EARLY LIFE AND INFLUENCES

Masterman grew up in comfortable, if not affluent, circumstances in a Conservative household.Footnote ¹⁶ His father had been a farmer in Sussex before mental illness forced him to stop work; Masterman himself struggled with depression for much of his life.Footnote ¹⁷ His early years were strongly influenced by the evangelical faith of his mother, a devout Wesleyan. Nonetheless, his purchase of a secondhand copy of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus when he was nine years old initiated a lifelong enthusiasm for Carlyle.Footnote ¹⁸ This opened his mind to prophecy as a spiritual and political genre.

The precise sequence of events by which he drifted away from the evangelical influences of his home towards High Anglicanism and political progressivism is unknown. However, some turning points are clear. At Weymouth College, to which he had won a scholarship in 1888, he was much influenced by Lux Mundi, the volume of essays edited by Charles Gore that sought to modernize High Church Anglicanism by a theology centred on the Incarnation and a conception of the importance of social transformation to the church's mission. But his main interests lay in mathematics and science, both at school and at Cambridge four years later where he read for the Natural Sciences Tripos.Footnote ¹⁹ As an undergraduate, his religious faith all but collapsed; exposed to a range of new currents—literary, philosophical, artistic—he experienced what he recalled in 1908 to his future wife as the “aridity” of religion:

At Cambridge, he kept company with G. M. Trevelyan, G. P. Gooch and Noel Buxton, undergraduates with strong progressivist—and, in Trevelyan's case, anticlerical—sympathies.Footnote ²¹ He gained a First in the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1896, the year in which he became president of the Union; at this time, and on his return to Cambridge in 1897 after a brief period of school teaching, he was much influenced by Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers, both agnostics who took a keen interest in psychical research. However, he was also drawn to Armitage Robinson, dean of Christ's College, a leading Anglo-Catholic who had been educated at Cambridge when the legacy of the Christian socialist F. D. Maurice remained strong.Footnote ²² Under Robinson's influence, Masterman underwent a full religious conversion.Footnote ²³ On leaving Cambridge in 1898, he took up residence in Dean's Yard, Westminster, following Robinson's appointment as rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, and canon of Westminster Abbey. There, he was introduced to other prominent Anglo-Catholic figures, including Gore—a strong advocate of disestablishment, which was soon to inform Masterman's politics and churchmanship too—and Henry Scott Holland (a contributor to Lux Mundi). He became part of a wide circle of Anglican social activists centred on the Christian Social Union (CSU) established by Scott Holland in 1888 to spread the gospel of Christian socialism associated with Maurice and Charles Kingsley. As one contemporary noted, he helped the organization “to become more of a fighting body than it would otherwise have been.”Footnote ²⁴

At Westminster, Masterman completed his first book, Tennyson as a Religious Teacher (1900). This closely argued work credited the poet with recognizing spiritual realities, but berated him for propagating a religion based on the denial of God as a “[p]resence with which he could enter into relation, the satisfaction of the yearning and the desire of men.”Footnote ²⁵ Like Tennyson, Masterman had serious religious doubts, in his case centering on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, which drew him away from the clerical career he contemplated briefly. But while other Liberal collectivists sought a new basis for social and economic relations in the moral strictures of philosophical idealism, Masterman remained wedded to the incarnational theology of Gore.Footnote ²⁶ This inspired the social work in which he found an alternative vocation at the Cambridge University mission in Camberwell, one of the poorest areas of South London, in the autumn of 1900. In From the Abyss: By One of Them (1902), he became the mouthpiece of its people. “Always noisy,” he wrote, “we rarely speak; always resonant with the din of many-voiced existence, we never reach the level of ordered articulate utterance; never attain a language that the world can hear.”Footnote ²⁷

Masterman had also begun writing for Christian socialist journals such as The Pilot and The Commonwealth, the monthly organ of the CSU; to these he gave a keen anti-imperialist edge in the context of Boer War jingoism. At the same time, he assembled a book with nine other writers—all from Cambridge—who shared his despair at the widespread enthusiasm for empire in Britain and indifference to conditions at home. The Heart of Empire was published later in 1901, with an introductory essay by Masterman. Provocatively entitled “Realities at Home,” the essay attacked imperialism for reversing the tide of concern for the poor that had developed since the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸ He hoped that the Liberal party could be persuaded to act on the book's recommendations given the strong Liberal connections of several of its contributors. As he wrote in March 1901 to Noel Buxton, a fellow contributor who was also active in the settlement movement, “our opportunity lies in the hopeless disorganisation of the Liberal Party and their real need for some social policy.”Footnote ²⁹

Clearly, Masterman was a Liberal by circumstance rather than conviction at this stage of his career, probably because of the wider difficulty to which Keith Robbins has pointed of translating “social Christianity” into the “competitive world of party politics.”Footnote ³⁰ He pinned his early faith in the party on the conversion of its imperialist wing under Lord Rosebery, Asquith, R. B. Haldane and Edward Grey. They, at least, embraced the need for social reform, if motivated primarily by concerns for national efficiency: Asquith in particular showed little sensitivity to the need for “a background to life,” “some spiritual force or ideal elevated over the shabby scene of temporary failure.”Footnote ³¹ In a further letter to Buxton in June 1901, Masterman urged his friend to “pray for light to shine on all ‘Liberal Imperialists’ when they are indecently sham, hypocrites, self-seekers and ‘souls’—and think of schemes to draw Christians together in the midst of a Pagan world.”Footnote ³²

In attacking imperialism, Masterman invoked the prophets, older and more recent. For example, in 1902 he returned a letter to Buxton from what he termed—tongue firmly in cheek—“a saintly lady” who had criticized the unsettling effects of The Heart of Empire. “Her remarks are pertinent,” he wrote, “but the same could be said against all reformers from the Ebrew [sic] prophets downwards. The blessed Isaiah also could be termed dull to the idle rich—disquieting to the Good—and discontenting to the submerged. So we must e'en [sic] perforce go ahead though the heavens fall.”Footnote ³³

Among the latter-day reformers on whom he leant were the secular prophets of the Victorian Age. For example, in connection with Liberal imperialist neglect of the “background to life,” he quoted Carlyle's warning that “the visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the invisible.”Footnote ³⁴ Carlyle featured alongside John Ruskin, Kingsley, William Morris, Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Giuseppe Mazzini, Ferdinand Lassalle, Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau in the University of London extension lecture series he delivered in 1903 on “Ideals of Life in the Nineteenth Century.”Footnote ³⁵ Noticeable for their absence were prominent Liberal thinkers such as J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Herbert Spencer and T. H. Green. The difference lay in the urgency with which, Jeremiah-style, the Victorian sages sought to shatter the complacency of their time, a complacency rooted in a belief in the supremacy of logic, reason and matter as the key to knowledge and experience.Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, for all their keen political engagement, their Liberal contemporaries were concerned primarily to understand modern society from a scientific or philosophical perspective, or a combination of both. The greater attraction of prophecy to Masterman is clear in the full title of his first work of social criticism: In Peril of Change: Essays Written in Time of Tranquillity (1905). Indeed, one perceptive reviewer—an older Liberal politician and writer, G. W. E. Russell, whose rare Christian socialism amongst members of the political class cemented his friendship with Masterman—emphasised his dual status as a prophet, both “a foreteller and forth-teller.’”Footnote ³⁷

It is true that Masterman moved closer to Liberalism and to the Liberal Party around this time. Towards the end of 1903, Herbert Gladstone, the party's chief whip, persuaded him to become the party's candidate in the Dulwich by-election.Footnote ³⁸ He fought a vigorous campaign, not least on church issues, as will be seen later in this article. While unsuccessful—he was defeated by Rutherford Harris, architect of the Jameson Raid—he wrote confidently to Gladstone about the party's prospects of gaining the seat at the general election: despite the “dominating tradition of unbroken Conservative rule . . . we have made Liberalism stand on its feet, in however tottering a fashion.”Footnote ³⁹ Yet his identity as a Liberal remained problematic: Russell noted with some alarm his uncritical admiration for certain writers—Carlyle especially—which could cloud his “ethical judgment.” Masterman's early relationship with Liberalism invites further enquiry.

SITUATING MASTERMAN WITHIN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERALISM

Masterman shrugged off his defeat at Dulwich to a friend and fellow Liberal activist, Arthur Ponsonby, by quoting the medieval mystic St Simeon on his pillar from Tennyson's poem “St Simeon Stylites” (1853):

However, for Masterman, unlike Tennyson, St Simeon was a figure of admiration rather than scorn; in his book on Tennyson, he had quoted favorably Newman's praise of the ascetic ideal as expressive of religion in its true, “spiritual” sense, using St Simeon as an example.Footnote ⁴¹

In setting himself against Tennyson in this way, the awkwardness of Masterman's relation to contemporary Liberalism is evident. In his poem, Tennyson typified the movement of “liberal values” that, as W. C. Lubenow has argued, shaped the landscape of intellectual liberalism following the decline of the confessional state from the late 1820s; this was centred on the power of the human imagination to “see things as they are, without exaggeration or passion,” in James Fitzjames Stephen's characteristically forceful words.Footnote ⁴² The movement was distinguished primarily by the fluidity of the boundary it erected between faith and skepticism, despite the vicarage origins of many of its leading figures, and also its disdain for democracy.Footnote ⁴³ However, along with G. K. Chesterton, the only other member of the Massingham network who moved in CSU circles, Masterman sought to strengthen the tie between Liberalism and Christianity, and with Liberalism's radical tradition at the same time. He much admired Chesterton's early poetry, which depicted human life as an endless adventure, filled with wonder and the sacramental value of everyday existence, and of which democracy was a natural concomitant.Footnote ⁴⁴ Chesterton's poetry and fiction were directed against the pessimist writers, artists, and thinkers associated with the fin de siècle movement: for example, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne. As an undergraduate, Swinburne's poetry had tested Masterman's faith to the limit.Footnote ⁴⁵

There were certainly differences between Masterman and Chesterton, not least with respect to Carlyle;Footnote ⁴⁶ but in the early years of their friendship these were minor compared with those between Masterman and another member of the Massingham circle, J. A. Hobson. In reviewing Hobson's The Social Problem: Life and Work in 1901, he acknowledged the attempt it represented to establish the “new Liberalism” on firmer ground than it existed at present, “wobbling” uncertainly between the twin poles of individualism and collectivism. However, perhaps not surprisingly given his own family history, he condemned Hobson's overriding concern, indeed obsession, with eliminating “waste” from society. This had led Hobson into dark areas of policy such as eugenics, which for Masterman would arrest rather than enhance “the long development of human progress.” Hobson's search for state-centered solutions to social problems also extended to education; he would allow the state to assume control of schools, despite his fears for the uniformity and rigidity in educational provision that would result. Most of all, Masterman was indignant at Hobson's dismissal of the Christian churches’ potential as agents of reform, particularly as his book originated in lectures to the CSU. Hobson, he claimed, misunderstood the churches’ role in society. This was not to pursue material comfort and improvement but to “enkindle discontent: alike in present squalor and future Millennium: perpetually to sting into hunger in every man ‘something that was before the elements and owes no homage under the sun.’” Social reform could only ever be a “bye-product” of this end.Footnote ⁴⁷

Masterman's emphasis on the permanent need for churches, especially the Church of England, to express their dissatisfaction with existing society is revealing. In part, at least, it accounts for his attraction to the church in the aftermath of F. D. Maurice's influence on the institution. In his book on Maurice published in 1907, he underlined Maurice's concern to bring the “Kingdom of God” closer to the “multitudes,” and his conception of the church this would require. Contrary to present misconceptions, it did not exist to minister to an aristocracy, nor to maintain an ecclesiastical “system,” nor to defend the religious beliefs of certain parties within the church—whether Protestant or Tractarian or Broad Church; it was to strive instead for “national” inclusiveness in accordance with the church's “distinctively English” liturgy.Footnote ⁴⁸

For Masterman, this mission had acquired renewed urgency. In an essay on “The Religion of the City” in In Peril of Change, he reflected at length on the results of two recent religious censuses, one by Charles Booth and the other by the Daily News. Both made clear that large sections of the working class—in London especially—had abandoned religion in the daily struggle to meet their material needs, and unlike elsewhere in Europe, they had failed to find a substitute in socialism. In contrast, religion had become a mere “plaything” for the rich, at best an aesthetic experience, especially in the form of “‘Cathedral’ Service.” At the same time, the faith of the churches had “grown cold.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The one ray of hope for Christianity lay with the Anglican clergy, who, in the spirit of Maurice, had sought to improve the conditions of the poor while adding spiritual depth to their lives through making accessible the liturgical traditions of the High Church. Masterman particularly praised the work of “slum priests” such as Robert Dolling and Arthur Stanton.Footnote ⁵⁰ He emphasized that Stanton's concern to raise the class identity of his parishioners cost him promotion within a Church set upon preserving social inequality.Footnote ⁵¹ As James Bentley has pointed out, the status of such priests as outcasts enhanced their sympathy with the poor. However, politically they tended to identify with the Labour movement rather than with the Liberal Party: Liberalism was associated with disestablishment, which they regarded as too extreme a response to the criminalization of ritualist practices through the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874).Footnote ⁵²

As we shall see, in the changed circumstances of the early twentieth century, Masterman made the defence of these renegade clergymen part of the cause of advanced Liberalism, alongside disestablishment. Here, it is important to note his use of their radicalism and spiritual energy to challenge what he believed were widespread associations between religion and good works, damaging to both.Footnote ⁵³ One such target was the Charity Organisation Society; this was the despair of other advanced Liberals, too, but on political and philosophical grounds, not the religious grounds on which Masterman assailed its chief polemicist—Helen Bosanquet—in 1902. Particularly disconcerting was her failure to understand that the injunction in the Gospel to “Seek first the Kingdom of God” required the “creation of a Christian State” that actively pursued social reform, not just the salvation of individual souls.Footnote ⁵⁴

But it was as much the nation as the state that seized Masterman's political and religious imagination. On this account, he praised J. R. Green, the clergyman-turned-historian who despaired of improvement having experienced the moral evil that existed in what Masterman termed here and elsewhere the “portent” of London. Reviewing Leslie Stephen's Life and Letters of John Richard Green (1901), he argued that Green's historical writing had been premised on the same search for “life” that had animated his earlier vocation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Macleod has emphasized that the ideal of “life” assumed “almost totemic significance” in progressive Liberal and other circles in the early twentieth century, one that was central to the value they placed on the “new.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Masterman portrayed Green as no less alert to the collective dimensions of “life” than the new generation of Liberals in seeking fullness of personality through the social whole. But, he emphasized, as a clergyman and as a historian, Green regarded the English people and the nation they embodied as the main source of “life” in this sense. For Green, he quoted approvingly, the state was “accidental; but a nation is something real, which can neither be made nor destroyed.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Masterman's receptiveness to Green in respect of the nation reflected the broad stream of Liberal Anglicanism that flowed from Coleridge and Thomas Arnold into Christian socialism, if entangled with imperialism by the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nationhood and its religious underpinnings were to shape his practical interests as an MP, as will become clear later in this article. But we should note here that his stance on the nation separated Masterman from other advanced Liberals. They certainly warmed to the principle of nationality as an expression of the complexity and diversity at work in the evolutionary order of society, particularly in literary culture.Footnote ⁵⁹ Through Hammond, Hobhouse and Gooch, the movement also sought to sustain the Gladstonian principle of intervention in support of oppressed nationalities, for example in Armenia and Crete;Footnote ⁶⁰ this, they believed, would enhance rather than diminish the cosmopolitan ideals of another earlier Liberal, Richard Cobden, who had resisted foreign intervention in the wake of the Crimean War.Footnote ⁶¹ However, in a domestic context, they opposed the cultivation of specific loyalties, both national and religious. Against the Fabians, especially, in this respect, Hobhouse and Wallas pressed for a return to the primacy of “reason” associated with the “Old” Liberalism of Bentham and his followers as the only basis of the collectivist state.Footnote ⁶²

By contrast, in In Peril of Change, Masterman continued to elevate recent voices in literature and politics for whom the nation represented the highest form of society: for example, Chesterton, Henry Nevinson, Hilaire Belloc and the poets W. B. Yeats and William Watson. Missing from his account was any representative of the Cobdenite wing of advanced Liberalism, not only Hobhouse, Hobson and Scott, but Massingham himself. He ridiculed the cosmopolitan ideals of the early Cobdenites thus: “all national differences were to smooth themselves out by the advance of knowledge and reasonableness. Common sense, commerce, a universal peace were to create a homogeneous civilisation, secure in comfort and tranquillity and a vague, undogmatic religion.” The Cobdenites had played into the hands of the imperialist “Reaction” of the 1880s and 1890s, coming “perilously near the abnegation of any special national affection, any particular pride in, or devotion to, their land.”Footnote ⁶³

In a stream of essays and reviews over the previous five years, Masterman had developed a wider narrative of the hollowing out of English identity that paralleled, if it was not caused by, the loss of connection to the land and to the church. He wrote in one review inspired by the results of the 1901 population census that as an urban people the English had become increasingly deracinated, “restless, imperturbable, dissatisfied, knowing little of each other, nothing of the world outside, with Nature abandoned and no Church erected by their own eager labour, and the dead hurried out of sight into some distant graveyard.” He expressed skepticism that this “New England” could “guard the tremendous trust it [had] inherited,” one that had enabled its “Old” counterpart to resist the threat of invasion, for all its immersion in a “life of quietude and simplicity, of poverty and privation, of narrowed outlook and unambitious effort.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He extended this critique to the suburbs: in an enthusiastic review of E. M. Forster's novel The Longest Journey in 1907, he noted how their inhabitants were constrained by convention, respectability and organization, “every chink or crevice closed which might admit fresh air or a vision of the Infinite beyond.”Footnote ⁶⁵

With its “intimate blend” of religion and patriotism centered on the idea of “home,” Ireland provided the foil to England, the nation that continued to oppress it.Footnote ⁶⁶ Elsewhere, he compared Ireland to troubled nations in the Balkans such as Macedonia, which he visited in the autumn of 1907 with Noel Buxton and his brother Charles as members of the Balkan Committee established by W. E. Gladstone. “In both cases a dominant race rules and draws income and leisure from a people whose creed and nationality it profoundly despises. In both cases the effort of a national revival endeavours to make its people stand upright—unafraid.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Masterman looked on enviously, regretting that through commercial and industrial success his own country had lost touch with its national soul, not least through the emptying of the countryside into the towns. One thing he did share with other progressive writers at this time was a nostalgia for rural England and a strong interest in its revival.Footnote ⁶⁸ The reaction among historians to Martin Wiener's thesis concerning a pervasive anti-industrialism among Britain's intellectual elite has obscured the different expressions of this interest, in deference to the complex political issues raised by the land issue.Footnote ⁶⁹ But Liberal progressivism was fuelled not only by a language of radicalism rich in antiaristocratic invective but also by one of “national community” against the sectional interests promoted by the Liberal Party's Unionist foe. As Patricia Lynch as shown, this held the key to the electoral success of the Liberal Party in rural constituencies in the first decade of the twentieth century across a wide range of issues.Footnote ⁷⁰ The party's pitch for “national” space enabled Masterman to deepen the ideological field of advanced Liberal politics through articulating a positive ideal of English nationhood and patriotism, and one, moreover, that was linked closely to the vitality of rural life.Footnote ⁷¹

As well as the nation, Masterman was removed from the wider current of New Liberalism on issues concerning time and change. Wallas, Hobson and Hobhouse sought a basis for a Liberalism that would serve collectivist ideals in the analytical approach of science—particularly theories of evolution. However, Masterman—the only New Liberal to have read natural science at university—was skeptical of the value of science in addressing social and political problems.Footnote ⁷² He was also skeptical of its capacity to provide analogies that would strengthen the progressivist cause, for example between society and an organism.Footnote ⁷³ He was far more receptive to G. M. Trevelyan's notion of the “poetry of time” than to evolutionary perspectives on nature and society,Footnote ⁷⁴ a notion that was inspired by Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus Trevelyan—like Masterman—had read at an early age.Footnote ⁷⁵ In reviewing Trevelyan's Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, Masterman wrote that the work advanced “like a pageant to the sound of music . . . It is both an example and a vindication of that principle which this writer has so ably defended, that ‘history is something far more wonderful than a process of evolution which science can estimate or predict.’”Footnote ⁷⁶

For Masterman, Trevelyan's approach to history was reinforced by Henri Bergson's theory of creative evolution, whose book of that title in its fourth edition he reviewed enthusiastically in 1909. Disregarding Bergson's challenge to religious belief, he used his work to emphasize the present as the “moving, flowing time” that constitutes reality.Footnote ⁷⁷ This was important in countering cynicism about the present, not least as the fin de siècle movement played out in contemporary drama. For example, in 1907 Masterman lamented the clever and witty but ultimately destructive exchanges in the plays of John Oliver Hobbes, pseudonym of Mrs Craigie; the characters in her plays and novels appeared as “phantoms” acting a “dance Macabre” in a universe indifferent to their fate.Footnote ⁷⁸ This was echoed in the plays of Arthur Pinero, a dramatist who pushed hard at the boundaries of social convention. He attended a performance of Pinero's latest play—Preserving Mr. Panmure—with Massingham in January 1911.Footnote ⁷⁹ He reported to his wife that the play was “rather funny but acrid and cynical, with all [Pinero's] later contempt for ‘this breed of maggots’ which makes up the society he deprecates.” He fell to wondering “if that is how future historians will really judge this generation.”Footnote ⁸⁰

LIBERAL POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND CHURCH–STATE RELATIONS

In emphasizing the urgent need for reform in the present, spearheaded by the Liberal Party and the church in tandem, Masterman was acutely aware of the obstacles to the formation of such an alliance. Not least, the party had become heavily dependent on Nonconformist votes since the passage of Arthur Balfour's Education Act of 1902; in Stephen Koss's words, the relationship between Liberalism and Nonconformity had suddenly become more than a “vague sentiment.”Footnote ⁸¹ In the months preceding the 1906 general election, this led Percy Dearmer, a prominent Anglo-Catholic priest, liturgist and Christian socialist, to question Chesterton and Masterman's support for a party that seemed to have abandoned the association between Liberalism and religious toleration in Gladstone's youth.Footnote ⁸²

In response, Masterman—who, as we shall see, was once again a Liberal candidate—denied any suggestion that closer ties between the Liberal party and Nonconformity recently could be attributed to the “pushfulness” of dissent; this was notwithstanding the bitter complaint of his agent that Nonconformity seemed to be calling the party tune, especially in relation to religious education.Footnote ⁸³ He pointed instead to the inward distractions of the church—the seemingly interminable controversies concerning marriage to a deceased wife's sister, church discipline, the Athanasian Creed, resistance to disestablishment, and its unyielding defence of church schools—leaving the field of Liberal politics clear for its rivals.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Education Act of 1902—which granted a public subsidy to church schools—dominated political debate in the years before and immediately after the Liberal Party's return to office in 1906. Nonconformists put pressure on the party to enforce “nondenominational” Bible teaching in all schools receiving the local rate—not just in board schools in accordance with the Cowper‒Temple clause of the 1870 Act. In response, Masterman was prepared to endorse the “secular solution”: the removal of religion from state-supported education. This was in accordance with the antipathy towards undenominational religion as a “Liberal tyranny” propagated by the Broad Church party he would have inherited from Maurice.Footnote ⁸⁵

Masterman's advocacy of the secular solution in the context of the education controversy is clear in a letter to his friend Arthur Ponsonby, who had recently been selected as Liberal candidate in Taunton immediately after his own defeat in Dulwich.Footnote ⁸⁶ He cautioned Ponsonby against declaring himself immediately for the abolition of Cowper–Temple, but to emphasize instead that, if no agreement could be reached among the different denominations, then “secular teaching is the only possibility.”Footnote ⁸⁷

As this conciliatory tone suggests, Masterman was anxious to secure Nonconformist support for the wider Liberal cause of democracy and reform, not just for religious freedom. This was especially necessary against Protestant diehards within the Church of England; led by Conservatives in Liverpool, a stronghold of the National Protestant League, they had campaigned vigorously to suppress ritualism in the Church of England through a series of church discipline bills from 1899 to 1911.Footnote ⁸⁸ He advised Ponsonby to make known his opposition to the most recent bill when responding to a letter from a local Nonconformist seeking clarification of his position on church issues. In Dulwich, he continued, triumphantly, “I did—defying the narrow Protestants who in consequence placarded the constituency with appeals to the good Protestants not to vote at all—result, the heaviest [Liberal] poll on record.” His opposition to the bill was grounded in a concern to “weaken” the bonds between church and state, in contrast to the Protestant Erastians who sought to strengthen them. Seizing on Nonconformist resistance to Erastianism, he assured Ponsonby that he would not lose the Nonconformist vote and might also “scoop all the Ritualist votes by opposing [the bill].”

Election tactics aside, support for the bill would be a blow to the progressivist agenda. Masterman cited the reason that Ramsay MacDonald had given him for rejecting the bill: “I won't vote for putting every High Church clergyman who does his duty denouncing vice at the mercy of every house sweater or brothel keeper who chooses to pose as an ‘aggrieved parishioner.’” He urged Ponsonby to end his letter by appealing to his correspondent “and his gang” for support, “in the name [word illegible] of the slum dwellers and the larger moral causes.” The clear message here was that Liberalism should not be defined by narrow religious interests; as he concluded, “To unite the CSU and the Nonconformists is our game.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Masterman's letter to Ponsonby well captures the close connections he sought to forge between religious freedom, disestablishment and opposition to materialism at the turn of the century. The combination of these concerns reflected the influence of another friend, the Anglican priest and historian John Neville Figgis, more than that of Gore and perhaps Chesterton, too.Footnote ⁹⁰ For Figgis, the modern, Leviathan state ever threatened the autonomy of smaller associations, including the church, in the context of an increasingly secular culture of thought and belief that portended a crisis of civilization of apocalyptic proportions. At stake was the independence of the individual within a multilayered corporate life that harked back to the medieval synthesis, and a church that flourished only when at war with social injustice. Figgis, like Masterman, had fought bitterly against Nonconformist demands for the teaching of undenominational religion in state schools; for him this could only mean the denial of the rights of the church by an omnipotent state.Footnote ⁹¹ He, too, praised the slum priests for making Christian (Anglican) worship accessible to the poor, devoid of its fashionable and respectable trappings.Footnote ⁹²

Steeled by the ecclesiastical and prophetic outlook he shared with Figgis, but with less distrust of the modern state as an agent of change, Masterman resolved to enter Parliament. With Gladstone's assistance, he was adopted as the Liberal candidate in (North) West Ham in 1904, a constituency torn by strife between rival progressivist parties.Footnote ⁹³ On the eve of the vote, he found time to review a new biography of Walt Whitman, rejoicing in the poet's “worship of life,” his clear distinction between “being” and “not being” that provided the moving force behind the chants of the New Democracy in Leaves of Grass.Footnote ⁹⁴

Following his return to Parliament in the Liberal landslide of 1906, Masterman voted against the government in debate on the Education Bill. He tabled an amendment that would exclude all but what he termed “simple Bible reading” without comment from publicly funded schools, and as part of “secular” rather than religious education, as exemplified in America and in the colonies. This would ensure that all children acquired some knowledge of the Bible, with no provision for withdrawal from lessons.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was a modification of the extreme secular position he had urged Ponsonby to adopt three years earlier if negotiations with Nonconformists failed. Nevertheless, despite his claim that most practising Christians, including Nonconformists, favored the secular solution in the interests of their faith, MPs rejected the amendment overwhelmingly. Undeterred, he wrote in The Speaker in the unmistakeable tones of Old Liberalism that the most likely alternative—state-sponsored Protestantism in schools—was “entirely impossible for any Government to carry which calls itself Liberal.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The same concern for religious freedom underlay Masterman's strenuous efforts in February 1908 to forestall the latest church discipline bill on its second reading. Once again deploying the language of Scripture, he wrote excitedly to Lucy Lyttelton, “I can smite these bigots I find, if I can get my amendment.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The amendment proposed to disestablish the church, a motion for which he had recently secured a slim majority at the Oxford Union, “amid rapturous applause from Jews, Indians, Rhodes scholars and various dissenters and atheists.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He was confident that, should the amendment be called, “I can rally up the Labour men and the Nonconformists and quite a number of members have come up to me and tell me that they will vote for me . . . and Bob Cecil will persuade his ruffians to abstain.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Balfour was working on Conservative MPs to do likewise, he reported, just before the debate itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In the event, the amendment was proposed and seconded by Ramsay MacDonald.Footnote ¹⁰¹ During a long and frequently acrimonious debate, Masterman expressed his sympathy for those who were being “persecuted” by the bill's supporters; they comprised most of the Liberal and socialist clergy dedicated to social welfare and the “great congregations” in the church. He challenged his opponents to produce evidence that their proposals would enhance either the well-being of the church, or religion or virtue. There were, he declared, in a speech that combined the political with the prophetic,

The bill was talked out and the government refused to give it any further time,Footnote ¹⁰³ clearly Masterman's primary objective. He would have been anxious to avoid the divisions within the party his amendment would have opened.

Masterman's advocacy of disestablishment was primarily an attempt to forge a new alliance between Anglicanism and Nonconformity—as envisaged in his letter to Ponsonby in 1903—through Liberal politics of an advanced kind. Hitherto, the prospects had not been auspicious. Nonconformity had provided much of the momentum of anti-ritualism in the last three decades of the nineteenth century; as the self-appointed guardian of Protestantism in Britain, it had sought to protect the nation from what it regarded as the subversion of this religion within the church.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, the political ground of anti-ritualism shifted perceptibly at the turn of the century, with Conservative Anglicans at the forefront of the campaign against the High Church party. One Nonconformist MP—Percy Illingworth—supported Masterman's amendment because he did not wish to return to the days of religious coercion that in his view would result from the bill. The remedy for abuses of the Book of Common Prayer was “not penal repression, but through disestablishment the creation of a Free Church where lay opinion could make itself felt, and where religious life could grow and expand to satisfy the religious hopes and aspirations of her members.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ With allies such as Illingworth among Nonconformists and a concerted move to bring the High Church clergy within the Liberal fold on an anti-Establishment, progressive agenda in the new, Conservative climate of anti-ritualism, New Liberalism could flourish as a religious as well as a political creed. Not least, since the late nineteenth century, Nonconformity—like High Church Anglicanism—had developed a strong basis in the teaching of the “social gospel” through Methodist preachers such as Hugh Price Hughes and Baptist leaders such as John Clifford; and this had seeped into Liberal Party organization at various levels.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

LIBERAL PROGRESSIVISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Masterman's defeat of the Church Discipline Bill coincided with the publication of some of his most ardent and programmatic statements of progressive Liberalism. In an article in February 1908, for example, he argued that a major obstacle in the path of reform was the widespread misconception that poverty was a “scourge of God.” Once this was corrected, the state could tackle the human causes of poverty, principally a regime of casual labor supplemented by low-paid work in the sweated trades that defied regulation and kept unemployment at high levels. His solution lay first in a guarantee of temporary employment by the state, and second in a state-enforced minimum wage determined by wages boards; such a wage would ensure that the worst employers were not placed at an advantage in economic competition.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Further, he advocated the extension of education until the age of sixteen for those who would not be employable under a system of the minimum wage, as well as housing reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In making the case for a “fresh start” to social welfare following the failure of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, Masterman aligned himself with Winston Churchill's notion of a “Minimum Standard [of Life and Labour].”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ At the same time, he distanced himself from the Webbs, who embraced a similar policy of the “National Minimum.” “They are always exceedingly interesting,” he remarked to Lucy Lyttelton in February 1908 following a lunch with them to “talk over the unemployed”; “and yet,” he continued, in the distinctive tones of advanced Liberalism, “I always leave with a sense of desolation. There is no poetry there and no passion; and that makes life appear an arid, rather dusty affair.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Further, unlike the Webbs, he believed that energy and initiative should be rewarded above the level of the “National Minimum.” If Liberalism adopted such a policy, it would become the focus of a “great Middle Party,” poised between the movement towards Protection in the Conservative Party on the one hand, and “full economic socialism” on the other.Footnote ¹¹¹ Also, unlike both Churchill and the Webbs, and the wider ethos of advanced Liberalism, too, he appealed directly to the Christian church to help set the ethical boundaries within which the movement of capital would be permitted. This was his message to the session on “Capital and Labour” at the Pan-Anglican Congress in 1908; The Times reported that the session drew a “very large audience.”Footnote ¹¹²

Above all, despite his concern to deflect criticism from the opponents of Liberalism, Masterman was seeking to keep the Liberal government on a progressivist track. In the previous year, he had feared it was already stalling, especially following the House of Lords’ rejection of the Education and Licensing Bills in 1907. His difficulties with the Education Bill notwithstanding, he felt that the government had failed to exploit the Lords’ challenge to its authority as the representative of the people, in addition to a wider public fear of socialism following the loss of Colne Valley to the Independent Labour Party in the by-election of July.Footnote ¹¹³ His frustration with the government's timidity, especially with respect to the Lords, only increased following his appointment as undersecretary to the Local Government Board in 1908.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This mood colored his literary work, particularly The Condition of England. One reviewer—the jurist Sir John MacDonnell—remonstrated against the book's bleak picture of England, unrelieved by the improvements in life that had been enjoyed by many in recent years. He was also skeptical of the contrast Masterman drew between previous ages of faith and the “destructive rationalism” of the present: he asked, “Were they so deeply religious inwardly, so free from the materialistic elements, so truly spiritual” as to merit such treatment?Footnote ¹¹⁵ Another reviewer was equally despairing: “Mr. Masterman wavers from despondency to hope, wavers from hope to caution and ends by saying that he cannot tell where we stand.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Masterman was undeterred by such criticism and made no attempt to moderate the prophetic influences on his thought that were largely responsible. For example, following the National Insurance Act of 1911, in the framing and passage of which he had played a pivotal role, he feared a policy vacuum. He spelt out the consequences in a detailed letter to Lloyd George in May 1913 while campaigning at the Altrincham by-election, a seat which the Liberals had lost to the Conservatives at the general election. He couched his concern in a play upon Luke 11:14–28: “I am more than ever convinced that the sooner we give something definite for our people to clutch on to the better. The House is empty, swept and garnished and the devils of anti-Insurance and Tariff [reform] march gaily in. We can't go on saying much longer ‘When the time comes we shall expect you to help us’ etc.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ His call for a renewal of the Land Campaign, coordinating a new policy on land valuation, slum housing and rural decay, failed to win support in the party and, because of political difficulties, was absent from his own campaign in Ipswich in May 1914.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Yet as a faithful servant of the government, Masterman quickly lost the support of those whose Liberal progressivism was also founded upon Christian beliefs. These included suffragettes such as Ennis Richmond, who wrote to him from West Heath School, Hampstead, in October 1909. She reminded him that only six weeks previously, she had risked arrest in seeking to speak to him in Palace Yard, Westminster, “on the then position of women working for women's suffrage,” a reference to the force-feeding they had been made to endure; he had duly come out of the House and, she implied, allowed her to take away a message of hope to the (pacifist) Women's Freedom League. But in failing to act since, and in dismissing concern for the treatment of women prisoners that had been expressed in the House recently, he had betrayed his Liberal and Christian vision:

This sense of betrayal extended further. As a Roman Catholic, Hilaire Belloc had always kept Masterman at arm's length: as early as 1906, he condemned him publicly as a fainthearted “literary” Christian who lacked the firmness of faith in the future of Christianity that marked the Catholic Church, past and present.Footnote ¹²⁰ When Masterman attempted to secure Bethnal Green after being unseated at West Ham for alleged electoral irregularities in June 1911, Belloc joined an array of antigovernment forces, including suffragettes, which sought to thwart his campaign.Footnote ¹²¹ Belloc's intervention appalled those in the secular stream of advanced Liberalism. For example, in congratulating Masterman on his success in winning Bethnal Green, albeit by a slim majority, George Trevelyan condemned Belloc as “one of those people who think that violent religious partisanship which he is pleased to call piety turn any ill conduct on his part into noble-minded zeal and enthusiasm. Lord Hugh Cecil appears to suffer from the same unpleasing delusion re ‘piety’.”Footnote ¹²²

Unsurprisingly, there is no record of support for Masterman among Conservative Anglicans, but less because of his Christian progressivism than his bitter indictment of the existing church, especially during debates over Welsh disestablishment in 1912.Footnote ¹²³ Chesterton—still an Anglican and a Liberal, although with little affiliation either to the church or to the party—was no longer an ally. In the dedication of his book What's Wrong with the World to Masterman in the previous year, he apologized for presenting “so wild a composition to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of the moving millions of England”; Masterman, he wrote, was “the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life.” But, he continued, politicians “are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals,” and besides, his friend would recognize in the book their many arguments together.Footnote ¹²⁴ Chesterton reinforced their differences in a poignant letter written in the shadow of the Marconi scandal of 1912.Footnote ¹²⁵ In this, Masterman supported Lloyd George over allegations concerning insider dealing among members of the government, while Chesterton supported Belloc's campaigning Witness journals.Footnote ¹²⁶ That association ensured the problematic nature of Chesterton's own Liberalism; he shared the anti-Semitism of the political class he otherwise condemned, a prejudice to which Masterman was by no means immune.Footnote ¹²⁷ But his despair of Masterman raises questions concerning Masterman's relation to Liberalism and to the Liberal Party as he became increasingly entangled in government. To what extent did his Christian socialism recede as his support for Liberalism lost some of its earlier ambiguity?

CONFLICTING LOYALTIES: THE LIBERAL PARTY, NEW LIBERALISM AND ANGLICANISM

The force of Masterman's Christianity certainly diminished as he entered government. Tellingly, during the first Christmas following his marriage, he was anxious that he and Lucy should not “relax our eagerness to do something for the poor . . . I feel that I am not so much inclined to care, or at least to break into revolt against conditions of poverty, as I come to settle down in the social order as one of a settled society accepting the whole as ‘whatever is; is right.’” Still more revealingly, he added, “I think in the future we should try to get more religious observance. These Sundays and weekends play havoc with that. Anyway, let's sometimes come above the smoke and confused noises of the city to see the stars, and listen to their silences.”Footnote ¹²⁸

At the same time, his devotion to the Liberal Party and to a conception of its lineage intensified. In 1911, in his entry on the Liberal Party for the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, he asserted the party's claim to represent “government by the people, by means of trust in the people, in a sense which denies genuine popular sympathy to its opponents.” He added that “throughout its career the Liberal Party has always been pushed forward by its extreme Radical wing,” commencing with—quoting Leigh Hunt—the “newer and more thoroughgoing Whigs . . . since called Liberals.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The following year, in an Introduction to a book by a radical Liberal MP, he praised the government for so altering the environment that the “sickly etiolated child of the ‘mean streets’ is now recognised as being not a thing to be lightly thrown aside, but an asset to the State,—a stone in the fabric of the Empire.”Footnote ¹³⁰ So complete was his sympathy with Liberalism, indeed Liberal imperialism, that he did not obstruct the passage of the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913, which put into practice aspects of the eugenics policy he had condemned earlier in reviewing Hobson's work. By contrast, Chesterton, in association with the Liberal MP Josiah Wedgwood, was vocal in his opposition.Footnote ¹³¹

Masterman's identity as a Liberal survived the introduction of conscription—which he had attempted to forestall in his journalismFootnote ¹³²—the party's split in 1916, and Lloyd George's coalition with the Conservatives, which he strenuously opposed.Footnote ¹³³ It also held up in the face of his clear move to the left of the party after the war, when, apart from a brief period from 1923 to 1924, he remained out of Parliament. At the invitation of the local Liberal association, he stood unsuccessfully as an independent Liberal in the mining constituency of Clay Cross at the general election of 1922. His program included the creation of a Central Mining Board, which would have the power “to make coal the property of the nation.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Yet for all his embrace of Labour policies such as this after the war, Masterman retained his distinctiveness as a Liberal progressive, and one, moreover, who was defined by close ties with the Church of England and a sustained belief in the need for its disestablishment. The use of the church's pulpits to denounce Britain's enemies during the war strengthened this conviction; after a visit to Westminster Abbey, he compared the service there to the work he was then engaged in commissioning at Wellington House as head of the government's propaganda unit.Footnote ¹³⁵ While a loyal servant of the state, he did not wish the church to become one, too.

Masterman became increasingly agitated by the closeness of church and state; in the 1920s, he wrote occasional pieces in this vein for The Churchman, the organ of the American Episcopal Church, the sister church of the Church of England, whose self-governing status he looked upon enviously. He used these opportunities to lament the crisis of the church as he perceived it. This was not created by overheated theological debates, as in the nineteenth century, but by the church's growing status as a mere social and philanthropic body in local communities, which seemed to pass unquestioned. He reported that his prophecy in In Peril of Change—that the church would become a mere arm of the state if it remained established—had largely been fulfilled; in the process, the church had emptied itself of all but a vague, undenominational religion that required “no real belief in anything except a kind of limited hope in the existence of God and the possibility of life beyond the grave.”Footnote ¹³⁶ The advent of modernism in this theological vacuum had done little to revive interest in religious questions outside the intellectual classes.Footnote ¹³⁷ Equally, he argued that the movement of social Christianity had become detached from its theological and scholarly roots, certainly under the leadership of William Temple, Bishop of Manchester, whom he described as the “type of the modern practical bishop.” Nevertheless, he welcomed Temple's willingness at least to discuss the possibility of disestablishment in the early 1920s. At the same time, he defended the earlier legacy of the CSU against Conservative critics such as Lord Hugh Cecil, despite their shared links with the High Church.Footnote ¹³⁸

Masterman believed that while it remained established, the church was powerless to address the problem of growing religious apathy in rural areas and a socialism that seemed focused primarily on material improvement in the cities.Footnote ¹³⁹ Only a few years earlier he had inveighed against Temple's “Life and Liberty” movement that sought more independence for the church but within the existing church–state establishment. He castigated the Enabling Bill that resulted from Life and Liberty following its presentation in the House of Lords in June 1919; while allowing the church a degree of self-government, the proposed legislation—which was enacted later in the year against all his expectations—still left the church at the mercy of Parliamentary opinion.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He became even more convinced of the need for a complete separation between church and state as the church prepared to bring before Parliament the alternative Prayer Book, a move that would accommodate some Anglo-Catholic practices alongside the Book of Common Prayer and end several decades of internal warfare over “discipline.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ His fear that the Book would be rejected by politicians who had no connection with the church was realized immediately after his death in November 1927, its first defeat in December of that year and its second the following June.

Arguably, it was the need for disestablishment that most attracted Masterman to, and kept him within, the Liberal Party fold, for all the temptation he felt to join Ponsonby and other former Liberals in the Labour Party after his defeat at Clay Cross.Footnote ¹⁴² Clearly, he hoped to revive the association between the Liberal Party and Nonconformity that Gladstone had forged, if loosely, around this issue, although the struggle had lost much of its fervor by the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁴³ One of his final tasks was to prepare the popular edition of Morley's Life of Gladstone, in the preface of which he emphasized Gladstone's reservations about the principle of establishment, and his exclusion from the church's confidence as a result.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As we have seen, Masterman emphasized the necessity of a church that, duly liberated from the shackles of the state, would continue to challenge the complacency of government about social conditions, whichever party was in power; this was a version of Gladstone's belief in the universal church as the divinely appointed instrument of salvation, for all its many weaknesses.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The Labour Party had always resisted the inclusion of disestablishment among its policies, despite sympathy for the cause among some of its members since its early years, and despite the presiding role of R. H. Tawney in shaping its religious and moral foundation, and Tawney's heavy indebtedness to Charles Gore in turn.Footnote ¹⁴⁶