PRELACY AND PALACES

That delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "Palace, I am told, is from Palatium, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?

These are questions which often present themselves to the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces—I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means, Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "I do think that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."

The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commission has assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards—a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true, mutatis mutandis, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.

Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days when each See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees—and some were very poor—had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.

In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansions in Christendom stood in one of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer, determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked, "that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No, I don't" replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "and so I'm determined they shall."

If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges, Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing, would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four, will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.

It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed the Palatium or "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done. One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and Ireland, and not one word said which implied we were apostles." Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.