y a portion
of the legislative union with Ireland. Peel's proposal, by making an
annual grant permanent, by tripling the amount, by incorporating the
trustees, established a new and closer connection between the state and
the college. It was one of the boldest things he ever did. What Lord
Aberdeen wrote to Madame de Lieven in 1852 was hardly a whit less true
in 1845: 'There is more intense bigotry in England at this moment than
in any other country in Europe.' Peel said to Mr. Gladstone at the
beginning of 1845--'I wish to speak without any reserve, and I ought to
tell you, I think it will very probably be fatal to the government.'
'He explained that he did not know whether the feeling among Goulburn's
constituents [the university of Cambridge] might not be too strong for
him; that in Scotland, as he expected, there would be a great
opposition; and he seemed to think that from the church also there might
be great resistance, and he said the proceedings in the diocese of
Exeter showed a very sensitive state of the public mind.' During the
whole of 1844 the project simmered. At a very early moment Mr. Gladstone
grew uneasy. He did not condemn the policy in itself, but whatever else
might be said, it was in direct antagonism to the principle elaborately
expounded by him only six years before, as the sacred rule and
obligation between a Christian state and Christian churches. He had
marked any departure from that rule as a sign of social declension, as a
descent from a higher state of society to a lower, as a note in the ebb
and flow of national life. Was it not inevitable, then, that his
official participation in the extension of the public endowment of
Maynooth would henceforth give to every one the right to say of him,
'That man cannot be trusted'? He was not indeed committed, by anything
that he had written, to the extravagant position that the peace of
society should be hazarded because it could no longer restore its
ancient theories of religion; but was he not right in holding it
indispensable that any vote or further declaration from him on these
matters should be given under circumstances free from all just
suspicions of his disinterestedness and honesty?[167]

In view of these approaching difficulties upon Maynooth, on July 12 he
made a truly singular tender to the head of the government. He knew Peel
to be disposed to entertain the question of a renewal of the public
relations with the papal court at Rome, first