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A CARDINAL’S BROKEN OATH
A Letter
TO HIS EMINENCE HENRY EDWARD, CARDINAL-ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER
BY
CHARLES BRADLAUGH
To his Eminence
HENRY EDWARD,
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 entitule “An Englishman’s Protest” against my being allowed to sit in the Commons’ House, to which the vote of a free constituency 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 constituents; 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 coarse 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, God,” 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 associated 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 institution possible. You say “there are happily some men who believe in God and fear him.” Do you do either? You, who declared, “So help me, God” 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, God.” How do you understand them of your broken oath? Do they mean to you: “May God 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 God – it is in the highest degree indecent and indecorous for you to parade yourself as a defender of the sanctity 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 assailment. 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
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 constituency does not entitle 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 constituency are called “mob,” “dregs,” and “scum” – 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 pronounce 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 constituents, 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 passed 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 anticipate 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 constituents.
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 sturdy 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 substituting 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 assembly 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 constituency; and you have succeeded in bringing Parliamentary Government into contempt by parading the House of Commons as the chief law-breaking assembly 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 associations 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 canvassed 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 constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall.” I have gone since voluntarily to my constituents – to those from whom you presented a petition with 10,400 mock signatures upon it. The answer has come at the ballot-box. My constituents 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 pronouncement. 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 constituencies, 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.”
Charles Bradlaugh.
30, St. James’ Place, S.W.March 4th, 1884.
Sir, – There are some points in the letter you have addressed to me which I am unwilling to pass over in silence lest I should be taken to admit your assertions.
In the first place, it is necessary that I should point out to you that the action of the House of Commons with respect to yourself has not been arbitrary or capricious, but has been founded on principles deliberately adopted by a large majority of its members of various political opinions, to which principles they have steadily adhered, and which they have always been prepared to justify.
In the second place it should be clearly understood that in all the steps which we have taken with respect to yourself, including some which we took with the greatest reluctance, we were acting on the defensive, in consequence of your repeated attempts to override or to evade the repeated decisions of the House of Commons.
The brief history of your case is this. You were duly elected member for Northampton at the General Election of 1880. On presenting yourself to take your seat you tendered an affirmation instead of an oath, and supported your claim to affirm by reference to the fact that you had been permitted to do so in a court of law under the Evidence Amendment Acts of 1869 and 1870. That claim at once, and necessarily, brought under the notice of the House that you must either yourself have objected in a court of law to take an oath, or must have been objected to as incompetent to do so, and that the presiding judge must have been satisfied that the taking of an oath would have no binding effect upon your conscience.
That being so, a Committee was appointed by the House to consider whether the Evidence Amendment Acts were applicable to the case of a member of the House of Commons desiring to take his seat and to comply with the necessary conditions.
It was held by the Committee that they were not so applicable, and this finding of the Committee was subsequently confirmed by the judgment of the Court of Appeal.
Upon being refused permission to affirm, you immediately came to the table of the House and offered to take the oath. This proceeding was objected to, and the majority of the House (still, as theretofore, composed of members of different shades of politics) refused to allow you to go through the form of taking an oath, which, by the hypothesis on which your original claim to affirm was founded, as well as by the evidence afforded by a letter of your own, they held you to be incompetent really to take, and which they considered it would be a profanation to allow you to pretend to take.
That was the ground taken by the House on the 23rd June, 1880, and it is the ground which it has maintained ever since.
You have, since the adoption of that resolution, made various attempts to force the House to admit you to a seat, while still maintaining its objection; and those attempts have, on more than one occasion, led to scenes of a very indecent and disorderly character. In its anxiety to prevent the recurrence of such scenes, the House has felt itself obliged to adopt measures of rigid exclusion, which it would gladly have avoided.
I do not think it necessary to enter into the details of these scenes.
I am, however, obliged to take notice of your allegation that my action on the 11th February involved a breach of an arrangement previously made through Mr. Winn.
The arrangement which I authorised Mr. Winn to make in my name, and which he did make in a letter to Mr. Labouchere, was as follows:
“If Mr. Bradlaugh will write you a letter to the effect that he will not go up to the table to take the oath, nor make any other move with regard to his seat until Monday, February 11th, and will do so on that day, say immediately after questions, I am quite sure that Sir Stafford will neither move anything himself respecting Mr. Bradlaugh’s seat, nor employ anyone else to do so, previous to that day.”
The meaning of this is perfectly obvious, and it was in strict conformity with it that I myself abstained, and urged my friends to abstain, from taking any step whatever in relation to Mr. Bradlaugh until the day named. When, upon that day, you came forward in defiance of the Speaker’s repeated calls to order, and began to go through the form of taking the oath, I had no option but to support the Chair, and to support also the repeatedly pronounced resolutions of the House in former sessions.
I do not take notice of other passages in your letter reflecting on the course of the majority, and more particularly of myself.
But I will add, in conclusion, what your letter does not show, that your exclusion from the precincts of the House is terminable at any moment when you may be willing to undertake not to disturb the proceedings of the House. The inconveniences of which you complain are inconveniences which you might, if you chose, put an end to to-morrow.
I have the honor to remain,Your obedient servant,Stafford H. Northcote.
C. Bradlaugh, Esq., M.P.
23, Circus Road, St. John’s Wood, London, N.W.,March 7th, 1884.
To the Right Hon. Sir Stafford Northcote, Bart, M.P.
Sir, – In reply to your favor of the 4th instant, in which you say that the House held me to be incompetent to take the oath, will you permit me to answer: 1. That the question of competence or incompetence to take the oath is one of law, fit only for the decision of a judicial tribunal, to which tribunal I have always desired and endeavored to refer such question. 2. That if the “principle deliberately adopted” by a large majority of the members of the House of Commons had been that they desired to prevent “a profanation of the oath,” then they ought, during the sessions of 1882 – 1883, to have gladly facilitated the passage of the Affirmation Bill, which would have prevented the necessity for the fulfilling by me of that which you describe as profanation, but which I contend is the duty imposed on me by law.
In your very temperate historic narrative, you omit the fact that when the House passed its resolution of the 23rd June, 1880, it had before it my declaration, made three weeks earlier, in answer to question 102 of the second Select Committee:
“Any form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding.”
And as you refer to my letter of the 20th May, printed in the report of that committee, it is also fair to recall my answer thereon on the same day to question 197:
“I ask the Committee in examining it to take it complete, not to separate one or two words in it and to take those without the countervailing words, and to remember that in this letter I declare that the oath, if I take it, would bind me, and I now repeat that in the most distinct and formal manner; that the Oath of Allegiance, viz.: ‘I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to her Majesty Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors, according to law,’ will, when I take it, be most fully, completely, and unreservedly binding upon my honor and conscience; and I crave leave to refer to the unanimous judgment of the full Court of the Exchequer Chamber, in the case of Miller v. Salomons, 17th Jurist, page 463, and to the case of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway Company v. Heaton, 4th Jurist, new series, page 708, for the distinguishment between the words of asseveration and the essential words of an oath. But I also desire to add, and I do this most solemnly and unreservedly, that the taking and subscribing, or repeating of those words of asseveration, will in no degree weaken the binding effect of the oath on my conscience.”
In your reference to my attempts to take the seat to which I am by law entitled, you have omitted to state that on the 27th April, 1881, you personally advised me to wait for legislation, and that when I did so wait, your friends of the majority and yourself prevented such legislation.
In recalling the arrangement made by Mr. Winn on your behalf, you have omitted his most explicit and latest letter:
