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THE NEW LIBERAL VISION OF C. F. G. MASTERMAN: RELIGION, POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2017
Abstract
This article explores the political thought of C. F. G. Masterman (1873–1927), a leading figure in the movement of New Liberalism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article emphasizes the distinctive color his Christian beliefs and Anglican loyalties lent to his progressive Liberal ideals; this adds a new dimension to the existing historiography of the New Liberalism, which, until recently, has neglected the religious influences on its development. The article further underlines Masterman's concern to harness the cause of religious freedom and the disestablishment of the Church of England to social reform; he did so through reviving the older Gladstonian alliance between Liberalism and Nonconformity. It argues that his religiosity—focused on the Church of England—was central to his thought, and was frequently expressed in the language of prophecy he imbibed from Thomas Carlyle and other nineteenth-century seers.
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Footnotes
I would like to express my thanks to the three anonymous referees of this article for providing detailed comments and helpful suggestions for improvement. I am also indebted to Dr Neville Masterman for information about his father and to Larry Iles for drawing my attention to some Masterman sources of which I had been unaware. My thanks are due, too, to the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, for allowing me to consult the C. F. G. Masterman Papers.
References
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35 University of London (University Extension Lectures), syllabus of a course of lectures on Ideals of Life in the Nineteenth Century, by Charles F. G. Masterman (London, 1903). CFGM Papers, 66/1/2.
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39 Masterman to Herbert Gladstone, 20 Dec. 1903, BL. Add. MSS 46061, fol. 87, original emphasis.
40 Masterman to Arthur Ponsonby, 20 Dec. 1903, quoted in Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 52, but without identifying Tennyson as the source of the quotation.
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45 C. F. G. Masterman, “A Look Round,” notice of the new collected works of Swinburne published by Chatto and Windus in 1904, DN, 14 Dec. 1904, 5. See also his review of the first volume of Swinburne's collected poems in 1907: “Time and Mr. Swinburne,” review of The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. 1, Poems and Ballads (London, 1907), DN, 14 June 1907, 4.
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56 Macleod, Literature, Journalism, 74, 160–61.
57 Masterman, “Historian and Patriot,” 308.
58 Jones, Victorian Political Thought, 48–9. For an example of the defence of empire in CSU circles see Holland, Henry Scott, “England a Nation,” Commonwealth 10/1 (1905), 25–7Google Scholar, a review of Oldershaw, Lucian, ed., England: A Nation, Being the Papers of the Patriots’ Club (London, 1904)Google Scholar, to which Masterman and Chesterton contributed.
59 Macleod, Literature, Journalism, 105.
60 Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, 79.
61 See Robbins, Keith, “Richard Cobden: The International Man,” in Howe, Anthony and Morgan, Simon, eds., Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, 2006), 177–88Google Scholar, at 186.
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66 C. F. G. Masterman, review of Fr. Sheehan's novel Luke Delmege, “Books of the Month,” The Commonwealth 7/5 (1902), 153–5, at 153. Masterman reviewed numerous books on Ireland, for example Masterman, “The Soul of Ireland,” a review of Sydney Brooks, The New Ireland (Maunsel, 1907), DN, 11 July 1907, 4; and Masterman, “A Plea for Ireland,” a review of the Earl of Dunraven, The Outlook in Ireland (Dublin, 1907), DN, 22 Feb. 1907, 4.
67 C. F. G. Masterman, “A Final Word on the Macedonian Tragedy,” DN, 29 Nov. 1907, 6. He mentions an editorial he had written on “Disturbed Ireland” for the Daily News in a letter to Lucy Lyttelton, 3 Sept. 1907, Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 88.
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72 C. F. G. Masterman, review of Wallas's Human Nature in Politics (1908), in “Can there be a Science of Politics?,” The Nation, 12 Dec. 1908, 439–40; Gerson, Margins of Disorder, 110, emphasizes Masterman's uniqueness among New Liberals in receiving “a full formal education in the natural sciences.”
73 C. F. G. Masterman, review of J. Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism and Society (1905), “The Newer Ideals,” DN, 17 Aug. 1905, 4.
74 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, 1 Aug. 1907, cited in Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 86.
75 Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan, 29–31. Trevelyan used the notion in his critique of Bury, J. B.’s inaugural lecture, “The Latest View of History,” Independent Review 1 (1903), 395–414Google Scholar, at 412.
76 C. F. G. Masterman, “The Garibaldian Epic,” DN, 9 April 1907, 4, paraphrasing Trevelyan, “The Latest View of History.”
77 C. F. G. Masterman, “The Philosophy of Vitalism,” The Nation, 13 March 1909, 902–3, at 902.
78 C. F. G. Masterman, “John Oliver Hobbes,” DN, 15 Aug. 1906, 6; see also his review of her last, posthumously published, novel The Dream and the Business (1906), DN, 27 Aug. 1906, 4.
79 Masterman to Lucy Masterman, 20 Jan. 1911, CFGM Papers, 1/1/121.
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85 Masterman, Frederick Denison Maurice, 27, 37.
86 For the origins of their friendship, their shared interest in social reform and details of Ponsonby's narrow defeat at Taunton in 1906 see Jones, Raymond A., Arthur Ponsonby: The Politics of Life (London, 1989), 31–2Google Scholar, 34–5, 38.
87 Masterman to Ponsonby, 28 Dec. 1903, CFGM Papers, 2/3/2/3. This was also Chesterton's position: G. K. Chesterton, “The Secular Solution,” letter to the editor, DN, 12 May 1905, in J. Stapleton, ed., G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913, 8 vols. (London, 2012), 3: 98–101.
88 Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism, 263–4; Machin, G. I. T., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987), 246Google Scholar.
89 Masterman to Ponsonby, 28 Dec. 1903, CFGM Papers, 2/3/2/3, original emphasis.
90 David Newsome linked all three thinkers, and Masterman, too, in “The Assault on Mammon: Charles Gore and John Neville Figgis,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 17/2 (1966), 227–41.
91 John N. Figgis, “The Church and the Secular Theory of the State” (address to the Church Congress), Church Times, 13 Oct. 1905, 441.
92 Cowling, Maurice, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols., vol. 3, Accommodations (Cambridge, 2002), 303–4Google Scholar.
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94 Masterman, C. F. G., “Walt Whitman,” review of Henry Bryan Binns, A Life of Walt Whitman (London, 1905)Google Scholar, DN, 24 Feb. 1906, 4; for positive evaluations of Whitman in the “democratic literary culture” that advanced liberals sought to foster see Macleod, Literature, Journalism, 83.
95 C. F. G. Masterman, speech to the House of Commons, 4th series, 22 May 1906, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 157, cols. 1232–9.
96 C. F. G. Masterman, “Cross Currents in Education,” The Speaker, 16 June 1906, 245.
97 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, 5 Feb. 1908, CFGM Papers, 1/1/34. Kings II 15:5: “And the Lord smote the king, so that he was a leper unto the day of his death.”
98 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, undated, CFGM Papers, 1/1/8.
99 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, 5 Feb. 1908, CFGM Papers, 1/1/34; in Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 97, original emphasis. Like Masterman, (Edward Algernon) Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, son of Lord Salisbury and a Tory progressive with deep roots in High Anglicanism, was first returned to Parliament in the 1906 election.
100 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, 12 Feb. 1908, CFGM Papers, 1/1/37, in Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 98.
101 Ramsay MacDonald, speech to the House of Commons, 4th series, 14 Feb. 1908, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 184, col. 325.
102 C. F. G. Masterman, Speech to the House of Commons, 4th series, 14 Feb. 1908, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 184, col. 321.
103 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, response to a question in the House of Commons, 4th series, 19 Feb. 1908, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 184, cols. 802‒3.
104 Burns, Arthur, “The Authority of the Church,” in Mandler, Peter, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 179–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 195–6.
105 Percy Illingworth, speech to the House of Commons, 14 Feb. 1908, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 4th Series, vol. 184, col. 329.
106 Packer, “Religion and the New Liberalism,” 241–3.
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108 Masterman, C. F. G., “A Hopeful Outlook,” The Commonwealth 10/12 (1905) 361–4Google Scholar, at 363; Masterman, “Causes and Cures of Poverty,” 535–9. This wider concern with the general welfare of society distinguished Masterman from William Beveridge, the other major liberal thinker to address the problem of unemployment in this period. See Freeden, The New Liberalism, 210–11.
109 C. F. G. Masterman, “The Policy of the Minimum Standard,” The Nation, 15 Feb. 1908, 700; Winston Churchill, “Liberalism and Socialism” (1906), in Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London, 1909), 81. For his friendship with Churchill at this time see Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 97–8. He campaigned for Churchill in by-elections in Dundee and Manchester in the spring of 1908: see Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, Queen's Hotel, Dundee, 7 April 1908, CFGM Papers, 1/1/52; Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, Batley, undated, CFGM Papers, 1/1/60; Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, Midland Hotel, Manchester, undated, 1/1/62.
110 Masterman to Lucy Lyttelton, 6 Feb. 1908, CFGM Papers, 1/1/35.
111 Masterman, “The Policy of the Minimum Standard,” 700.
112 “The Pan-Anglican Congress,” The Times, 20 June 1908, 6.
113 C. F. G. Masterman, “How the Government Stands,” The Nation, 24 Aug. 1907, 925–6; see also Masterman, “The Block upon Legislation,” The Nation, 11 May 1907, 406‒7.
114 See his long, hastily written letter to Asquith, 3 Feb. 1910, Parliamentary Archives, SAM/A/30.
115 Anon., “The Condition of England,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 June 1909, 215. (Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive).
116 “E. R.,” “The Condition of England,” English Review 3/9 (1909), 182–4, at 182.
117 Masterman to Lloyd George, undated, Parliamentary Archives, LG/c/1/1/7a, original emphasis; for a report of his address to a lively meeting in Sale see “From Newmarket to Altrincham,” The Times, 20 May 1913, 6. The Liberal Party failed to regain the seat.
118 Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land, 143; David, “The New Liberalism of C. F. G. Masterman,” 30–31.
119 Ennis Richmond to Masterman, 16 Oct. 1909, CFGM Papers, 4/2/2/6. She was referring to his exchanges with Keir Hardie in the House of Commons on 5 Oct. 1909; reported in The Times, 6 Oct. 1909, 5. For the priority that Masterman gave to the government's reform agenda above that of women's suffrage see Masterman, C.F.G. Masterman, 384.
120 Belloc, Hilaire, An Open Letter on the Alleged Decay of Faith (London, 1906)Google Scholar, reprinted from The Tribune, 29 March 1906; a response to C. F. G. Masterman, “The Future of Religion,” The Speaker, 24 March 1906, 592–3.
121 For the varied nature of the opposition see Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 197.
122 Trevelyan to Masterman, 31 July 1911, CFGM Papers, 3/5/25. For Lord Hugh Cecil see Rodner, William S., “Conservatism, Resistance and Lord Hugh Cecil,” History of Political Thought 9/3 (1988), 529‒52Google Scholar, esp. 539‒42.
123 For the hostility of Sir William Anson, warden of All Souls and MP for the University of Oxford on this account see Henson, Herbert Hensley, “Last Years,” in Henson (ed.), A Memoir of the Right Honourable Sir William Anson (Oxford, 1920), 208–33, at 215Google Scholar.
124 Chesterton, G. K., What's Wrong with the World (London, 1910)Google Scholar, Dedication; and see Masterman's friendly, if skeptical, review, “The Battle of Hudge and Gudge,” The Nation, 2 July 1910, 483–4.
125 Chesterton to Masterman, undated [Dec. 1912] CFGM Papers, 4/6/1/1 (copy).
126 David, “The New Liberalism of C. F. G. Masterman,” 28; for the Witness journals and the Marconi scandal see Villis, Tom, Reaction and Avant-Garde: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2006), 80–82Google Scholar.
127 For Masterman's anti-Semitic remarks about Herbert Samuel see Masterman to Lloyd George, undated but written following the passage of the Insurance Act, 1911; CFGM Papers, 4/1/3/13.
128 Masterman to Lucy Masterman, undated [27 Dec. 1908], CFGM Papers, 1/1/80, quoting Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1774). Lucy quoted from the letter in her biography but with ellipsis for the passage expressing his concern about their neglect of religion. Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 116.
129 Anon., “The Liberal Party,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (New York, 1911), in CFGM Papers, 55/4.
130 Introduction to Alden, Percy, Democratic England (London, 1912), xiGoogle Scholar. The reference to “mean streets” is to Arthur Morrison's realist fiction centred on the East End in Tales of Mean Streets (1894).
131 See Stapleton, G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, 8: 85–9, 128–34, 142–5, 198–207.
132 C. F. G. Masterman, “Why the Workman Enlists,” The Nation, 11 Sept. 1915, 762‒4.
133 For Masterman's denunciation of, and subsequent reconciliation with, Lloyd George in 1925 see David, “The New Liberalism of C. F. G. Masterman,” 33–41.
134 See his election addresses: “To the Electors of Clay Cross Division,” “A Word to the Miners,” and “Mr Masterman replies to Mr Duncan.” I am indebted to Special Collections, Bristol University Library, for making these addresses available.
135 Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman, 290.
136 C. F. G. Masterman, “Disestablishment,” The Churchman, 6 May 1922, 16.
137 C. F. G. Masterman, “The English Church Congress,” The Churchman, 28 Nov. 1925, 12; see also “The English Modernist Conference,” The Churchman, 22 Oct. 1921, 16‒17.
138 C. F. G. Masterman, “Disestablishment,” The Churchman, 6 May 1922, 15; Masterman, “Christianity and Social Reform: A Reply to Lord Hugh Cecil,” Guardian Supplement, 27 Feb. 1925, 205.
139 Masterman, “The English Church Congress,” 12.
140 C. F. G. Masterman, “The Enabling Bill and Disestablishment,” Westminster Gazette, 4 June 1919, 8.
141 Masterman, “The English Church Congress,” 12. For the context of the Prayer Book crisis see Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 4.
142 David, “The New Liberalism of C. F. G. Masterman,” 34.
143 Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, 179.
144 John Morley, The Life of Gladstone, popular edn, abridged, with illustrations and facsimiles, and a preface by C. F. G. Masterman (London, 1927), xxiii–iv.
145 Ibid., xxiii.
146 Catterall, Peter, Labour and the Free Churches, 1918–39: Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion (London, 2016), 175–7Google Scholar; Kirby, “R. H. Tawney and Christian Social Teaching’, 807–8.
147 Masterman, “The Enabling Bill and Disestablishment.”
148 C. F. G. Masterman, “Seven Don'ts for Liberals,” DN, 30 Jan. 1926. The allusion is to Matthew 6:32: “(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly father knoweth that you have need of all these things.”
149 Chesterton, G. K., “Charles Masterman,” G. K.’s Weekly 6/141 (1927), 775Google Scholar.
150 “From Newmarket to Altrincham,” The Times, 20 May 1913, 6.
151 Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal party from 2015 to 2017, resigned because of the pressure on his Christian beliefs through engagement in politics.