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Benjamin Disraeli (1804‒1881): His Lives and Afterlives (Colloque de la SFEVE 25-26 février 2024)
Part 2: Cultural, Literary and Religious Impressions

‘[A] Mere Mystery-Man’: Disraeli and the Church of England’s Episcopate

« Purement et simplement un homme-mystère » : Disraeli et l’Episcopat de la Church of England
Jérôme Grosclaude

Résumés

La sincérité de l’anglicanisme de Benjamin Disraeli a souvent été contestée, quand elle n’a pas été dénoncée comme une simple façade. Les éléments généralement avancés en faveur de ces thèses renvoient alors à son rôle dans le processus de nomination des évêques et archevêques de l’Église d’Angleterre, et, plus largement, à ses relations avec l’épiscopat. Nous verrons toutefois que, même si le calcul politique était rarement absent de ses pensées, Benjamin Disraeli s’efforçait, en recommandant des hommes pour l’épiscopat, de faire preuve de mesure et de ne pas bouleverser l’équilibre interne de l’Église établie.

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Texte intégral

1The authenticity of Disraeli’s membership of the Church of England has drawn much attention, as well as the way he considered the Established Church. To be sure, Disraeli’s proud embrace of his Jewish heritage, as well as his calling in 1870 the Church of England ‘a main remedial agency in our present state’ (Disraeli 1870, xii), undoubtedly aroused suspicions from at least some of his contemporaries that his Anglicanism was a mere façade.

2Disraeli’s recommendations of episcopal appointments—and, more broadly, his relations with the episcopate—have long been used as evidence of his insincere Anglicanism: this is what this article will investigate. When it comes to episcopal nominations—Disraeli was to recommend thirteen bishops during his two spells as Prime Minister—his choices for bishoprics have often been described as merely driven by purely political, or even vote-catching, motives. A great historian of the Church of England, Owen Chadwick went so far as to call him ‘the most ignorant’ of Queen Victoria’s ten Prime Ministers when it came to church patronage (Chadwick 331). However, this paper will argue that, even though such calculations were seldom absent, Disraeli’s recommendations generally aimed at striking a balance, and at not unduly upsetting the internal equilibrium of the Established Church. I’ll begin by showing that Disraeli’s practice when it came to episcopal nominations seemed largely suspicious at the time; I will then study to what extent Disraeli’s recommendations were indeed driven to some extent by party political, or party strategy, considerations. Finally, in highlighting the religious sensibilities of the men Disraeli recommended as bishops, I suggest that Disraeli struck a balance between party political concerns and genuine spiritual considerations.

Disraeli’s Fraught Relations with the Church and Its Leadership

3The title of this paper ‘a mere mystery man’ refers to a phrase Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Winchester used to refer to the former Prime Minister and then Leader of the Opposition in a letter dated 20/11/1871 he sent to his friend the Archbishop of Dublin, Richard (Chevenix) Trench: ‘[A] mere mystery-man like Disraeli, who was trading upon the principles and ultimate existence of an honorable minority and had no real principles, but was ready to catch at any cry to gain a respite from defeat’ (R. Wilberforce 278).

4The tone of the passage—in the middle of a letter about the discussions between the then newly-disestablished Church of Ireland and the British Government then led by W. E. Gladstone—is representative of the low esteem in which Bishop Wilberforce held the former and future Prime Minister.

  • 1 Disraeli was MP for Buckinghamshire from 1847 to his elevation to the Lords in August 1876. He had (...)

5Samuel Wilberforce can appear well placed to judge Disraeli: S. Wilberforce was the Bishop of Oxford for 24 years (1845‒1869), which means that Disraeli’s constituency and country house, Hughenden Manor, were in his diocese.1 As an Anglican, Samuel Wilberforce was therefore Disraeli’s diocesan bishop. As such, Samuel Wilberforce was regularly entertained by Disraeli (Blake 411‒12) as was usual for an MP who was also a Justice of the Peace (from 1836) and the local Deputy Lieutenant (from 1845). I must note that these occasions must have been purely formal as Samuel Wilberforce never mentions them in his correspondence, as far as I was able to ascertain.

6Apart from what their local proximity, Samuel Wilberforce and Disraeli also shared a strong involvement in national politics. Samuel Wilberforce was obviously a member of the House of Lords—although he died before Disraeli also joined the Upper Chamber—and was a leading force among his brother bishops especially in the 1850s when—in great measure because of Wilberforce’s efforts—the convocations of the Provinces of York and Canterbury (what is often called the Parliament of the Church) were finally restored after a hiatus of more than 130 years.

7Samuel Wilberforce was broadly moderate in his writings, even in his private writings. He could however be scathing in his attacks: in an essay published in 1869 he calls John Henry Newman and his associates ‘the leading perverts’ (S. Wilberforce 262), on another occasion, he refers (in a private document) to one of his priests as ‘a clown’. Disraeli is one of a small number of people to whom all references in his letters (be they or not intended for circulation) are negative.

  • 2 See the Book of Daniel 5, 1-30, and in particular 25 & 26: ‘And this [is] the writing that was writ (...)

8As the quote which opened this first section shows, Samuel Wilberforce felt clearly disgusted by Disraeli. But for what reasons? There probably was at the bottom of all this a lack of personal alchemy. I refer the reader, for this, to the picture the prelate made of the party Disraeli had organised to celebrate his elevation to the Premiership in 1868 and to which Samuel Wilberforce had been invited: ‘Dizzy in his glory, leading about the Princess of Wales; the Prince of Wales, Mrs Dizzy—she looking very ill and haggard. The impenetrable man low. All looks to me as if England’s “Mene, Mene”,2 were written on our walls’ (R. Wilberforce 242). ‘Mene’ being the word written by the hand of God on the walls of Jericho to foretell that the city would be destroyed.

9Describing Disraeli’s educational background, Robert Blake had this to say: ‘An agnostic home, education at a Unitarian establishment, his refusal to go to Oxford, his highly individual, if not eccentric, religious opinions, made it hard for him to identify himself convincingly with the Anglican cause, still harder for others to do so’ (Blake 203). There is little doubt that Disraeli’s background could seem upsetting for Samuel Wilberforce, especially when compared with his friend W. E. Gladstone, a fervent, Oxford-educated Anglican who was also an amateur theologian.

10But we can also find more susbstantial reasons in an exchange between the two men in September 1868. In a letter dated from Balmoral, Disraeli, then Prime Minister, had written to Samuel Wilberforce to point out to him that the Church of England’s best interest lay in supporting the Tory party in the next elections which were to take place two months later. Thus Disraeli encouraged Samuel Wilberforce to moderate his anti-Catholicism and to fight against what he called ‘ultra-Ritualism’:

Now, certainly, I [undecipherable] the long pent up feeling of this nation against ultra-Ritualism will pronounce itself at the impending election. . . . The questions of labour & liberty are settled, the rise of religious questions may be anticipated in an eminently religious people undisturbed in their industry and secure in their freedom.
It will be a Protestant Parliament, though it may not be a Church Parliament.
But there can be no doubt that every wise man on our side should attract the Protestant feeling, as much as practicable, to the Church of England.
It has been diverted from the Church of England in Scotland. There, the Protestant feeling is absolutely enlisted against us. If we let it escape from us in England all is over. (MSS Wilberforce 13)

11It is not hard to imagine that Samuel Wilberforce must have felt outraged that Disraeli should so openly claim that the very existence of the Church of England was wholly dependent on the zeal with which the Church and its ministers would campaign for the Tory party. It is worth asking who Disraeli meant by ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the letter quoted above. And, perhaps more importantly, did he include Samuel Wilberforce in these pronouns? Wilberforce drafted a cautious letter some days later: while assuring Disraeli that ‘The vast majority of sound Churchmen are entirely with you on the great question of the day [disestablishment in Ireland]’ (R. Wilberforce 260), he dismissed the idea that the Church could lose her status in England: ‘There is a small ultra party who look with hope to disestablishment, but they are almost as politically powerless as the Evangelicals’ (R. Wilberforce 260). He then candidly mentioned the Anglican doubts about Disraeli’s Government: ‘[T]here is at this moment a jealous and an alarmed watchfulness of your administration of Church patronage’ (R. Wilberforce 260). He concluded: ‘I believe that there is great danger of your losing the hearty support of the great body of the Church party unless they see the men who represent them adopted by your administration’ (R. Wilberforce 261). To put it more clearly: according to Samuel Wilberforce, the Tory leader could not take for granted the support of the Church of England and, interestingly enough in view of the theme of this paper, the argument he put forward was the choice the Prime Minister had made of the men he recommended for episcopal nominations.

12Samuel Wilberforce’s opinion shows that, at the time, in important ecclesiastical circles Disraeli already had the reputation of being an unsafe ally for the Church of England. The next section will show that Wilberforce’s opinion was warranted to the extent that Disraeli did have ulterior political motives.

The Ulterior Political Motives of Disraeli’s Episcopal Recommendations

13I should begin by noting that Samuel Wilberforce’s misgivings could appear warranted, and especially if one compared him to his arch-rival William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone was well known to be a devout member of the Church of England—he even dabbled with theology, writing in particular a 296-page The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scriptures (pub. 1890), which one recent commentator called ‘popular apologetic for the Bible in the face of sceptical criticism’ (Sanders np). This last fact would have seemed unthinkable coming from Disraeli. To make matters worse, so to speak, Samuel Wilberforce was friends with W. E. Gladstone with whom he had become acquainted in the 1840s when the latter was the MP for Oxford University. As a sign of the central place religion occupied in his life, W. E. Gladstone had once declared that his faith was to him ‘what the Nile is to Egypt, and what sunshine is to the world’ (Gibson 1999, 372). It is therefore unsurprising that Prof William Gibson has described W. E. Gladstone as ‘exhilarated’ by the task of recommending men for bishoprics as Prime Minister (Gibson 1999, 375). Indeed, his former private secretary, Sir George Leveson-Gower was to observe: ‘whenever a Church dignitary happened to die . . . the whole business of state seemed to be put aside whilst he poured forth a perfect avalanche of letters inquiring at great length and in minute detail as to the comparative merits and claims of various clergymen for preferment’ (Gibson 1999, 376). It would have been difficult to say the same of Disraeli: on one of his first meetings with the Queen as Prime Minister he had to ask his private secretary to send him a copy of Crockford’s Clerical Directory by the mail, so ignorant was he then of the clerics Queen Victoria had mentioned as worthy of the mitre (Chadwick 331). It is however fair to note that, over the years, he improved his knowledge of the subject.

14When Roy Jenkins observed that ‘One difference between Gladstone and Disraeli was that  . . . Disraeli, although a tactician of genius  . . . was a maneuver rather than a statesman of wide strategy’ (Jenkins 268), the remark also seems apt to describe Disraeli’s approach to episcopal preferments. As has often been said of Samuel Wilberforce, Disraeli always had an eye on the temporal when pursuing the spiritual. This seems confirmed by the remark by Dean Gerald Wellesley of Windsor, who wrote to Queen Victoria in 1875 that ‘he [Disraeli] regards the Church of England as the great engine of the Conservatives’ (Blake 507).

15It seems beyond doubt that, broadly speaking, Disraeli saw all the political potential there was in the religious question (Parry 2007, 79). One should observe that the ideas expressed by Disraeli in his letter of September 28, 1868 which I quoted earlier were only the natural expression of a strategy he had been following for some 15 years, and which ran contrary to the one pursued by his predecessor both as Tory leader and as Prime Minister, namely the 14th Earl of Derby (previously Lord Stanley). Indeed, to quote Prof Angus Hawkins:

  • 3 Angus Hawkins is here quoting a leading article published in The Press on 24 December 1853. The Cab (...)

Derby’s wish to avoid sectarian differences becoming the basis of party distinctions came under pressure during 1854, however, as Disraeli fashioned himself into an unlikely Protestant champion. In early 1853, while courting the Irish and radicals, Disraeli talked of a liberal and generous policy with regard to Catholicism. But by the end of the year, through the pages of The Press, he was shaping fear of popery and High Church ritual into a weapon against ministerial Peelites. ‘The middle classes of England are essentially Protestant. They shrink with unconquerable distrust from Puseyite Secretaries of State, from Jesuits in the guise of financiers, and from impassioned Oratorians in the garb of Secretaries of War’. (Hawkins 96)3

16The reader will have understood that Derby did not approve of such an attitude, as he was to write to Disraeli. In a letter sent shortly after the 1852 elections, he recalled that their ‘chance at the [1852] elections had been ruined by our taking up high Protestant politics’. Derby warned that ‘I fear you will burn your fingers with that infernal “Protestantism”’ and always remained staunchly opposed to exciting Protestant prejudice as a Conservative rallying cry (Hawkins 97).

17However, 16 years later, in February 1868, when Derby’s health problems led him—at the age of almost 70—to resign the leadership of the House of Lords, his responsibilities as overall Tory Leader and Prime Minister passed seamlessly to Disraeli (Blake 485‒86). That was a very natural process since Disraeli had been the Conservative leader in the House of Commons, and thus the Earl’s second-in-command, for more than fifteen years (Blake 267‒69). Once this transfer of power had occurred, no influence could prevent the new Prime Minister from deploying an incendiary strategy which represented to him the Conservatives’ best chance of success. This could seem all the more pressing as the Conservatives were to prove unable to command a majority in the House of Commons between 1846 and 1886 (except for a brief exception in 1874). As is well known, Disraeli’s first Premiership was rather short, since the Liberals won the following general elections of November 1868. Gladstone was appointed Prime Minister on December 1, barely 10 months after Disraeli had himself climbed the greasy pole. As Robert Blake aptly remarked:

Between 1846 and 1886 there was only one Conservative administration with a clear majority behind it in the House of Commons. All the rest were short-lived minority governments existing only because of their opponents’ dissensions. Disraeli was to spend a longer time in opposition than almost any statesman of comparable stature in our history. (Blake 243)

18In the context I just described, it would be very naïve to contend that Disraeli had no party-political issues in mind when recommending names for bishoprics to his ‘most beloved sovereign’. Disraeli had genuine concerns for the Church of England and his recommendations for episcopal appointments were at least partly guided by religious considerations. To this last point we now turn.

Disraeli’s Religious and/or Spiritual Considerations in Making Episcopal Recommendations

  • 4 See Jonathan Parry for Disraeli’s distrust of the alleged centrifugal influence of the Tractarianis (...)

19We can start with a certainty: Disraeli was very hostile to the High Church party and to Ritualism.4 Three of the men he appointed bishops and who could fairly have been described as High Church, were known for their opposition to Ritualism: John Jackson, William Connor Magee, and Archibald Campbell Tait.

  • 5 The (Tory) Leader of the House of Lords being the 6th Duke of Richmond, ‘an amiable but ineffective (...)

20The latter, as Archbishop of Canterbury, introduced in the House of Lords the Public Worship Regulation Bill in 1874. The Bill allowed for the swifter prosecution of recalcitrant clergy, and Disraeli quietly ensured the Bill was quickly adopted by the Upper House.5 The Bill provided for a single court for both provinces in order to try ritual cases—instead of the previous cumbersome procedure before a bishop’s court, which was responsible for local discrepancies, depending as it did on each individual bishop’s willingness to prosecute or not such offences or alleged offences. Although the Bill could technically be used against either party of the Church, it was widely known to have been drafted to try to put an end to the Ritualist Movement.

21If Disraeli ‘quietly’ ensured the Bill’s passage, it was not primarily because of his beliefs on the matter, but because his own cabinet was divided on the question—as it contained Low Churchmen such as the Lord Chancellor, the first Earl Cairns, as well as High Churchmen such as the Secretary of State for India (and future Prime Minister), the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury who openly supported Tractarian ideas.

22When the Bill reached the House of Commons it was met with a strong speech by Gladstone—it is said he had come down specifically from his Welsh estate of Hawarden to speak against the Bill (Blake 550)—who denounced it as dangerous for the Church and misguided. The ‘Grand Old Man’ thus remarked:

At the commencement of the controversy we were told that Ritualism was a great evil, and that we must have a Bill to put it down, while at the same time there was no definition of what Ritualism was. I have lived a public life for 40 years, and during every one of those years Ritualism has borne a different meaning. (Parliament 1874a, 1376)

23After insisting on the fact that no one (according to him) could define what Ritualism was, he concluded:

Raise the mad-dog cry of ‘Ritualism’, and do not say what that Ritualism is, and you will bring down the world, the flesh, and the devil—you will bring down all those evil powers which are rife in the world, and wreck God’s great work of revival in His Church of England. On these grounds I object to the Bill, brought in as it is. (Parliament 1874a, 1455)

24This drew a forceful reply the following week, when the Bill received its second reading, from Disraeli who explicitly stated that this was ‘a Bill to put down Ritualism’. He took the occasion to condemn Ritualism, which he called ‘Mass in masquerade’. He then added:

To the solemn ceremonies of our Roman Catholic friends, I am prepared to extend that reverence which my mind and conscience always give to religious ceremonies sincerely believed in; but the false position in which we have been placed by, I believe, a small, but a powerful and well-organized body of those who call themselves English clergymen, in copying those ceremonies, is one which the country thinks intolerable, and of which we ought to rid ourselves. (Parliament 1874b, 80‒81)

25The Public Worship Regulation Act was ultimately passed by Parliament and received Royal Assent on 7 August 1874. It proved however largely ineffective. It led to four priests being sent to prison between 1877 and 1882—and thus becoming martyrs to the cause—for having persisted in following ritualistic practices. It was eventually repealed in 1963 after having been dormant for some sixty years.

26It would, however, be wrong to make too much of Disraeli’s opposition to the High Church and to only read his recommendations to bishoprics in the light of this episode.

27The thirteen men appointed Bishops or Archbishop on Disraeli’s recommendation were John Jackson (London 1868), James Atlay (Hereford 1868), Archibald Campbell Tait (Canterbury 1868), William Connor Magee (Peterborough 1868), Christopher Wordsworth (Lincoln 1869), (William) Basil Jones (St David’s 1874), Thomas Claughton (St Albans 1877), Edward White Benson (Truro 1877), Anthony Thorold (Rochester 1877), Rowley Hill (Sodor & Man 1877), William Maclagan (Lichfield 1878), Joseph Lightfoot (Durham 1879), and John Ryle (Liverpool 1880).

28Despite historian James Bentley’s remark that Disraeli would never have appointed a Liberal to a bishopric, he did recommend (and obtained) Joseph ‘J. B.’ Lightfoot’s appointment to Durham in 1879. He also successfully recommended Thomas Claughton’s translation from Rochester to St Albans in 1877. Claughton, a member of the High Church party, was an associate of W. E. Gladstone (Gibson 1992, 201). In fact, of the thirteen men Disraeli recommended, seven could be broadly classified as Low Church or Evangelical; they were Hill, Jackson, Jones, Lightfoot, Magee, Ryle, and Thorold. Five others could be described as moderate High Churchmen—Atlay, Benson, Claughton, Maclagan, and (to a certain extent) Tait. Christopher Wordsworth was the only one than could fairly be described as a staunch High Churchman. Owen Chadwick’s surprising assertion that ‘Disraeli wanted Conservative clergymen and nothing but Conservative clergymen’ (Chadwick 332) is therefore not borne out by facts as they accounted for less than half the total of his episcopal recommendations.

29W. E. Gladstone himself acknowledged that Disraeli’s episcopal patronage was ‘very good’, with the one exception of John Ryle’s appointment to Liverpool in 1880 which he saw as nakedly political. Crucially, this was Disraeli’s last appointment, which, he explained to the Queen, was necessary in order to attach Liverpool to the Conservative party. Ryle was an Evangelical and a vocal opponent of ritualism who would later decline to oppose the prosecution for ritual irregularities of Fr James Bell Cox in 1885 under the Public Worship Regulation Act.

30Of course, one last element to take into account is that Disraeli was officially just ‘advising’ Queen Victoria on the matter, and the evidence shows that he was more often than not doing so in the face of the Queen’s own religious preferences, influenced as they were by her unofficial advisors (Dean Gerald Wellesley of Windsor, her resident chaplain from 1849, chief among them) (Ledger-Lomas 149‒51). One well-known instance of this is the appointment of A. C. Tait as Archbishop of Canterbury, to which he had to consent in view of the Queen’s insistence (Parry 2007, 80).

31The final judgment seems to me to be one of the points made by Prof William Gibson in 1992: ‘Throughout his premiership Disraeli worked hard to ensure that vacant bishoprics were distributed so as to obtain a balance between the church’s various factions and at the same time some advantage to the Conservative Party’ (Gibson 1992, 201).

General Conclusion

32In this article, we have seen that Disraeli had the reputation of using recommendations to bishoprics for party-political reasons. We saw that he had already gained this reputation in his lifetime. However, the facts, once considered, do not seem to warrant this reputation. We might therefore well ask ourselves: why? Where did this reputation come from? The present author’s guess is that the root was probably in his obvious disdain for the Tractarian-inspired High Church—then in the ascendant on the ground but suffering from the hostility of the Queen and of the Church’s hierarchy. This party of the Church was then ‘unfashionable’—to quote the expression used by William Gibson in a 1995 article on place-seeking in the Church (Gibson 1995, 59)—and largely outside the pale of Church patronage. As a consequence, it is probable that they looked for a scapegoat for their difficulties in achieving high ecclesiastical office and laid the blame on Disraeli, rather than on Queen Victoria who, however, resisted the introduction of Tractarian Bishops (Ledger-Lomas 152‒55) every step of the way. Whatever the view we take of things, it is hard to deny that Disraeli was responsible for the advancement of some of the most eminent churchmen of the century—including unwittingly Christopher Wordsworth [Jnr] as Bishop of Lincoln in 1869. He, for one, must have seen how balanced Disraeli’s episcopal recommendations were.

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Bibliographie

Blake, Robert. Disraeli. 1966. London: Methuen & Co., 1969.

Chadwick, Owen. The Victorian Church, Part II: 1860‒1891. 1970. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales of the Right Honorable Disraeli: Lothair. Vol. I. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1870.

Gibson, William. ‘Disraeli’s Church Patronage: 1868‒1880’. Anglican and Episcopal History 61.2 (1992): 197–210.

Gibson, William. ‘“Unreasonable and Unbecomingˮ: Self-Recommendation and Place-Seeking in the Church of England, 1700–1900’. Albion 27.1 (1995): 43–63.

Gibson, William. ‘“A Great excitement”: Gladstone and Church Patronage 1860‒1894’. Anglican and Episcopal History 68 (1999): 372‒96.

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Jenkins, Roy. Gladstone. 1995. London: Papermac/Macmillan, 1996.

Ledger‒Lomas, Michael. Queen Victoria – This Thorny Crown. Oxford: OUP, 2021.

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Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 15/07/1874, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1874/jul/15/adjourned-debate, accessed 15 May 2024.

Parry, Jonathan. Benjamin Disraeli. Oxford: OUP, 2007.

Parry, Jonathan. ‘Disraeli and England’. The Historical Journal 43.3 (2000): 699‒728.

Parry, Jonathan. ‘Disraeli, the East and Religion: Tancred in Context.’ The English Historical Review 132.556 (2017): 570‒604.

Sanders, Fred. ‘Gladstone: The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture’, https://scriptoriumdaily.com/gladstone-the-impregnable-rock-of-holy-scripture/ accessed 15 May 2024.

Wilberforce, Reginald Garton. Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D. D., Lord Bishop of Oxford and Afterwards of Winchester, with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, Volume III [1861‒1873]. London: John Murray, 1882.

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Notes

1 Disraeli was MP for Buckinghamshire from 1847 to his elevation to the Lords in August 1876. He had previously been MP for Maidstone (Kent) from 1837 to 1841 and then for Shrewsbury (Shropshire) from 1841 to 1847.

2 See the Book of Daniel 5, 1-30, and in particular 25 & 26: ‘And this [is] the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This [is] the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it’.

3 Angus Hawkins is here quoting a leading article published in The Press on 24 December 1853. The Cabinet members mentioned were very likely, in that order, the 2nd Earl Granville (Lord Privy Seal), W. E. Gladstone (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and the 5th Duke of Newcastle (Secretary for War and the Colonies).

4 See Jonathan Parry for Disraeli’s distrust of the alleged centrifugal influence of the Tractarianism-inspired High Church (Parry 2007, 79 & 82).

5 The (Tory) Leader of the House of Lords being the 6th Duke of Richmond, ‘an amiable but ineffective nonentity’ (Blake 516).

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Jérôme Grosclaude, « ‘[A] Mere Mystery-Man’: Disraeli and the Church of England’s Episcopate »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 101 Printemps | 2025, mis en ligne le 07 avril 2025, consulté le 13 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15955 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13qt4

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Auteur

Jérôme Grosclaude

Jérôme Grosclaude is Professor of British History at Université Clermont Auvergne and a member of the Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM) research center. His recent publications include Samuel Wilberforce (1805‒1873) : réinventer l’Église sous Victoria (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023) and ‘Wesley and the Atlantic World’ in Joseph W. Cunningham & Clive M. Norris (eds), The Routledge Companion to John Wesley (Routledge, 2023).
Jérôme Grosclaude est professeur de civilisation britannique à l’université Clermont Auvergne, et appartient à l’UMR 5317 : IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités). Parmi ses publications récentes : Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) : réinventer l’Église sous Victoria (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023) et ‘Wesley and the Atlantic World’ in Joseph W. Cunningham & Clive M. Norris (éds), The Routledge Companion to John Wesley (Routledge, 2023).

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