Irish disorder and the Vatican council, 1869–70

With the Irish Church question settled, the body of the Liberal party expected that the government would turn its attention to legislation for English education, and that, in doing so, it would attack clerical pretensions and denominational ascendency in as thoroughgoing a way as it had in 1869. Liberals did not anticipate that Gladstone's clericalism and Forster's Establishmentarianism would militate against the pursuit of such a policy. In consequence, the nonconformist optimism and enthusiasm of 1868–9 was, before the end of 1870, to be transformed into resentment, and then into mobilisation for fundamental educational and ecclesiastical reform. In parallel with the progress of this crisis, moreover, was the emergence of another. The peculiar nature of the Irish Church question had enabled pro- and anti-Catholic sentiment to be harnessed in the same cause, and had hidden the strains between them. In the discussion of educational policy, however, the innate anticlericalism of much of the Liberal party was bound to be bolstered by a hostile consideration of the Irish dimension to the problem. This dimension was in any case apparent to all Liberals, given the Catholic pressure for Irish university reform; but it was further highlighted by two developments in 1869–70, which were anathema to British Liberalism.