the meek Bishop of Barchester. '"Idolatry is, I believe, more rampant than ever in Rome", said she; "and I fear there is no such thing at all as Sunday observances". "Oh, not the least," said Miss Dunstable, with rather a joyous air; "Sundays and weekdays are all the same there". "How very frightful!" said Mrs Proudie. "But it's a delicious place," says Miss Dunstable, an heiress, and no respecter f even such persons as Mrs Proudie, "I do like Rome. I must say. And as for the Pope, if he wasn't so fat he would be the nicest old fellow in the world." ' The Proudies, taking over the bishopric at the start of Barchester Towers somehow remind one of Harold Wilson and Marcia Williams taking over Ten Downing Street in 1964, after 'thirteen years of Tory misrule.'

Their Evangelical passion to cleanse the see of worldliness, sinecure, chanting and other Romish practice. was, in clerical terms, the equivalent of Wilson's 'white heat of technology'. And did not Wilson, too, employ the equivalent of the repulsive Mr Slope. the Bishop's chaplain and Mrs Proudie's favourite until he disgraced himself by lechery?

The Proudies represented what would later be called the progressive wing of the Church of England, in sympathy with the Liberal Party in Parliament. There were few actual dissenters then in high office — they did not sweep into Parliament until 1905 — although one of them was the judge of the assize where Mr Crawley was due to stand trial.

The low-church evangelicals were very intent on missionary work and the state of what they would now call the 'third world'. Exeter Hall in London was their headquarters, a place much loathed by Sir Richard Burton, the atheist. Tory and Negrophobe.

The Last Chronicle of Barset was pub lished in 1867, two years after the end of the American Civil War, in which Sir Richard Burton was a partisan of the North. So was Archdeacon Grantly who 'thought that the Southerners were Christian gentlemen, and the Northerners infidel snobs; whereas Mrs Proudie had an idea that the Gospel was preached with genuine zeal in the Northern States'. It is not known whether Mrs Proudie supported Lady Rosina de Courcy's favourite 'mission for putting down the Papists in the west of Ireland'. She did however interrupt a lecture in Papua and New Guinea ('the lands of which produce rich spices and glorious fruits') shouting 'Christianity and Sabbath-day observance. Let us never forget that these islanders can never prosper unless they keep the Sabbath holy.' No wonder that the Rev Josiah Crawley. whose quarrel with Mrs Proudie produces a glorious chapter, should write to the Dean: 'The special laws of this and of some other countries do allow that women shall sit upon the temporal thrones of the earth, but on the lowest steps of the throne of the Church no woman has been allowed to sit.'

On that point, if on few others, the Church of England still has not changed, although a move to allow the ordination of women was only narrowly beaten at last year's conference. In most other respects the modern Proudies and their kind have transformed the Church into something that Archdeacon Grantly, Mr Harding and Mr Crawley would look upon with horror. In the course of reading the novels. I went back to Salisbury for the first time since! was still at school in another part of Barsetshire; and found that physically it was not too badly changed. There are the usual shopping precincts and car parks that disfigure every English town but the close is still there, and though the view of the Cathedral is now impaired it was never as fine a building as it appears in the Constable paintings. The town has a lively cultural life of theatre, writers clubs and amateur music.

But Sunday morning Eucharist in the Cathedral was rather disturbing for one who is not much used to attending church these days. Much has been written, and best of all by David Martin in three powerful articles in the Daily Telegraph, on the rewriting of Anglican liturgy, specifically Series 3 Revised. 'Current permutations of the Lord's Prayer already run into three figures,' he wrote on March 7, 'which means that it is being destroyed as a shared possession of English-speaking peoples'. True, but at least even people like myself with defective memories, know the correct Lord's Prayer by heart and can detect when it is tampered with — for example, at Salisbury, by cutting out the words 'For thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory' — perhaps the most thrilling words in the English language.

At least all of us know the Lord's Prayer, but what of the rest of the liturgy, or the Bible for that matter? The peculiar cruelty of reform and revision is not so much the resulting ugliness and banality but the uneasiness that comes from making' us unlearn our lessons. Nothing said in a church now sounds quite right; we wonder if it has really been changed or if it is we whose memories play us false. The cruelty of thus 're-programming' our memory is all the greater because we have first heard these prayers and lessons and hymns as children. They are as much part of our early memories as a nursery rhyme or a Christmas Carol or multiplication table. These changes done to the Church of England's language, are similar to the changes made to political language in Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, such as 'all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.' In 1984. a team of hacks are employed at the Ministry of Truth to re-write back numbers of The Times.

Things have not reachedsuch a pass, although The Times, Trollope's Jupiter. is now edited by a Catholic, while its Religious Affairs Correspondent Clifford Langley, the modern Tom Towers, is a militant leftwing trade union leader. The changes made in the Anglican Liturgy may be inspired by the rather confused progressive intention to bring the Church more into line with the people, the workers, the underprivileged, women, blacks, children or what have you. The Church hopes that by turning itself into something different it will somehow make itself more popular. Hence the playing down of the mention of sin and death; hence the absurd new custom of shaking hands with people around you after the service; hence the 'ecumenical' sucking up to other churches by not stating beliefs they will not approve.

The present Bishop of Salisbury is not an arch-progressive, indeed he recently showed his displeasure concerning the third marriage in his cathedral of an infamous Tory MP. Although the Cathedral has on display some pamphlets on aid to the third world — shades of Papua and New Guinea — there is as yet no appeal for arms for a Papua New Guinea Patriotic Front.

The Anglican don, Edward Norman, said in the Reith Lectures last year that the Church should withdraw from politics and in particular from helping Marxist armed guerillas in Africa and Asia. He cited as an example how certain North Oxford clerics had given support to the Rev Canaan Banana, who wants to alter the Lord's Prayer 'Teach us to demand our share of the gold . . .'. Fair enough, but it is not true to say that the Church of England has only recently been involved in politics. It was, in Trollope's day, very much part of the gov erning clan, although there were some in its midst who wanted to change the political system. The Proudies, Archdeacon Grantly even the saintly Septimus Harding were, just by virtue of their office, in politics, whether they liked it or not; and Mr Harding did not, for it got him attacked in The Jupiter.

This is the second o f three articles by Richard West on Trollope's political England. '