The True Story of my Parliamentary Struggle Part 12

CARDINAL-ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER.

Three times your Eminence has--through the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_--personally and publicly interfered and used the weight of your ecclesiastical position against me in the Parliamentary struggle in which I am engaged, although you are neither voter in the borough for which I am returned to sit, nor even co-citizen in the state to which I belong.

Your personal position is that of a law-breaker, one who has deserted his sworn allegiance and thus forfeited his citizenship, one who is tolerated by English forbearance, but is liable to indictment for misdemeanor as "member of a society of the Church of Rome." More than once, when the question of my admission to the House of Commons has been under discussion in that House, have I seen you busy in the lobby closely attended by the devout and sober Philip Callan, or some other equally appropriate Parliamentary henchman. Misrepresenting what had taken place in the House of Commons when I took my seat on affirmation in July, 1880, your Eminence wrote in the _Nineteenth Century_ for August, 1880, that which you were pleased to ent.i.tule "An Englishman's Protest" against my being allowed to sit in the Commons' House, to which the vote of a free const.i.tuency had duly returned me. In that protest you blundered alike in your law and in your history. You gave the Tudor Parliamentary oath Saxon and Norman antiquity. You spoke of John Horne Tooke as having had the door of the House shut against him by a by-vote, no such by-vote having been carried, and the statute which disabled clergymen in the future not affecting John Horne Tooke's seat in that Parliament. You declared that in the French Revolution the French voted out the Supreme Being; there is no record of any such vote. In March, 1882, when the House had expelled me for my disobedience of its orders in complying with the law, and taking my seat, you again used the _Nineteenth Century_.

This time for a second protest, intended to prevent my re-election. You, in both your articles, reminded the bigots that I might be indicted for blasphemy. Your advice has since been followed. Persecution is a "two-edged sword," and I return the warning you offer to Lord Sherbrooke.

When I was in Paris some time since, and was challenged to express an opinion as to the enforcement of the law against the religious orders in France, I, not to the pleasure of many of my friends, spoke out very freely that in matters of religion I would use the law against none; but your persecuting spirit may provoke intemperate men even farther than you dream. In this country, by the 10th George IV., cap. 7, secs. 28 and 29, 31, 32 and 34, you are criminally indictable, Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster. You only reside here without police challenge by the merciful forbearance of the community. And yet you parade in political contest your illegal position as "a member of a religious order of the Church of Rome," and have the audacity to invoke outlawry and legal penalty against me. Last month, in solemn state, you, in defiance of the law, in a personal and official visit to the borough of Northampton itself, sought to weaken the confidence of my const.i.tuents; and you were not ashamed, in order to injure me, to pretend friendship with men who have for years constantly and repeatedly used the strongest and foulest abuse of your present Church. An amiable but ignorant Conservative mayor, chief magistrate of the borough, but innocent of statutes, was misled into parading his official robe and office while you openly broke the law in his presence. In the current number of the _Nineteenth Century_ you fire your last shot, and are coa.r.s.e in Latin as well as in the vulgar tongue. Perhaps the frequenting Philip Callan has spoiled your manners.

It else seems impossible that one who was once a cultured scholar and a refined gentleman could confuse with legitimate argument the abuse of his opponents as "cattle." But who are you, Henry Edward Manning, that you should throw stones at me, and should so parade your desire to protect the House of Commons from contamination? At least, first take out of it the drunkard and the dissolute of your own Church. You know them well enough. Is it the oath alone which stirs you? Your tenderness on swearing comes very late in life. When you took orders as a deacon of the English Church, in presence of your bishop, you swore "so help me, G.o.d," that you did from your "heart abhor, detest and abjure," and, with your hand on the "holy gospels," you declared "that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate hath, or ought to have, any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence, or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm." You may now well write of men "whom no oath can bind." The oath you took you have broken; and yet it was because you had, in the very church itself, taken this oath, that you for many years held more than one profitable preferment in the Established Church of England. You indulge in inuendoes against my character in order to do me mischief, and viciously insinuate as though my life had in it justification for good men's abhorrence. In this you are very cowardly as well as very false. Then, to move the timid, you suggest "the fear of eternal punishment," as a.s.sociated with a broken oath. Have you any such fear? or have you been personally conveniently absolved from the "eternal" consequences of your perjury? Have you since sworn another oath before another bishop of another church, or made some solemn vow to Rome, in lieu of, and in contradiction to, the one you so took in presence of your bishop, when, "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," that bishop of the church by law established in this country accepted your oath, and gave you authority as a deacon in the Church you have since forsaken. I do not blame you so much that you are forsworn: there are, as you truly say, "some men whom no oath can bind;" and it has often been the habit of the cardinals of your Church to take an oath and break it when profit came with breach; but your remembrance of your own perjury might at least keep you reticent in very shame. Instead of this, you thrust yourself impudently into a purely political contest, and shout as if the oath were to you the most sacred inst.i.tution possible. You say "there are happily some men who believe in G.o.d and fear him." Do you do either? You, who declared, "So help me, G.o.d" that no foreign "prelate ...

ought to have any jurisdiction or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm." And you--who in spite of your declaration on oath have courted and won, intrigued for and obtained, the archbishop's authority and the cardinal's hat from the Pope of Rome--you rebuke Lord Sherbrooke for using the words "sin and shame" in connexion with oath-taking; do you hold now that there was no sin and no shame in your broken oath? None either in the rash taking or the wilful breaking? Have you no personal shame that you have broken your oath? Or do the pride and pomp of your ecclesiastical position outbribe your conscience? You talk of the people understanding the words "so help me, G.o.d." How do you understand them of your broken oath? Do they mean to you: "May G.o.d desert and forsake me as I deserted and forsook the Queen's supremacy, to which I so solemnly swore allegiance"? You speak of men being kept to their allegiance by the oath "which binds them to their sovereign." You say such men may be tempted by ambition or covetousness unless they are bound by "the higher and more sacred responsibility" involved in the "recognition of the lawgiver in the oath." Was the Rector of Lavington and Graffham covetous of an archbishopric that he broke his oath? Was the Archdeacon of Chichester ambitious of the Cardinal's hat that he became so readily forsworn? Lord Archbishop of Westminster, had you, when you were apostate, remained a poor and simple priest in poverty and self-denial, although your oath would have still been broken, yet you might have taunted others more profited by their perjuries. But you, who have derived profit, pride, and pomp from your false swearing--you, who sign yourself "Henry Edward, Cardinal-Archbishop" by favor of the very authority you abjured in the name of G.o.d--it is in the highest degree indecent and indecorous for you to parade yourself as a defender of the sanct.i.ty of the oath. As a prince-prelate of the Church of Rome you have no right to meddle with the question of the English Parliamentary oath.

Your Church has been the foe of liberty through the world, and I am honored by your personal a.s.sailment. But you presume too much on the indifference of the age when, in this free England, you so recklessly exhibit as weapons in an election contest the outward signs of the authority the Vatican claims, but shall never again exercise, in Britain.

CHARLES BRADLAUGH.

NORTHAMPTON

AND THE

HOUSE OF COMMONS.

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN

CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.,

AND THE RIGHT HON.

SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE, M.P.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

LONDON

FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, 63, FLEET STREET E.C.

1884.

PRICE TWOPENCE.

LONDON: PRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH, 63, FLEET STREET, E.C.

NORTHAMPTON

AND THE

HOUSE OF COMMONS.

20, Circus Road, St. John's Wood, London, N.W., _March 1st, 1884_.

To the Right Hon. SIR STAFFORD H. NORTHCOTE, M.P., G.C.B.

SIR,--If, on either of the occasions when recently moving against me in the House of Commons, you had accorded or claimed for me opportunity of speech in self-defence, I might have been spared the need for this letter.

Apparently your view is that a member unfortunate enough to have the majority of the House against him need not have even the semblance of fairness shown him--that you, being strong, need not be troubled with scruples, and that the mere fact that the member is, like yourself, the chosen member of a const.i.tuency does not ent.i.tle him to the smallest courtesy or consideration.

You have taught me, Sir, many lessons during the past four years. Some of these I trust to remember and profit by in the future. You have taught me that a temporary majority of the House may, year after year, exclude any member of Parliament from his seat, although he has strictly obeyed every Standing Order--and this without vacating that seat--that it may so exclude the member although he has been a decent and orderly member of the House, attending regularly for months to all its duties, and one against whom no charge or pretence of Parliamentary misconduct was made whilst he so served in it.

You have taught me, Sir, that the leader of a great party may sit silent, and acquiesce in it by his support, while the law-abiding electors of a great const.i.tuency are called "mob," "dregs," and "sc.u.m"--that such a leader may permit his followers to openly accuse two of the highest judges of our country of having judicially decided unfairly from corrupt party motives--that he may even, without dishonor, keep silence whilst it is suggested that the whole judicial bench is so corrupt that it will be ready to decide unjustly at the bidding of a government--and that the first law officer of the Crown is ready to be fraudulently collusive with myself. Did you believe these things, Sir, when they were stated and loudly cheered by those who sit around you on your side of the House? If yes, I am glad that your experience of humanity has been less fortunate than my own. I have regarded our judges as at least striving to be just and independent. You seem to think it nothing that the highest judges should, in your presence, be charged with judging unjustly from favoritism for the government of the day.

You have encouraged and practised deliberate violation of the law, and, to cover this law-breaking, you have connived at, and been party to, the basest insinuations against those whose duty it is to judicially p.r.o.nounce on matters of legal dispute. You have, without rebuke, permitted your followers to declare that if the High Court of Judicature declared the law to be in my favor, that then they and you still intended to defy and disobey the law.

The first resolution you moved against me, on the 11th February, was worse than futile, for it forbade me to do that which I had already done, and which you well knew that I had so done, in order to compel the submission to the judgment of a competent tribunal of the legality of my act.

The ridiculous form of your resolution arose because you--having bargained with me in writing through Mr. Winn that I should come to the table immediately after questions, and not before--intended to interpose ere I could reach the table. This would have been a dishonest trick had you succeeded; it became contemptibly ridiculous when you failed; but it is a lesson to me that I must be careful, indeed, when English gentlemen of name and family make treaties with me.

Your second resolution, on February 11th, was a spiteful, paltry, and cowardly insult to myself and to my const.i.tuents, for it was pressed by you despite that my colleague offered for me the express undertaking that you pretended you wished to secure, and was still pressed by you though Mr. Burt offered for me that I would at once personally give such undertaking. These two resolutions, utterly illegal and dangerous to Parliamentary repute, you have renewed on Thursday, the 21st, although you had heard read by Mr. Speaker an undertaking from me to the House that I would not attempt to take my seat until the judicial interpreters of the law had given formal judgment. And they are very cowardly and inexcusable resolutions, spiteful in excess of any ever pa.s.sed in previous years. They exclude me, not only from the House, but from the reading-room, library, tea-room, dining-rooms, and exterior lobbies, though there is not the faintest suggestion that I have used my right to go to those places to enable me to disturb the House. If I had not taken the precaution to antic.i.p.ate your malice, I should actually have been hindered by force from going to the proper officer to obtain the certificate of my return. Yours is a mean and spiteful act, Sir, unworthy an English gentleman. And I admit that you have inconvenienced me, for you have deprived me of access to the library of the House, and you may thus put me to some expense and annoyance in the procurement of law books and Parliamentary records in the litigation in which I am involved in defending the rights of my const.i.tuents.

It is too much that, in 1884, a duly-elected and properly-qualified burgess of Parliament should be shut outside by such votes.

To repeat to you words signed, in September, 1656, by your own ancestor, Sir John Northcote, M.P. for the County of Devon: "we who have been duly chosen to be members of the Parliament, have an undoubted right to meet, sit, and vote in Parliament," and "no part of the representative body are trusted to consent to anything in the nation's behalf if the whole have not their free liberty of debating and voting in the matters propounded."

To continue the language of your st.u.r.dy ancestor, you have "now declared that the people's choice cannot give a man a right to sit in Parliament, but the right must be derived from _your_ gracious will and pleasure."

You reply that you have the force on your side; but Sir John Northcote declared that: "The violent exclusion of any of the people's deputies from doing their duties and executing their trust freely in Parliament doth change the state of the people from freedom into a mere slavery;"

and if you tell me that the majority of the present members of the House are with you in what you do, I recall Sir John Northcote's protest: "That all such chosen members for Parliament as shall take upon them to approve of the forcible exclusion of other chosen members, or shall sit, vote, and act by the name of the Parliament of England while, to their knowledge, any of the chosen members are so by force shut out, we say such ought to be reputed betrayers of the liberties of England."

You cannot now pretend with any hope that sane men will believe you, that you desire "to prevent the profanation of the oath." In 1880 you prevented the second reading of the Affirmation Bill, introduced by my colleague, Mr. Labouchere, under the pretext that such a measure ought to be introduced by the Government. In 1881, after you yourself had said the matter should be dealt with by legislation, you prevented the Government from introducing it. In 1882 your friends blocked the Affirmation measure again proposed by my colleague, and in 1883 you exerted every influence to defeat, and successfully defeated, the Affirmation Bill brought forward by the Government.

If you had really believed the oath profaned by me, you would have been one of the first to aid in removing the possible profanation by subst.i.tuting the right of affirmation. In Ulster you took credit for keeping an Atheist out of Parliament, but it was not my Atheism you kept out, for I actually sat with you day by day, speaking, voting, and serving, from the beginning of July, 1880, until the end of March, 1881.

And, during the whole of that time, my care was to be at least as good and loyal a member of that House as any sitting within its walls. I do not plead my conduct there, whilst using all my right, as anything on my behalf, for I at most could do no more than my duty; but at least I have the right to say that it was never suggested that I was other than a good working member of the House, strict in my attendance at and during every one of its sittings. It cannot be pretended that I used my right of speech to force upon the House one word which did not relate to the business then being dealt with, or that in any fashion I obtruded upon what should be a purely political a.s.sembly any views of mine on matters of religion.

You have permitted in public my conduct to be misstated in your presence, and utterances in Parliament to be attributed to me which are none of mine, and you have done this because you hoped that, by exciting religious and social prejudice against me, you might weaken the Government, and crawl back into office. To injure the Liberal party, you have allowed words which you pretend are sacred to be used as party cries, and you have made hundreds of thousands examine into and declare in favor of my opinions and expressions on religious questions who but for you might perhaps have never even known my name. You have allied yourself at Westminster with men whom you denounced in Ireland as "traitors and disloyal," in order that, with their help, you might insult an English const.i.tuency; and you have succeeded in bringing Parliamentary Government into contempt by parading the House of Commons as the chief law-breaking a.s.sembly in the world. In four years against me you have done your worst to destroy me; with your own purse you have helped the various projects to ruin me; and you have so failed that clergymen and Nonconformist ministers have been driven to support me from very indignation against the injury you have done to the cause of religion.

Your Conservative a.s.sociations have flooded the country with leaflets containing garbled and misleading extracts from my speeches and writings, and have thus excited the curiosity of many whom I could have never reached. These, procuring my works, and finding that my words have been distorted and taken out of context, give a favor to me that I should perhaps have never otherwise won.

Few believe that you are moved by religious motives. Mr. Newdegate is regarded as sincere, though his sanity is doubted; but when men recollect the past and even present lives of many of those around you, whose tongues so loudly declare their piety, they come, not unnaturally, to the conclusion that he is the worst infidel who trails the banner of his church in the mire of political warfare, and permits the votes of the drunken, the dissolute, the dishonest, and the disloyal to be canva.s.sed by his whips so that they may be counted on the side which he parades as that of the pure and the holy.

On the 7th February, 1882, I told you and your majority: "If I am not fit for my const.i.tuents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall." I have gone since voluntarily to my const.i.tuents--to those from whom you presented a pet.i.tion with 10,400 mock signatures upon it. The answer has come at the ballot-box. My const.i.tuents bid me resist you, and I will.

They trust me to defeat you, and I will. The law is on my side, and you fear its p.r.o.nouncement. You kept me from the possibility of obtaining a decision as long as you could, but on the 11th February I broke through your barriers. Then you fruitlessly tried to erase all trace of my voting, and when you found that I beat you on this by adding a new vote as you rubbed out the vote before, then, in malicious spite, you shut me out of the tea-room, dining-room, cloak-room, and library. For shame, Sir Stafford Northcote! This was worthy of "O'Donnell," but not of the leader of a great party. You wear knightly orders. You should be above a knave's spitefulness.

My turn is coming. You have won sympathy for me throughout the land; you have made Northampton men stand by me closer than ever; you are now awaking the country to stand by Northampton. Mr. Justice Stephen says that the appeal is to the const.i.tuencies, and I appeal. In the name of justice, by the hope of liberty, in memory of English struggles for freedom, I appeal, and I hear the answer growing as you shall hear it, too, on the day when, from my place in the House, I move: "That all the resolutions respecting Charles Bradlaugh, member for Northampton, hindering him from obeying the law, and punishing him for having obeyed the law, be expunged from the Journals of this House as being subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors of this kingdom."