Gladstone, Vaticanism, and the Question of the East

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Abstract
That Gladstone was religious is obvious enough, and to state it does not get us very far, but this remains as far as most historians get. The aim of this paper is to show by exposition the religious motivation behind two of the greatest Gladstonian and Victorian outbursts—the clutch of writings on the Vatican council published in 1874–5 and the pamphlet and articles on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. These two expostulations, though they occurred within twenty two months of each other, are usually treated by historians as quite unrelated. Moreover, although attention has been paid to their proximate causes, they have not been placed in the complex and long-drawn out process of Gladstone’s religious development. I hope to show that both groups of pamphlets, though written in passion spurred by proximate causes, reflected long standing and interrelated intellectual, theological and political interests, an understanding of which illuminates both Gladstone and his age. If this paper ranges from idealism to cabinet diplomacy, this reflects the range of influences on Gladstone who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics.

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