Peter Gowan

The Origins of the Administrative Elite

A quarter of a century ago, Perry Anderson wrote a path-breaking article

challenging the framework that historians had established for explaining,
among other things, political change in 19th-century Britain.1 His analyses
at that time, along with the work of Tom Nairn, have received reinforcement
from subsequent research and offer a more plausible account than the earlier
paradigm of an almost effortless rise to power of the new bourgeoisie and
graceful withdrawal of the aristocracy and gentry.2 Yet studies of the evolving
machinery of the state, confined within the bloodless discipline of administrative history, have remained firmly within the old imagery of bourgeois
revolution.3 There was, indeed, a fierce debate among administrative historians in the 1960s and 1970s about what had actually changed in 19thcentury government, but the protagonists shared a common false perspective
on the decisive issues. Above all, we will argue, they failed to grasp the nature
and importance of the NorthcoteTrevelyan manifesto for reorganizing the
central institutions of the state and the subsequent, successful campaign to
4

implement that manifesto. Before we examine in detail the Northcote

Trevelyan Report, however, we should review the two traditions of
thought on British administrative development in order to establish the
terms of the argument.

1. Administrative Historiography
Tories versus Fabians

Jennifer Hart caused a stir in Past and Present in the 1960s with a vitriolic
attack on what she called the Tory school of administrative history,4 in
which she included Oliver MacDonagh, Kitson Clark, W.L. Burn,
David Roberts and others. She accused themaccuratelyof belittling
the role of men and ideas; of attributing change to the Christian
conscience of public opinion in areas where it considered conditions
intolerable, and of holding that change was not, on the whole, premeditated or planned but was the result of the historical process or blind
forces. In reality, Hart maintained, 19th-century administrative change
had been in large measure the result of conscious planning by the
Benthamites. Henry Parris strengthened her case by showing how Dicey
had led historians astray with his claim that the Benthamites were
champions of laissez-faire against government growth,5 while S.E. Finer
demonstrated the extraordinarily vigorous efforts of the Benthamites to
spread their ideas in governing circles between 1820 and 1850 and their
remarkable success in this enterprise.6
What Jennifer Hart did not spell outbut what surely gave the
debate its acrimonious tonewas the fact that she was speaking for an
alternative political tradition, which might be called the Fabian school
of administrative studies and historiography. The basic tenets of classical
Fabianism are, of course, that the state can and should engage in positive
social engineering and that this requires conscious planning on the part
of an intellectual elite dedicated to the common good. Translated into
historiography, these assumptions have produced a strong defence of
the role of the Benthamites in 19th-century reform. There is, after all,
a close family resemblance between Benthamism and Fabianism both
in their substantive political theories and in their methods of work and
the roles they sought to play. Beatrice Webb named Bentham Sidneys
intellectual god-father,7 and Graham Wallas acknowledged his own
1 Origins of the Present Crisis, New Left Review 23, JanuaryFebruary 1964. D.C. Moores study of
the 1832 Reform Act, The Other Face of Reform, Victorian Studies, September 1961 pointed up the
inadequacy of the old framework for understanding 19th-century political development. See also P.
Anderson, The Figures of Descent, NLR 161, for a substantive reassessment.
2 The most important of recent works, Geoffrey Inghams Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in
British Social Development, London 1984, provides the first serious framework for understanding the
historical relationship between the British states peculiar system of administrative power and the
dominant sectors of British capital.
3
The first serious challenge in this field is Hans Eberhard Muellers Bureaucracy, Education and Monopoly:
Civil Service Reforms in Prussia and England (University of California Press, 1984).
4
J. Hart, 19th Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History, Past and Present, No. 31.
5
The 19th Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised, Historical Journal No. III,
1960.
6
Published in G. Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of 19th Century Government, London 1972.
7
Our Partnership, London 1926, p. 210.

enormous debt by employing an essentially Benthamite conception of

rights and attempting to ground political theory on an adequate grasp
of human nature and psychology.8 The early Fabians enthusiasm for
quantitative social science techniques serving a dynamic elite of professional administrators makes them direct descendants of the Social
Science Association founded by, among others, Chadwick and KayShuttleworth in the mid-1850s, after they had been driven out of
government jobs to make room for the new breed of reformers.
The Fabian school has built its interpretation of 19th-century administrative history around Wallass distinction between the Negative and the
Positive State. As he put it: During the last hundred years, in all
civilized communities of the world the functions of government have
changed from being mainly negative into being mainly positive, that is
to say, Governments have come to be engaged not merely in preventing
wrong things from being done, but in bringing it about that right
things shall be done.9 Wallas and later Fabians constantly repeated
that this positive state required a government of expertsa carefully
recruited, highly trained, elite corps of professional civil servants. Wallas
himself even defined the master-art of government to be the use of
intellectual initiative for the creation of such administrative machinery
as shall produce in its turn further intellectual initiative.10 This standpoint has formed the basis for a large body of Fabian literature,
providing the core normative ideas in H.R.G. Greavess important
book, The Civil Service in the Changing State, in the Fabian tracts of 1946
and June 1964, in Thomas Baloghs famous essay, The Apotheosis of
the Dilettante, and indeed in the Fulton Report and in the CrowtherHunt and Kelner critique of the civil service in 1977.11
Thus, while the Tory historians generally deplore the excessive growth
of the collectivist state as a bureaucratic encroachment upon
liberty, the Fabians applaud it. While the Tories dismiss the idea that
changes in the 19th-century state could have been carefully planned,
the Fabians insist that the Benthamites did indeed plan a good deal.
While the Tories make the Christian conscience of public opinion the
source of reform, the Fabians identify a definite group of conscious,
theoretically aware bourgeois reformers. These contrasts indicate, however, the degree to which both schools agree on a central significant
trajectory, from the Negative, laissez-faire or individualist state, to the
collectivist, bureaucratic Welfare state. They both also agree that crucial
changes in the governmentaladministrative system had to do not with
social or class conflict but with the tackling of new circumstances
or old problems, and that the whole process was part of a wider
modernization, along with the rise of the middle classes, the growing
complexity of society and state, the spread of democracy and technological transformations.
8

See T.H. Qualter, Graham Wallas and the Great Society, London 1980, pp. 99, 162.
G. Wallas, Government, Public Administration No.6/1, 1928, p. 3.
10 Quoted in Qualter, op. cit., p. 132.
11 The Civil Servants, London 1977. Baloghs essay is in H. Thomas, ed., Crisis in the Civil Service,
London 1968.
9

The ToryFabian Consensus

All these shared assumptions have produced a remarkable consensus

over the NorthcoteTrevelyan Report on the reorganization of the
central institutions of government in the 1850s. The very article by
MacDonagh that sparked the controversy with Jennifer Hart over the
nature of the 19th-century revolution in Government had devoted as
much space to NorthcoteTrevelyan as to Benthamism. Yet Harts
savage response passed over MacDonaghs interpretation of Northcote
Trevelyan in silencenot surprisingly since her own views turned out
to be almost textually identical. For MacDonagh the report was first of
all aimed at the further loosening of the aristocratic hold on
government and at eradicating political corruption; Hart correspondingly stresses the aim, on Gladstones part, of a purer public ethic. For
MacDonagh it was designed to cheapen and improve the efficiency of
government; Hart correspondingly claims that Trevelyans chief concern
was greater efficiency. MacDonagh adds a third point: that the report
was impregnated with the radical ethics of self-help and competition
and that the reform betrayed a total absence of either bureaucratic or
collectivist intention. Hart does not bridle at this. She makes no attempt
to assimilate NorthcoteTrevelyan to her Benthamite Great Tradition,
and treats the report very much in the Tory style as the product of
individual personalities immediate concernsa blind step in the march
towards the modern state.
This shared view merges with a wide consensus among administrative
historiansfrom Kingsley and Cohen, through Balogh, Greaves and
Finer, to Parris and Annanthat NorthcoteTrevelyan was part of the
general rise of the bourgeoisies influence on government, linked to
the steady progress of democratization, the increasing complexity of
administration, technological change and so forth.12 The list of adjectives
could be extended almost endlesslydemocratic, middle-class, radical, against the ancien rgime, technocratic, efficiency-oriented,
anti-aristocratic and so on. True, some of these authors do show signs
of uneasiness,13 and Hughes, author of some of the most important
detailed research on the work surrounding and leading up to the Report,
eschews broad historical generalizations about its place and significance
in 19th-century development.14 Nevertheless, until Hans Muellers
recent work to which we shall return, we would have to go back
before the First World War to the conservative American administrative
historian, Robert Moses, to find a radically different interpretation.15
12 D. Kingsley, Representative Bureaucracy, Ohio 1944; E. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service,
17801939 (1941); Greaves, op. cit; H. Finer, The British Civil Service, p. 17; H. Parris, Constitutional
Bureaucracy, London 1969; Annan does, however, at least acknowledge the class background: government had become too complicated and technical to be handled by the ruling class and their dependents.
The English Intellectual Aristocracy, in J.H. Plumb, ed., Essays in Social History, p. 244.
13 Especially Greaves, but also Finer who feels obliged to offer us a rather tortuous paradox to the
effect that the reform was produced not only in the spirit of middle-class democracy but also because
the aristocracy felt so secure, and its aristocratic ethic of good housekeeping passed over to the middle
classes and civil servants.
14 E. Hughes, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform, 185355, English Historical Review,
January 1949, and his material in Public Administration XXXII, 1954.
15 Robert Moses, The Civil Service of Great Britain, Columbia University, 1914.

No less striking than this unity of explanation are the dramatic change
in the political attitude of the Fabian school towards the Northcote
Trevelyan manifesto and the tendency of orthodox historians in the
post-Fulton period to play down its importance in shaping the 20thcentury British state. Wallas before the First World War hailed NorthcoteTrevelyan as the one great political invention in 19th-century
England,16 while in the 1930s Harold Laski echoed his opinion that
the reformed Civil Service was largely responsible for the development
of the positive state.17 Yet by the time Greaves was exploring the
subject, just after the Second World War, he was plagued by doubts as
to the positive value of NorthcoteTrevelyan and inclined to view it
as more in tune with the Negative rather than the Positive phase of
state development. He sought to resolve his dilemma by declaring in a
famous passage that the 19th-century state never really existed, since
before the Negative state had been constructed the modern active state
had begun to emerge. But by the 1960s Greavess doubts had become
hostile certainties for Balogh, along with the anonymous authors of the
influential Fabian tract and the majority of the Fulton Commission:
NorthcoteTrevelyan had been transformed from Fabian hero to Fabian
villainthe prime obstacle to the technocratic positive state, the epitome
of negativism.
These Fabian attempts first to squeeze the Crown of Positivism onto
NorthcoteTrevelyan then to replace it with the dunces cap of Negativism might have suggested that a paradigm constructed only out of
negative laissez-faire and positive collectivism simply does not fit at all,
since no one disputed that NorthcoteTrevelyan was of fundamental
importance in the construction of the modern state. Yet administrative
historiography after the Fulton Report has tended to take a different
course, namely to play down the importance of the NorthcoteTrevelyan
reform process altogether. Parriss important work, for example, gives
sustained attention to the Report only in a polemical final chapter
entitled Our Present Discontents on the Fulton report.18 From the
right, Sir Norman Chesters recent history manages almost entirely to
ignore NorthcoteTrevelyan.19 And Harts article on the origins of the
report, as we have seen, equally treats it as the product of the particular
concerns of individual personalities unconnected to great forces shaping
a modern state: only the Benthamites are permitted the capacities for
grandiose historical planning of politicaladministrative structures.
With NorthcoteTrevelyan thus disposed of, we are now urged to
concentrate on the real debate about who or what was responsible for
the rise of the modern collectivist, interventionist state. The controversy
has been the subject of painstaking survey, it has stimulated a major
collection of further research in the field, and some of the main
contributions have provided the meat for two recent collections on the
16

Human Nature in Politics, New York 1983, p. 249.

See H. Laski, Democracy in Crisis, London 1933, p. 99. Laskis later hostility to the higher civil service
can, of course, be attributed to his evolution from Fabianism to Marxism.
18
H. Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy, op. cit.
19
N. Chester, The English Administrative System, 1780 to 1870, Oxford 1981. Chester also manages to
dismiss Benthams influence on administration as being insignificant (pp. vi, 221 and 276). He is able
to achieve all this by treating administrative history as largely the history of procedure.
17

Victorian state.20 The general problematic has also been buttressed by

Greenleafs volumes on the British political tradition. Thus, to adapt
the sarcastic remark with which Hart opened the controversy, every
student is now taught as an article of dogmatic faith that the choice
must be made only between the Tory and the Fabian interpretation of
19th-century history.21

II. The NorthcoteTrevelyan Report

The NorthcoteTrevelyan Report was produced under the Aberdeen
government, formed in December 1852 of Whigs and Peelites (plus
one ex-Radical, Molesworth). The Report was commissioned by the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, through a Treasury minute of
April 1853, but serious work does not seem to have started until
October 1853. In the intervening months Treasury chief Trevelyan was
working with Ralph Lingen, head of the Education Department, on an
enquiry into that body. In July the reformers attention switched to the
Indian Civil Service as a result of intervention from Benjamin Jowett
of Balliol. This led Trevelyan to propose the abolition of the East Indian
Companys training college at Haileyburya proposal championed in
the Commons by Robert Lowe, the junior minister for Indiaand
Jowett subsequently became closely involved in the reform discussions.
What Northcote and Trevelyan considered to be the final draft of the
Report reached Gladstone at the end of November, but the Chancellor
demanded one major change: the total abolition of Parliamentary patronage in Civil Service appointments.22 The Reports titular authors, who
had wanted to keep seven-eighths of such patronage intact in the hands
of the Treasury, agreed to this structural change and the final draft was
then subjected to intensive discussions within the Government until it
won a Cabinet majority in February and was published.23 There was a
generally very hostile public reaction, except from Oxbridge and public
school leaders and a scattering of individuals. The Government was
compelled to drop its plan to legislate the Reports main proposals and
was itself forced from office shortly afterwards.
20 See Valerie Cromwell, Interpretations of 19th Century Administration: an Analysis, Victorian
Studies, March 1966, pp. 24555; G. Sutherland, Recent Trends in Administrative History, Victorian
Studies, June 1970, pp. 40811; G. Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of 19th Century Government,
London 1972; Valerie Cromwell, ed., Revolution or Evolution, British Government in the 19th Century,
London 1977; Stansky, ed., The Victorian Revolution.
21 Her actual remark was: Every schoolchild is now taught as an article of dogmatic faith that the
Whig interpretation of history is false. Is the Tory interpretation any better? Loc. cit., p. 39.
22 Gladstones very important letter of 3 December 1853 was first published by Hart in Sutherland,
ed., op.cit., pp. 7477.
23 J.B. Gonachers The Aberdeen Coalition, Cambridge 1968, is the best general source on political
events in the government and also contains extensive coverage of Gladstones correspondence with
Graham and Russell on the Report. (Parkers Life and Letters of Sir James Graham Vol. 2 contains
useful background as well as the full texts of the first exchange of letters between Graham and
Gladstone. Hughess 1949 article (op.cit.) is superb on the discussions within the government. Also
indispensable is J.R. Moore, The Abolition of Patronage in the Indian Civil Service and the Closure
of Haileybury College, The Historical Journal, VII 2, 1964, pp. 24657. On public reactions to the
Report, Mueller (op.cit.) is by far the best, but Greaves is also useful. Russells preoccupations and
difficulties can be appreciated by reading G.P. Gooch, ed., The Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell,
18401878, Vol. 2, London 1925, pp. 11439. Lord Palmerstons icy letter on the proletarian threat and
Russells refusal to face up to it should not be missed!

The NorthcoteTrevelyan Reports key proposals are fairly clear cut

and easily summarized:
(1) Departmental staffs were to be divided into two grades: a superior one
engaged in intellectual work and an inferior, involved in mechanical work.
(2) Within each grade promotion would be by merit and not simply by
seniority.
(3) The staff would be recruited for life at a young age and constitute a
distinct profession.
(4) Appointment by patronage would be replaced across the board by
open, competitive exams run by a central Civil Service Commission.
(5) The exams for the superior grade would embrace the liberal education
curricula of Oxford and Cambridge, thus allowing immediate entry from
those universities without any further course of study, though the exams
were not exclusively geared to liberal subjects.
(6) Higher-grade civil servants would be open to promotion across departments, thus unifying the service into a cohesive corps.24

Although not directly mentioned in the Report, another key change

was closely related in Trevelyans mind: namely, the conversion of the
Treasury into the superintending department in Whitehall.25 In fact
the implementation of the Reports proposals and of Treasury control
were in large measure interdependent. Taken together, these proposals
represent the decisive organizing principles of the top management
corps within the modern British state.
Was the Report Important?

The only historian to mount a serious argument that the Northcote

Trevelyan report was unimportant has been Parris.26 In his view, the
changes proposed in the Report as implemented in the 1870 Order in
Council and in earlier and later reforms came about not through the
impact of the Report itself, or the work of the reformers directly
associated with it, but through more or less natural pressure from the
new breed of administrators entering the higher civil service from the
late 1840s onwards. As he points out, this new breed was replacing
an earlier generation of top officials such as Kay Shuttleworth and
Chadwickpeople he characterizes as zealots but whom I would prefer
to call programme-committed officialsfrom the age of Benthamite
reform in the 1830s and 1840s.27 Parris thus plays down not only the
continuity between the 1854 report and subsequent changes but also
the element of conscious political struggle to implement the changes
outlined in the NorthcoteTrevelyan manifesto.
This view of events cannot be accepted. It is true that neither Northcote
nor Trevelyan was involved in the 1870 Order in Council. Yet the
24 The full text of the Report can be read in the 1954 issue of Public Administration, 1954 devoted to
its centenary and is also reproduced in the Fulton Report.
25 Henry Roseveares The Treasury, London 1969, is good on this. See also Maurice Wrights more
detailed study, Treasury Control of the Civil Service, 185474, London 1969.
26 Op. cit. The formula that encapsulates his argument is on p. 159.
27 Members of the new breed like Lingen were also zealots, but not about particular departmental
programmes. I have used the term programme-committed in the sense in which it has often been
applied to officials in US federal bureaux.

10

Report had been by no means only their work. Lingen, Jowett and
Loweall very close friends28had been involved and so above all
had Gladstone, the man who had commissioned the Report and pulled
a reluctant Northcote into working for him on administrative reform.
Gladstone was, of course, Prime Minister at the time of the 1870 Order.
When he became Prime Minister soon after the passing of the Second
Reform Act he made what many regarded as a very strange choice as
his Chancellor: Robert Lowe, the intellectual leader of the Adullamite
Cave, the most famous enemy of democracy in the country.29 The choice
has usually been linked with Gladstones view of finance. But Gladstone
himself considered Lowes outstanding contribution, entitling his elevation to the Lords, to have been the Order in Council in line with the
1854 Report.30 Furthermore, Gladstone moved Ralph Lingen into the
Treasury as its permanent head in 1869, established the Playfair Commission in 1874 to ensure that the reform programme was pushed
through the administrative machine, and followed up with the second
Royal Commission on the Civil Service, the Ridley Commission of
188688. A further indication of Gladstones drive to implement the
Report was the fact that amidst all the pressures of office in 1870, he
asked Lowe to contact his friend Benjamin Jowett to find out if there
was anything Gladstone could do for him. Jowett, of course, wanted the
Mastership of Balliol and Gladstone obliged by giving the encumbent a
deanery, clearing Jowetts way.31 Even by the end of the Gladstone
period, the full programme of NorthcoteTrevelyan had not been fully
implemented: yet the consolidation of a fused corps delite binding
together all the instruments of administrative powerthrough Milners
changes at the end of the First World Warcan be seen as having a
direct link with an original reform group.32 This is not to deny Parriss
point that the top civil servants of 1870 were often much more amenable
than those of 1854 to the ideas of NorthcoteTrevelyan. But there was
nothing automatic and organic about the implementation of those ideas:
they were consciously fought for and pushed through by Gladstone
and other veterans of the Aberdeen government.
28

Throughout this article I have used the two main sources on Jowetts life: Abbott and Campbell,
The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (two volumes, London 1897) and Faber, Benjamin Jowett: A
Portrait with Background. See also the additional volume by Abbott and Campbell, Letters of Benjamin
Jowett (London 1899). All these works demonstrate the closeness of Jowetts relations with both
Lingen and Lowe. It is not entirely clear when Lowes friendship with Jowett was first cemented,
but they were friends by the 1850s and became very close. The basic work on Lowe is Martins twovolume The Life and Letters of Lord Sherbrooke, London 1893. But see also J. Winter, Robert Lowe,
Toronto 1976. There is no full-length study of Lingen, but Richard Johnsons fascinating article,
Administrators in Education before 1870: Patronage, Social Postion and Role, in Sutherland, ed.,
op. cit., pp. 11039, provides the basis for the material on Lingen here. Johnsons article, Educational
Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England, Past and Present 59, provides a valuable portrait
of the work and outlook of Kay Shuttleworth. The most detailed account of the decision to introduce
the 1870 Order in Council is in Maurice Wright, op. cit., Chapter 4. He rightly contradicts the
impression in many earlier accounts that Gladstone was lukewarmthe truth was the reverse.
29 See Martin, op. cit. on Lowes appointment.
30
Loc. cit.
31
Faber, op. cit., pp. 349ff. gives a vivid account of this incident.
32
See R.A. Chapman and J.R. Greenaway, The Dynamics of Administrative Reform, London 1980, pp.
1045 for Milners little-known involvement. It may seem fanciful to suggest a link between a document
of 1854 and changes in 1919. But Milner was a direct product of Jowetts Kindergarten, and Jowett
was acting as Milners mentor and confidant long after he had left the University. Faber (pp. 36065)
devotes a whole section of a chapter to the relationship between the two men.

11

The New Breed

Parriss perceptive identification of a transition from one breed of

officials to another in the late 1840s and the 1850s is of great importance
in explaining the transformation of the administrative elite. Yet this
transition does not seem to have been quite the simple, natural generational change that he implies. Nor can we distance this new breed
from the aims and outlook of those who produced the report. Two of
the three exemplars of the new breed that he mentions were, in fact, a
very special breed: Jowett protgs. One was Lingen himself, and the
other was Farrer, the first of an extraordinary line of senior civil servants
to benefit from Jowetts tuition. The only place in the administration
where this new breed was strong in the early 1850s was, in fact, in
the Education Department, where everyone was a Jowett product.33
Between the time that Lingen joined the department in 1846 and the
end of 1849, Jowett was actively involved in securing the entry of the
following Balliol men: Matthew Arnold, Frederick Temple, Francis
Sandford and F.T. Palgrave. For decades afterwards the department
was controlled by his ex-pupils. They were not just a social type, but
had distinctive ideas and were extremely hostile to the programmecommited reformers of the earlier Benthamite era, like Kay-Shuttleworth. While Lingen was still Kays subordinate, Jowett wrote to him
likening Kay to the two barbarians, Hengist and Horsa.34 Lingen
shared this contempt, swinging from attacking Shuttleworth in very
vigorous English to keeping quiet on Jowetts advice, to be sure of
taking over the department when Kay-Shuttleworth was removed.35
Lingen ended the tradition of programme-commitment, in so many
ways similar to the outlook reported to reign among civil servants in
American government bureaus today. Under his regime, as Kekewich
(another of the Balliol Department leaders) remembered, the Education
Departments office staff formed exactly the same sort of society that
is to be found in any college Common Room; they were scholars,
poets, philosophers and musicians etc. and they were ready to discuss
and to discuss wellany subject under the sun except education.36
Lingen himself was an incorrigible writer of Greek verse and his deputy
wrote in 1857: Lingen will go on leave this weekhe meditates a
journey to Rome, I suppose to get as far as he can out of reach of
Education.37
The change was one not simply of style and culture but of policy. KayShuttleworths drive to expand the Departments budget in order to
build a national system of working-class education was replaced by
Lingens stress on control and retrenchment and above all by his
lack of any drive whatever to fight legislative battles for a stronger
commitment to education or wider powers for the department. A
breakthrough in the education field had to wait until Lingen had left
33

See R. Johnsons article in Sutherland, op. cit.

The full text and background is contained in Abbott and Campbell, Vol. 1.
35 R. Johnson, op. cit.
36 Ibid., p. 128.
37 Ibid., p. 135.
34

12

the department at the end of the 1860s to drive for Treasury control
and for the implementation of NorthcoteTrevelyan. None of this
meant that Lingen and the rest of the new breed were indolent or
conceived of themselves as gentlemen dilettantes: on the contrary, they
were just as much zealots, despite any easy Common Room airs. But
their mission pointed in a very different direction from either Benthamite
bureaucratic doctrine or a fixation with laissez-faire economics.
The band of new men in the Education Department were a very isolated
group within the civil service of the early 1850s. But they had a potential
ally in Trevelyan, the Treasurys administrative driving force. Though
himself, as Russell pointed out,38 in so many ways similar to the
buccaneering civil servants of the earlier period, by 1853 he was no
friend of Benthamite types like Chadwick. Indeed, he declared in
February 1853 that Chadwick had never shown any feeling about the
public money except to get as much as he could of it and that this
alone disqualified him from officeimplying that additional grounds
could be found for sacking Chadwick if necessary.39 Kay-Shuttleworth
was thrown out of Education very shabbily in 1849 and Chadwicks
enemies drove him out with relish in 1854. The NorthcoteTrevelyan
breed shed no tears, for at that very moment they were in the midst of
destroying a bastion of Benthamismthe training system of the Indian
Civil Servicea very important event to which we shall return later.
Against Parriss downgrading of the reform effort of 185354 and his
supposed alternative of a natural evolution to a new breed of recruits,
we would offer Lord Annans brilliant account of how the Report was
hailed as a Bill of Rights by his intellectual aristocrats who gained
their Glorious Revolution in 187071.40 There was, in other words, a
dialectical process: a few of the new breed like Lingen inside and Jowett
outside participated in producing the Reform manifesto of 1854. This
drew more of the new breed towards a civil service career and towards
an administrative structure on the lines of the Report, thus creating
more favourable soil for Gladstone to plough from 1870 onwards.
To trace back in this way the reorganization of central state institutions
for over fifty years, is to make very large claims for the brief, twentypage Report that appeared in 1854 and to posit a great programmatic
consistency on the part of the central actors for decades thereafter. Such
claims for synoptic planning have no place in Tory historical philosophy.
Yet we shall argue that NorthcoteTrevelyan was precisely such an
astonishing planning achievement, a remarkably creative work of administrative, political and social imagination fully worthy of Wallass accolade. It was planning, however, that cannot be assimilated to Harts
Fabian tradition, for its spirit and orientation were utterly alien to the
blue-prints and aims of Bentham and James Mill. It contained an
integrated set of principles offering a highly specific solution to a wide
range of administrative, political and class problems and problems of
institutional development; it created the tightly integrated managerial
38

Russell to Gladstone, 20 January 1854, quoted in Conacher, op. cit., p. 321.

Quoted in J. Hart, Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury, English Historical Review LXXV (1960).
40
See The English Intellectual Aristocracy, op. cit.
39

13

elite of the British state, matching the requirements of, and helping to
create, a particular socio-political coalition of forces in Britain.
The radical switch in direction away from Benthamism represented by
NorthcoteTrevelyan was obscured first by Dicey and then, more
recently, by Parriss correction. Dicey was aware of the importance of
the government reforms starting between 1848 and 1854, but in his
crusade against collectivism he assimilated both Benthamism and the
NorthcoteTrevelyan programme to individualist laissez-faire. Parris
rightly broke the identification between laissez-faire and Benthamism,
but then assimilated NorthcoteTrevelyanism to an undifferentiated
Benthamite period stretching from 1830 right through the century into
collectivism. This also led him to deny a break in overall direction at
the start of the 1850s.
We will argue that the NorthcoteTrevelyan programme was far more
destructive of Benthamism than any mere anti- Benthamite laissez-faire
policy could have been. This was because the programme embodied an
alternative, positive conception: one not restricted to issues of frankly
middling policy importance that often have as much to do with party
rhetoric as with substance. Their conception concerned what type of
central state mechanism should be constructed in Britainthe kind of really
big issue that is simply ignored in a political historiography that sees
only party leaders, party rhetoric and policy, and in an administrative
historiography that sees only procedure and implementation. The
NorthcoteTrevelyan conception was inimical to neither laissez-faire
nor collectivism and it offered little that was new in terms of administrative routines. MacDonaghs supposed paradox of a laissez-faire reform
unintentionally aiding collectivism is a puzzle of his own making. We
will now try to dissect this alternative in the minds of the 185354
reformers.
Trevelyans Volte-Face over Haileybury

Hughes, Hart and others have rightly stressed that Trevelyan played a
central role in the formation of the Reports ideas,41 and Hart has shown
that he was grappling with the idea of a general reform of the civil
service at least since the mid-1840s. As early as 1848 Trevelyan was
arguing for the division of the administrative staff into a superior and
an inferior grade.42 His advocacy of promotion by merit more than
seniority, while wanting this to be applied only within, not across grades,
was a caste principle equally central in the Report. Trevelyan can thus
be credited with the idea of creating a distinct managerial elite within
the British state. In this period Trevelyan was also striving for that great
complement to NorthcoteTrevelyanTreasury Control43which was
linked in his mind with the idea that senior civil servants would be
41
Hughes, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform, 185355, loc. cit.; J. Hart, The Genesis
of the NorthcoteTrevelyan Report, in Sutherland, ed., op. cit., pp. 6381.
42
See Trevelyans evidence to the Select Committee on Misc. Expenditures, 28 March and 4 April
1848, quoted at length in H. Roseveare, The Treasury, 16601870, The Foundations of Control, London
1973, pp. 201204.
43 Roseveare demonstrates Trevelyans pioneering role in this area. See his The Treasury.

14

promoted across departments. He wanted the Treasury to recruit not

straight from the outside but from the most suitable material within
other departments, ensuring that it would be the apex and directing
force within the career structure, forming a closely integrated corps
dlite.44
Hart argues that all these ideas of Trevelyans were inspired exclusively
or overwhelmingly by his desire to improve the ability of recruits into,
and efficiency of, the civil service. She dismisses Trevelyans own later
testimony to the Playfair Commission and to Eaton, an American
researcher, that the spur for the reform proposals was the shock of the
1848 Revolution, as the unreliable memories of an old man. Now,
efficiency was undoubtedly a concern for Trevelyan, but if it had ever
been paramount it was no longer his only motive by the time he
came to write the Report. What Hart overlooks is the revolution in
Trevelyans thinking as a result of his conversation with Jowett on the
21st or 22nd of July 1853, before he started drafting the Report.
In arguing for Trevelyans preoccupation with efficiency, Hart very
pertinently refers to his experience in India and his admiration for the
Indian Civil Service. Trevelyan was himself a product of Haileybury,
the East India Companys training college, and as Hart points out, he
thought the Indian service far more efficient than the home service. A
Trevelyan memo of August 1849 praised Haileybury for weeding out
unsuitable people who, if nominated for the home service, would
almost always have gained a place. Hart mentions a further Trevelyan
encomium for the ICS of March 1850. But what she does not explain is
why, following his conversation with Jowett, Trevelyan moved heaven
and earth in 1853 to destroy Haileybury. We must look more closely at
both Haileybury and Trevelyan.
Haileybury College had been founded by the directors of the East India
Company in 1806, to train higher Indian civil servants. By Statute of
1813 all higher civil servants of the Company had to have spent four
terms at Haileybury as a condition of employment. The college soon
became an intellectual power-house as the directors spared no pains to
attract the highest quality of teachers. Malthus taught (and wrote his
famous book) there, as did Sir James Stephen and Sir James MacIntosh.
The Sanskrit scholar Monier-Williams, subsequently a professor at
Oxford, wrote that the mental training there was of such a high standard
that nothing at all equal to it . . . was to be had either at the Universities
or elsewhere . . . I soon discovered that if I wished to rise above the
level of the average student, I should have a task before me compared
to which my previous work at Oxford could only be regarded as childs
play.45
Haileyburys educational orientation, radically different from that of
Oxbridge, was geared to training administrators in knowledge relevant
to their work. The students were therefore taught politics (general
44

These were the ideas to be implemented by Warren Fisher in the inter-war years under Milners
impulse.
45 Quoted by Moses, op. cit., p. 51, from Memorials of Old Haileybury, p. 75.

15

polity), law and political economy as well as Indian languages and

classical subjects. Here, in short, was a mechanism for producing civil
servants on the lines of French or German bureaucracy, a British Ecole
Polytechnique. (The British Ecole des Mines et Chausses was the
college at Addiscombe for Indian Army engineers and technicians.) Of
course, this extension of the continental model was the work of Bentham
and James MillBentham had every reason for his quip that he would
be running India from his grave, since he and Mill had taken care to
make Haileybury their training college. Bentham had gained his friend
and supporter Sir James MacIntosh the key post of Professor of General
Polity and Law and brought Malthus in as well. When MacIntosh
moved on in 1824, he was succeeded by William Empson, another
fervent Benthamite.46
The story of the extremely skilful and energetic manoeuvrings to destroy
Haileybury, by Trevelyan, his brother-in-law Macaulay and Jowett, ably
assisted by Robert Lowe in the Commons, has been well described
elsewhere.47 But their aims have not been fully explored. Jowett of
Balliol had an obvious motive: to open the ICS fully to Oxbridge
graduates. For Macaulay and Trevelyan a consciously anti-Benthamite
element was almost certainly present: that is, they were anxious to settle
scores with James Mill over the fundamentals of British strategy in
Indiathe relation between race, class and state buildingon which
Trevelyan and Mill had been at odds since the 1830s.48 But the issues
at stake for Trevelyan went far beyond Indian administrative training.
Trevelyan had shown himself to have a remarkable historicalimaginative grasp of fundamental programmatic issues to do with state construction when he was in India in the 1830s, and any notion that his
scope was restricted to a Victorian equivalent of Raynorite efficiencyfanaticism is utterly misleading. There is also strong circumstantial
evidence that his July 1853 conversation with Jowett (no doubt carefully
stage-managed by Jowett and Lingen) struck dynamite in Trevelyans
imagination.
Taken on their own, Trevelyans ideas about a caste division and
Treasury control had a static and rather administrative character, a
case of what organization theorists would call closed-system thinking,
unconnected to the environment of the administrative apparatus. Jowett
showed him how to turn his ideas on the British reform into, so
to speak, an open system, feeding on inputs from the educational
environment, reacting back on the educational system and becoming
self-reproducing. Thus Trevelyan abandoned his earlier notion of recruit46

Sir George Campbell, who was at Haileybury in the 1840s, recorded in his memoirs that Empson
taught not the law of English lawyers, but good first principles. He was a good deal of a Benthamite,
and I came away from Haileybury with a very sound belief in the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. For this and other material on the Benthamite influence on India see Eric Stokes, The English
Utilitarians and India, London 1959.
47 See R.J. Moores illuminating article, loc. cit.
48 This very important struggle between Trevelyan and Macaulay on one side and James Mill on the
other is told in Stokes, op. cit., and forms an important theme in his book. The whole affair was in
the forefront of the brothers-in-laws minds in 185253. Trevelyan went so far as to present large
chunks of his 1838 pamphlet to the select committee of enquiry preparing the India Act in 1852.
Woods Education Dispatch of 1854 finally carried the day for the brothers-in-law against the ghost
of Mill.

16

ing people in the midst of other careers into the Civil Service in favour
of taking young people straight from Oxbridge via suitably geared
exams. The parallels between such a scheme and his own cherished plan
of 1838 for linking together the administration, education and class
structure of India in an intregrated plan for state-building must surely
have been obvious to him. The Haileybury model, hitherto highly
valued by Trevelyan on efficiency grounds, now had to be scrapped
because it entailed building an administrative elite out of material
separated from the socialeducational elite institutions of Oxbridge.
Here was the decisive break with the Benthamite conception of constructing an administrative elite that had been gaining ground within the
state in the 1830s and 1840s. From that July conversation onwards,
Trevelyan pulled Jowett into the centre of the discussions of British
civil service reform. From July 1853 Jowett was spending most of his
time in London: staying the night at the Lingens, passing the evenings
in Westbourne Terrace andwho knows?perhaps spending his afternoons chatting to his old friend from student days at Balliol, Stafford
Northcote.
Class, Class Pressure and Administration

Many writers, most notably the American Kingsley, used to argue that
the NorthcoteTrevelyan Report was a response to pressures from the
rising middle classes, well-educated but allegedly short of jobs. Hart
convincingly demonstrates at some length that this thesis is false: there
were, in fact, plenty of jobs for this proverbially rising middle class,
whose political expressions such as the Financial and later the Administrative Reform Associations were not at all in tune with the sort of
ideas Kingsley suggests. Indeed, the Administrative Reform Association
was extremely hostile to any expansion of employment in the Civil
Service.49 But in the course of proving this point Hart adds an analytical
error and draws an erroneous conclusion.
The analytic error is to lump together two quite separate social groups
into a single, more or less undifferentiated category: she makes Annans
intellectual aristocracy of Trevelyans, Macaulays and suchlike, members of the same class as the old boys of the mechanics institutes. This
would seem crude even to the most vulgar of Marxists, not to speak
of the Victorian gentry. Lord Melbourne may have been irritated by
Macaulays cocksure attempt to appoint himself the ideologist of the
Whig counsinhood, but even he would not have confused Macaulays
rank with that of a Kay-Shuttleworth, not to speak of his nameless
book-keeper. There were two Victorian middle classes, and one of them
was the gentry, of whom someone like Northcote was a typical instance.
The sons and daughters of the gentry had long mingled with the
aristocracy. They were by no means always well-offhence the places
for poor scholars at the top public schools and Oxbridge. Their younger
sons could plan on entering the Church, the Bar or the army, along
with the aristocracy, but the oldest should have some form of private
49
See Olive Anderson, The Janus Face of Mid-19th Century Radicalism: The Administrative Reform
Association, 185557, Victorian Studies, Vol. 8, 1965; and her The Administrative Reform Association,
185557, in P. Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without, London 1974.

17

income, preferably, of course, some land. This gentry class inhabited,

or tried desperately to inhabit, a different world from the urban business
classes.50 Hart demonstrates beyond doubt that the latter were not
clamouring for jobs in the civil service. But what about the plight of
the gentry? She does not allow herself to perceive such a distinction.
Harts erroneous conclusion is that because the urban middle classes
were not exerting pressure, class had nothing whatever to do with
the NorthcoteTrevelyan report. She simply ignores the irrefutable
evidence, some of which she herself has been responsible, elsewhere,
for producing, that the reformers were profoundly concerned with class
issues.51
Earlier historians like Kinglsey can, in fact, be forgiven for imagining
that the report was a manifesto of the rising middle classes, since the
authors deliberately wrote it in a style geared to appeal to that group:
meritocratic, technocratic, flattering the ethic of the self-made urban
bourgeoisie. Trevelyan was acutely aware of this public relations aspect
of the Report. He lined up Delane at the Times to produce a demagogic
attack on the aristocracy in support of the Report, and even sought to
mobilize support for it from the mechanics institutes. At the same time,
he had a moment of panic over the possibility that a text of his within
government, spelling out the real, aristocratic class orientation of the
reform, might have leaked out!52
Not only were the reformers under no pressure from the rising urban
middle classes to open up the civil service: they believed and hoped
that the reform would weaken the capacity of this group to penetrate
the upper reaches of the service, thereby strengthening the hold of the
landed classes on administrative power. The notion that Trevelyan or
Gladstone, let alone Northcote, had any other inclination directly
contradicts all the evidence. Asa Briggs long ago demonstrated Trevelyans aristocratic orientation.53 Northcotes supposed wish to overthrow
what MacDonagh repeatedly calls the ancien rgime is simply preposterous. As for Gladstone, whose ideas will be examined in more detail
below, one leading scholar explains that his youthful idealism had two
great foci: the Church and the Aristocracy . . . For William, aristocracy
was not a repressive principle, but one of unity, cohesion and mutual
50

Hans Mueller (op. cit.) brilliantly illuminates this key distinction in Victorian society.
An American historian has recently remarked with some irritation: Whether or not present-day
historians accept a class description of English society, 19th century English pedagogues did. (H.W.
Becker, The Social Origins and Post-Graduate Careers of a Cambridge Intellectual Elite, 18301860,
Victorian Studies, Vol. 28 No. 1, autumn 1986, p. 97.) The obsessiveness with which Victorian officials
and politicians discussed issues in class terms is matched only by the obsessiveness with which modern
Tory and Fabian historians seek to evade explanations of behaviour and events in these terms!
52 The text in question consisted of detailed comments by Trevelyan on a paper sent to him by a
Captain OBrien. These comments explained how many lower-class people were at the time rising
within the civil service: At present a mixed multitude is sent up, a large proportion of whom, owing
to the operation of political and personal patronage, are of an inferior rank in society. The comments
attack OBrien for imagining that recruitment through open competition would draw in fewer
gentlemen: the real case will, as I believe, be exactly the reverse. Patronage, says Trevelyan,
discriminates against our public schools and universities, while the tendency of the reform will, I
am confident, be decidedly aristocratic. The material is reproduced by Hughes, loc. cit., 1949.
53 Briggs quotes from Trevelyans Thoughts on Patronage, published in full in Hughes, loc. cit., pp.
6970.
51

18

support . . . his respect for the aristocractic principle was never to leave
him . . . his attitude to aristocracy was similar to that of his father: he
deferred not to individuals but to an institution.54
There is, of course, not a shred of truth in the suggestion of earlier
historians that the NorthcoteTrevelyan reformers supported democracy. Defence of the aristocratic principle in the mid-19th century
precisely meant defence of the given class state, in the face of the
pressures against it from below summed up in the banner of democracy.
This was the over-riding issue on the political agenda for all the Tory,
Whig and Peelite leaders in the 1850s. Croker, the Derbyite spokesperson
in the Quarterly Review, defined the basic problem of the age as whether
the legislative power is to rest with the landed and those connected
with it or with the manufacturing interests of the country, adding that
task was to resist the inroads of democracy.55
It was also true that there was general agreement among party leaders
that this struggle involved winning the rising middle classes away from any
class coalition with the radical democrats among the workers. No party leader
wished to replace the landed power with urban middle class ascendancy;
all wanted to consolidate aristocratic power by integrating the middle
class in a subordinate role. The disagreements in the early 1850s were
over the three strategic formulae for achieving this end. A major reason
for the instability of the Aberdeen coalition was the fact that the main
champions of all three sat in the Cabinet. Russell advocated franchise
reform to bring in the middle classes, plus education for the working
class. Palmerston violently opposed this, urging instead the mobilization
of popular support for the patriotic flag through a noisy campaign for
liberalism abroad. Gladstone, the third protagonist in the debate,
opposed and deplored Palmerstons line, not least because of the threat
it posed to state finance. But he was no less hostile to franchise reform,
being on the extreme Tory wing of the Peelites at this time and
remaining more inclined towards them than towards the Liberals right
through the 1850s. His only policy difference with the Derbyites was
over Free Trade, and his diary shows him to have been troubled, on
the eve of the formation of the Aberdeen government, as to whether
there was a principled basis for such a coalition of Whigs and Peelites,
particularly given Russells commitment to franchise reform. The diary
also reveals what, in his view, gave such a coalition its principled
character: namely, Disraelis utterly irresponsible readiness to seek trivial
party advantage by placing in jeopardy a central pillar of aristocratic
ascendancy.56 This pillar was the fifty-year bipartisan policy of equal
taxation, directed against the demands of the middle classes, backed by
classical political economy, for heavier taxation on the landed interest.
Disraeli (trying to intrigue with Bright at this timesomething Glad54

S.G. Checkland, The Making of Mr Gladstone, Victorian Studies, Vol. 12, 196869, p. 408.
Quoted in R.B. McDowell, British Conservatism 18321914, London 1959, pp. 5354.
56 On Disraelis manoeuvrings with Bright around the time of his budget see R. Stewart, The Politics
of Protection, Cambridge 1971, pp. 20615. For Gladstones analysis of the political situation and for
his stance on the formation of the coalition, see the Diaries for 18 December 1852. For his analysis
of the trends amongst the Peelites and of his own position, see the diaries for 26 March 1852.
Important material is also contained in J.B. Conacher, The Peelites and the Party System, 18461852,
London 1972, pp. 17679.
55

19

stone would not have dreamt of doing) had proposed making the landed
interest pay more than the manufacturers in terms of tax rates. This,
thought Gladstone, would unleash a conflict between the classes and
the overriding duty of moderate opinion in all parties was to unite in
fierce opposition to this treacherous policy. But in entering the coalition
he insisted that the absence of agreement on any measure of franchise
reform should be explicitly registered.
Patronage and Gladstone: Myth and Reality

Those like MacDonagh who argue that the NorthcoteTrevelyan

reformers and their supporters were an amalgam of Peelism and middleclass radicalism opposing the ancien rgime point above all to their
hostility to parliamentary patronage. This, as we have seen, was indeed
a central concern of Gladstones.57 Although he recognized that amendments along such lines would cause a sensation and might mean the
Report would not be accepted by Parliament, this did not disturb him
in the least. For he felt that issues of principle were at stake, so central
that in a private remark about the document to Graham he described
them as my contribution to the picnic of Parliamentary reform. He
was here counterposing his plan to change party politics by abolishing
patronage to franchise reform, of which Graham was the leading
supporter amongst the Peelites in the coalition.58
But Gladstone, unlike MacDonagh, strongly believed that the abolition
of Parlimentary patronage would strengthen the ancien rgime and
undermine potential challenges from the rising middle classes.59 The
work of destroying the patronage system that MacDonagh and others
seem to have in mind had been largely carried out by that greatest of
defenders of the ancien rgime, Edmund Burke, in his defence of that
regime against George IIIs political stirrings. True enough, the image
of old aristocratic corruption remained powerful in the popular imagination and Trevelyan knew how to exploit it. But after 1832, patronage
as aristocratic dole had largely been replaced by Parliamentary patronage,
in the service of party politics. Trevelyan explained in a confidential
document that this patronage was mainly available to MPs from middlesized urban boroughs, for the purpose of strengthening party support.
And it was often in the power of opposition MPs, not government
supporters.60 (Northcotes proposal to centralize patronage powers in
the Prime Ministers hands would, no doubt, have changed that.) As
for top administrative posts in departments, these were often within
57

Northcote, according to his own later testimony, had originally wanted to concentrate all patronage
in the hands of the Prime Minister. See Hart, in Sutherland, ed., op. cit.
58 Gladstone to Graham, 3 January 1854, reproduced in full in Parker, op. cit., Vol. 2 pp. 20910,
along with Grahams very interesting reply.
59 Gladstones second letter to Graham, 14 January, quoted in Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition, p. 320.
60 See his letter to Times editor Delane, 6 February 1854, explaining that the very large boroughs were
too big to be bought and the pocket boroughs were too small to need buying. The letter is reproduced
in full in Hughes, 1949, op. cit., pp. 8486. Back in 1843 as a member of Peels government, Gladstone
had already discovered that patronage was no longer a matter of dole for friends and relatives, but
strictly political coinage: he had tried to get a job for a friend of a friend on humanitarian grounds
and was told by the Patronage Secretary at the Treasury that this was not allowed: to be eligible,
cases had to be justifiable on strictly party political grounds. See Hughess 1954 article, loc. cit. for a
good treatment of this whole subject.

20

the jurisdiction of the minister concerned if the post fell vacant, but
they were under pretty strict controls for competence by the 1850s and
were far from being open to Lord Norfolks proverbial bastards, beloved
of popular imagination.
Lord John Russells strong opposition in Cabinet to Gladstones proposals seem to have been viewed as a typical reaction from the Whig
aristocracy, yet there is no solid reason for viewing Russells stance as
inherently less modern than Gladstones. The truth is that no government in the 19th or 20th century has got rid of patronage: they have
simply dispensed it in different ways.61 Russell favoured dispensing
patronage through the party system. American Federal judges are
appointed in this mannerwith a check for competence. And if Heclos
account is to be believed many permanent civil servants are appointed
to US bureaus through the patronage rights of senators and congressmen62exactly the British system for lower civil service posts in
the early 1850s. In truth it would be absurd to suggest that the British
nomenklatura lists of the great and the good for handling, say, BBC
governorships are remotely more modern than the American methods
of appointing Supreme Court justices or the members of regulatory
agencies. As to the dangers of political corruption from the Russell
system, Gladstone agreed that it no longer acted as a means of changing
party allegiances: it merely strengthened party ties.
None of this is intended to suggest that Gladstones plan to shift
the power of patronage from the parliamentaryparty arena to the
administrative arena was of little moment. One has only to think of the
vast quango sector operating in the late twentieth century to see its
extreme importance for the evolution of the British state, redistributing
the real power that patronage entails from Parliament to the administrative system.63 Gladstone undoubtedly did, as Hart argues, convince
himself that the parliamentary patronage system was evil and corrupt.
But there were, for Gladstone, plenty of evils in the world to combat,
so that the question remains why he chose to turn this issue into a
crusade. Ethical motives are not sufficient: the campaign was also linked
with Gladstones entire strategic formula for consolidating the midVictorian oligarchic state by winning acceptance of it from the new
middle classes. Part of this strategy involved, of course, free trade and
a domestic laissez-faire economic policy; another element was an appeal
to the demands of the urban bourgeoisie for low taxation, strict controls
61

For an excellent theoretical, comparative treatment of this whole subject see Martin Shefter, Party
and Patronage: Germany, England, and Italy, Politics and Society, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1977. He shows how
the penetration of the NorthcoteTrevelyan process in the 1870s and 1880s created a crisis in the
functioning of the Tory party as it grappled with problems of adjustment. Parris shows, interestingly,
that with the consolidation of the NorthcoteTrevelyan regime, top civil servants began to be the
recipients of patronage by being made Lords. Very appropriately, Lingen and Farrer were among the
first to be honoured.
62 See Hugh Heclo, Government of Strangers, Chapter 4.
63 Thatcher, of course, by buying up Armstrong after firing his predecessor as head of the Civil
Servicean unprecedented couphad gained a party-political grip on the nomenklatura system with
formidable consequences in terms of her capacity to wield power: for instance, her use of the
Manpower Services Commission, her appointment of the Bishop of London opening a split in the
Church, her appointment of Donaldson to the key judicial post of Master of the Rolls, her packing
of the BBC Board of Governors, to name just a few examples.

21

on spending and efficient government; a further aim was to demonstrate

that the governing class deserved its control over the state on the
grounds of superior capacities, and the replacement of parliamentary
patronage by examination entry into a new civil service elite was
designed to achieve exactly this meritocratic appeal. But Gladstone was
not seeking to gain middle-class entry into that elite. Quite the contrary.
At this time he was tirelessly working to ensure this would not occur
by reorganizing the institutions of oligarchy. We shall return shortly to
Gladstones pivotal role in the NorthcoteTrevelyan reform process.
But first we should examine Hans Eberhard Muellers thesis on the
forces that produced the Report.
State Autonomy or AristocraticCumOxbridge Pressure?

Muellers recent comparative study of bureaucratic reform in Prussia

and England is by far the most important and convincing study of
the NorthcoteTrevelyan reform to have yet appeared. He brilliantly
illuminates the interwoven class and institutional structures of the midVictorian state and destroys many of the myths concerning a supposed
triumph of the urban middle classes within the dominant institutions at
this time. He also demonstrates the aristocratic thrust of the Northcote
Trevelyan manifesto, showing in particular the immensely strong aristocraticgentry control over Oxbridge and the way the reform was
constructed to roll back the urban middle classes from their earlier
inroads into administrative power.
But Muellers own explanation of the Report in terms of class pressure
from the aristocraticgentry world, mediated through the top public
schools and Oxbridge, and through what he calls an inter-institutional
clique, remains vulnerable. He does not prove his case for outside
class pressure and his image of a clique is too narrow and one-sided.
If the notion of outside pressure could be encapsulated in the person
of Benjamin Jowett along with a small circle of his friends and cothinkers, Muellers thesis could be largely accepted. But once we suspend
formal barriers and make Jowett an honorary insiderwhich indeed
he wasthe thesis collapses. For there is no evidence of a great beating
on the doors of Whitehall by Oxbridge graduates before the Northcote
Trevelyan Report. Furthermore, Jowett was himself a rather isolated
figure within Oxbridge as a whole and his role was very far from
being a shop-steward for a half-mobilized class or set of educational
institutions. Active pressure from these institutions did not precede the
Report, but was articulated by and mobilized through it. As Annan
pointed out, the Report struck a deep chord that was ready to be struck,
but had not, so to speak, struck itself. The Report energized its
constituency, not vice-versa. Jowett, Trevelyan and Gladstone must be
given credit as relatively autonomous and creative actors: we have a seemingly
classic case of the autonomy of the state in policy-making (including
Jowett, of course, for the moment within the state), provided we
restrict our time-frame to the three or four-year period leading up to
1854.64
64

For a lively exploration of the value of the conception of state autonomy for historical studies, see
Skocpol et.al., Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge 1985.

22

What is true is that in mid-century, there was mounting pressure on

Oxbridge and on the gentry and aristocracy from the rising urban
middle classes. Oxbridge was increasingly unable to meet the spreading
educational challenge initiated by the Benthamites through University
College, London. This was partly because of the stifling grip exercised
on the ancient universities by a Church that was itself under threat from
the new spirit, increasingly agnostic, within the educated urban middle
classes.65
The old aristocraticgentry professions were also losing some of their
glitter: Oxbridge graduates no longer necessarily felt that a choice
between the prospect of a parish, the bar or a commission in the army
gave them exciting occupational horizons. The new middle classes,
increasingly involved in education, were moving into public administration and local government and building their own prosperous new
professions. Oxbridges liberal education and the traditional career
opportunities for the younger sons of the landed classes were assuring
neither fulfilment nor secure hegemony.
These hostile social pressures upon the old institutions would not
automatically have produced an effective comeback: stagnation, inertia
and a bunker mentality were a real possibility and if this had occurred,
political consequences for the oligarchic state would have followed.
Experience on the continent was to furnish plenty of examples of
displaced aristocracies and gentries drifting off into an embittered world
of root-and-branch reaction, extremist fantasies, anti-semitic politics and
all the rest. This did not happen in Britain and one of the reasons was
NorthcoteTrevelyan.
Jowett was acutely aware of the pressure on the old institutional order.
His experience at Balliol in the late 1840s of getting students and friends
into the Education Department, indicated a solution to the simmering,
wider crisis. But is Mueller right to express the work of Jowett,
Trevelyan, Gladstone and others as that of an inter-institutional clique?
Institutional interests and motives were obviously present in Jowetts
casestrengthening the position of Oxbridgeand in Trevelyans drive
for Treasury power and for a more powerful administrative elite. But
the so-called clique evidently did not include Gladstone himself: he
thought, for example, that Robert Lowe was responsible for the idea
of scrapping Haileybury. Furthermore, Jowetts aims and motives were
much more wide-ranging than those evoked by the notion of a clique
spirit. What Mueller misses is a transformation which had occurred in
Gladstones political thinking even before the Aberdeen coalition.
Gladstone was almost certainly unaware that it was Jowett, along
with the latters life-long friend A.P. Stanley, who had provoked the
revolution in his strategic ideas. But it was this intellectual transformation, in the spring of 1852, which was responsible for Gladstones
65

One of the most useful sources on this is M.A. Crowther, The Church Embattled, which discusses
the social views of Jowett and his circle. See also T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life
in Victorian England, London 1982, and J.P.C. Roach, Victorian Universities and the National
Intelligentsia, in Victorian Studies, Vol. II, No.2, 1959. Beckers article, loc. cit., is also very useful.

23

determination to have the NorthcoteTrevelyan manifesto as the basis

for his drive over subsequent decades to reorganize the state.

III. Dynamic Conservatism and the Old Order

We have argued against Mueller that NorthcoteTrevelyan is a classic
example of the relative autonomy of the political from direct, expressive
class pressures. The ideas in the Report were in general far in advance
of the thinking within the social groups the Report was designed to
serve. Within a restricted policy time-frame, the creative, imaginative
achievement of the reformers was a remarkable example of state leaders
reshaping social relationships and relations between state and society.
But in a longer historical perspective, this statesociety relationship is
reversed. For the Report was also in turn the product of changes and
tensions in social relations in the earlier part of the century, mediated
through great movements in the field of ideas. Its autonomy was
relativerestricted would be a better wordand its authors were
themselves products of wider and deeper determinations within 19thcentury society. To grasp this dimension we must travel far from the
narrow, habitual limits of administrative and political history into
the realms of intellectual and church history. And we must return to
Benthamism, examining the conditions of its rise and decline as a
dynamic current of politicali.e., state-buildingthought.
Benthamism became popular within sections of the propertied classes,
as Dicey so rightly said,66 against the background of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the industrial revolution on the other. In
place of the reactionary violence of the Lord Liverpool era, it offered
another, reformist, answer to Jacobinism. On one side it attacked all
natural rights ideologies such as those prevalent among democratic
revolutionaries; and on the other, it argued for rationalizing bourgeois
reforms of the state, law and public policy. With the collapse of the
Liverpool-eras coalition in 1829 and the passing of the Reform Act in
1832 Benthamisms hour had come. It offered a method of responding
to the class pressures of the period of Chartism and middle-class
radicalism that lasted through till the end of the 1840s. But at the very
moment of its seeming triumph in political and administrative reform,
Benthamism was under devastating attack in the intellectual world.
James Mill may have been the despot of India and may have been, as
one historian put it, attacking the Church and the aristocracy like a
vengeful Jehovah of Sodom and Gomorrah.67 But he could not prevent
his own, so carefully nurtured son from all but succumbing to the Idea
of the Church and the Aristocracy while his father was, so to speak,
out on business. For in the 1830s, John Mill was bowled over by
Coleridge.
Coleridges disciples not only created havoc in the Benthamite Debating
66
67

As quoted and summarized in H. Parris, Reappraisal Reappraised, loc. cit.

The phrase belongs to W. Thomas in his The Philosophical Radicals, Oxford 1979, p. 178.

24

Society;68 they captured the minds of some of the brightest of the

younger generation at Oxford and Cambridge and within the Church.
At Cambridge the Apostles, shortly after their creation, succumbed to
Coleridgean thought,69 as did a galaxy of young Oxford intellectuals.
Thomas Arnold of Rugby was also, of course, a fanatical Coleridgean
that was what his work was all about. In 1837 John Mill summed up
the view of many when he declared that there was more food for
thought in Coleridge than in any other writer. Within the Church, the
Coleridgeans were the Broad Church movement, a fairly tight-knit
circle, mainly composed of priests at or around Oxbridge.7 They
were not a narrow sect of fanatics like Benthams immediate disciples:
Coleridge himself would have deplored such an idea. Nor did they all
necessarily endorse or grasp all Coleridges philosophical notions. But
their social and political vision and their conception of the proper social
role of the Church derived essentially from him. They were to create a
sensation in 1860 with the publication of Essays and Reviews, which
brought repression in the Church courts down against two of the
essayists, plus a denunciation by both houses and the Synod, and a
petition got up by the Archbishop of Canterbury and signed by no
fewer than 12,000 clerics. Two priests were the organizers of Essays and
Reviews. The name of one was Wilson; of the other, the Reverend
Benjamin Jowett. There was more to Jowett than the brilliant clique
operator and wire-puller.71
We have not the space here adequately to evoke the suppleness, toughness and scope of Coleridges political theory.72 In a nutshell, he was a
staunch defender of the dominance of aristocratic order and the landed
interest, unlike the Benthamites. But in contrast with the sterile, obscurantist, reactionary Tractarianism of Newmans followers, Coleridge
believed that to maintain its power the aristocracy must engage in
thoroughgoing internal reform, transforming the life of the universities,
the Church, the state, the intellectual world. Coleridge, at the same
time, was not an enemy of commerce, industry, the world of money:
he was no more anti-capitalist than Burke had been before him. But he
was bitterly opposed to the spirit of capitalism being allowed to become
the dominant ethic in national life: there must, he argued, be an
equilibrium between the forces of permanenceembodied above all in
the landed interestand the forces of movement and dynamism, which
included commerce. Coleridge was the enemy of democracy, but was
68

W. Thomas, ibid., pp. 167205, provides a vivid account of this struggle and of its impact on Mill
junior. But see also J.M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind, the Social and Political Thought of John
Stuart Mill (Toronto), as well as Raymond Williamss classic Culture and Society, London 1961, Chapter
3 as well as Chapter 6 on Arnold and Newman.
69 See M.M. Garland, Cambridge before Darwin (Ohio 1979), and Peter Allen, The Cambridge Apostles:
The Early Years, Cambridge 1978.
70 See Crowther, op. cit. The most lucid account of Coleridges conception of the Church and of
Church policy is in Y. Brilioth, The Anglican Revival, London 1925.
71 We lack the space to explore the enormously important role and influence of Jowett on the formation
of the British mandarinate. But it should be noted that although Jowett was a Coleridgean in Church
policy and in many of his political attitudes, he was a Hegelian in philosophy, indeed the first serious
Hegelian in Britain.
72 David Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State, Yale University Press 1966, is the best
introduction, along with R.T. White, ed., The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Selection,
London 1938.

25

profoundly committed to the idea of the state as a community of

individuals and classes bound together by consent. To achieve this
consent, the propertied classes must devote a part of their wealth to the
enlightenment, cultivation and improvement of the people, tasks to be
undertaken by forming a cadre of dedicated, cultured intellectuals
imbued with a profound sense of duty who would go forth into every
corner of the nation to cement the classes into a genuine national
community. Coleridge saw it as the role of the Church and the universities to produce and train this cadre, or clerisy as he called it. But for
this to be achieved there had to be a thorough shake-up in these
institutions.
Coleridge had nothing but contempt for the reactionary gentry at the
base of the Liverpool coalition, with their fear and loathing of the new
forces and ideas of the urban world. A more short-sighted, selfish and
blundering Body of statesmen never existed than the present country
Party, he wrote. But his contempt for the Benthamites was equally
savage, not merely for their inclination in favour of representative
democracy but for their brutal and destructive attitude towards the
factory workers as well as their narrow and mean theoretical assumptions.73 Coleridge considered that the success of Benthamism derived
from the spiritual bankruptcy of the actually existing institutions of the
aristocratic order. The ascendancy of the corrosive, destructive spirit
of commerce could be checked and reversed only by drawing on three
resources: deference to the aristocracy and its code; the revival of
genuine religious commitment; and the return of a passionate and
respectful devotion to authentic philosophical and religious learning.
The actual aristocracy, church and centres of learning in the early 19th
century did not, in his view, remotely live up to their calling. There
had to be, so to speak, a cultural revolution within the ruling class for
it to re-establish its leadership or hegemony and re-unite the nation.
This task could not be accomplished through rigid defence of given
institutional divisions and forms but required a dynamic equilibrium
between the forces of change and the forces of permanence. Recourse
to the violence of repression would be largely unnecessary within a
state led by a clerisy actively securing popular consent. At the same
time, the state would have to build within itself potential powers to
enable it to resist disruptive pressures from below. The most important
of these powers were the private wealth of the aristocracy and its power
and authority within the state. Using these resources when necessary,
it could intervene to right the balance.
The leaders of the oligarchic state, especially the Whigs, thrown onto
the defensive during the dangerous 1830s and 1840s of working-class
chartism and middle-class radicalism, had made use of Benthamite
thinkers, programmes and officials in an effort to stem the tide of urban
discontent. But Benthamism was in no sense an adequate justificatory
ideology for the aristocratic state. With the collapse of Chartism and
the arrival of the great mid-Victorian economic boom, the hour of
Coleridgean conservatism had come. No serious study of the influence
73

From Calleo, op. cit.

26

of Coleridge in 19th-century politics has yet been published.74 One

starting point for such research might be to trace those between 1820
and 1840 who were struggling to master their German grammarsthe
sure sign of a true Coleridgean among a classically educated intellectual
class. One such earnest young scholar, finding time for this labour even
at the height of the Reform Act upheavals, noted in his diary: German
grammarif I do not attempt to secure an idea of German now, I
know not when I may have the opportunity. Yet perhaps young
William Gladstone gained inspiration to persevere from the Thomas
Arnold sermon his father had read to him the night before.75
Gladstones Second Strategic Synthesis

Despite the mountain of Gladstone scholarship, it is only now that,

thanks to the work of Matthew, the extent to which Gladstone was a
Coleridgean is being grasped. In his illuminating introduction to the
second volume of the Diaries, Matthew notes that Gladstones major
political book, The State in its Relations with the Church, largely follows
Coleridge and is very much concerned with the ethics of the clerisy.
Gladstone explains that the clerisy is inherent in every well-constituted
body politic and that it is a class . . . sufficiently supported . . . freed
from corroding want and care.76 Gladstone had been on very intimate
terms with Coleridgeans among the Cambridge Apostlesone of them,
Hallam, was his dearest friend at Eton and laterand the Diary shows
him voraciously reading Coleridge and the works of some of his
disciples. But the crucial point which Matthew brings out is that this
set of ideas led naturally to his later enthusiasm for the administrative
grade of the civil service. The standard view of Gladstones evolution
is that in the mid 1840s, after his debacle over the Maynooth grant, or
at least before the Gorham judgement of 1851, he had abandoned the
basic ideas contained in Church and State and drifted for some years of
hiatus until he embraced Liberalism. Yet as Matthew notes, Gladstone
never admitted that his theoretical conception as expressed in The State
in its Relations with the Church was wrong. He didnt admit it because
he didnt believe it.
Yet Matthew himself does not seem to us to have conclusively explained
Gladstones evolution. Indeed, he appears puzzled by Gladstones failure
to repudiate his earlier theoretical-political stance. He implies that the
commitment to individualism in Gladstones early book gave it an
eclectic character and contained the utilitarian seed of Gladstones
evolution to Liberalism. Yet to detect an anti-Coleridgean element in
the stress on individualism is to misinterpret Coleridge as some sort of
organicist political theorist.77 Matthew, like others before him, sees
Gladstones transition after Maynooth in terms of a rejection of political
role for the Church and its replacement as the central pillar of his
74

Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the 19th Century, Cambridge 1978, concentrates on the literary
cultural rather than the political.
75
The Diaries, 5 November 1832.
76
The Diaries, Vol. 2, p. XXVIII.
77
See Calleo, op. cit., on this misunderstanding. The Tractarian Keble, reviewing Gladstones book
when it came out, accused him of being influenced by utilitarianism because of this individualist strain
in his thought.

27

political thought by free trade. From free trade, then, there is a small
step to the later Liberalism. This seems to entail a misunderstanding
both of the nature of Gladstones political ideas on the Church and of
the place of free trade in his thought.
To grasp Gladstones relationship to the Church we must distinguish
his own religious orientation from his stance on Church policy. His own
religious beliefs were, from early on right through his life, extreme, High
Church Anglicanism, very much in tune with the religious orientation
of the Oxford Movement before Newmans adhesion to Rome. But
Gladstones policy orientation does not seem to have been Tractarian
at all: he was a Coleridgean in policy both on internal church matters
and on the social role of the Church, at least from the time when he
published his own book on the subject. To be high church in religious
belief and practice but broad church in policy may seem contradictory
to historians, but no such tension would have been evident to Gladstone
himself when his ideas were forming in the 1830s. For at that time,
when Gladstone became a Coleridgean in policy, Coleridges own most
important statements of his religious views had not been published.78
Newman himself and many of his followers saw a close harmony
between Oxford and Coleridge, despite the objections to such suggestions from Coleridges daughter.
Gladstones very close relationship with both Manning and Hope up
until their conversion to Catholicism is a further cause of confusion:
Gladstones despair over their defection in 1851 is, after all, well known,
and it is often assumed that he shared their views on Church policy
right up to the end. Yet Gladstones despair was purely one of personal
loss: he was not in the slightest attracted by their vision of the place
and role of the church. They had wanted a church in which their High
Church doctrines and rituals were imposed as orthodoxy and from which
the puritans were purged. Gladstone stood for the exact oppositehe
would have welcomed a reconciliation with the dissenting churches.
They wanted an earthly, institutionalized universal church and saw
Rome as its embodiment: he wanted a unified and pluralistic national
church and considered the concept of the universal church to be a
purely spiritual one, embracing all the various national churches and
sects including the Eastern as well as Rome. In short, Gladstone held
to a Coleridgean broad church conception from the 1830s through the
1850s and beyond.
Gladstones extreme Toryism in the period up to Maynooth may have
overlapped with that of the Tractarians but its premisses were in reality
quite different: he interpreted the Coleridgean conception of the clerisy
to imply that the task of the Church hierarchy was to be the clerisy that
would unite the national community. He thus understood his own role
in politics as being to champion the cause and interests of that hierarchy,
and it was this Gladstonian strategy that was collapsing after Maynooth
and received its death-blow in the Gorham judgement in 1851. By then
Gladstone had been forced to accept that the hieratic church could not
78

They were not published until 1840, and we may note from Gladstones diary that he was again
deep into Coleridge in his reading during the year.

28

be expected to act as the clerisy to bind the nation together. As the full
realization of this truth gripped him in 1851, he was plunged into
thoughts of leaving politics altogether.79 But Gladstones rejection of
the Church hierarchy as the national clerisy did not in the least require
him to abandon the idea of the clerisy, which Coleridge had never based
on the priestly element in the Church. Gladstones own identification
of the two had perhaps derived from his extreme High Church commitment, but it would have been strange if his later disillusionment should
have led him to break with his Coleridgean outlook. After all, Coleridge
had been nothing if not scathing about the capacities of the existing
priesthood to play an authentically national spiritual role.
As for the suggestion that free trade could have filled the vacuum left
by the priesthood, such an idea simply fails to come anywhere near
matching Gladstones character and outlook: it places him the way his
enemies placed him, as a straightforward political schemer cunningly
wearing a mask of sanctimonious humbug. Free trade was, of course,
an important policy for Gladstone but it was not the calling for which
he was dedicating his life in the service of the nation. Gladstone found
his new calling in May 1852, when the Report of the Oxford Royal
Commission on Reform of the University, written by A.P. Stanley and
Benjamin Jowett, struck him like a thunderbolt.80 Because of his earlier
stance in defence of the Church hierarchy, Gladstone, one of the two
MPs for Oxford, had been looked upon with some suspicion by the
Broad Church reformers at the University. As recently as April 1850,
Gladstone had voted against a commission being set up on the reform
of Oxford. Yet now, on reading this report, he became an ardent
reformer. Its impact on him can be judged from his own comment
upon it: one of the ablest productions submitted in his recollection to
Parliament. Here, we suggest, was the seed of Gladstones new strategic
purpose: the clerisy could be constructed through the reformed universities, a new breed of civil servants and figures like himself in public life.
Here were the elements of the force that could restore the authority of
the aristocraticoligarchic state and reunify the national community
under its leadership. Commerce would be encouraged through free
trade and sound finance, there would be a new balance between the
classes and a new harmony that would stem the threatening democratic
tide.
Jowett, who had been sceptical, at first, about gaining any support from
Gladstone for university reform, was astonishedin fact irritatedby
the way Gladstone threw himself into the campaign, wrenching the

79

The best account of the events involving Gladstone and the Church is Perry Butler, Gladstone:
Church, State and Tractarianism, Oxford 1982. But Butler almost totally misses Gladstones Coleridgean
derivation of his ideas on the role of the Church and Church policy and shows no awareness of the
fact that Gladstones arguments against Manning and Hope were straight out of Coleridge.
80 Formally Jowett was not the author: Stanley was. But they had just written most of a book together
when interrupted by the establishment of a Royal Commission on their topic. Jowetts handling of
the Commissions work was another tour de force of infiltration and manipulation. Faber, op. cit., is
especially good on the whole story.

29

entire project out of Jowetts own hands.81 But it was in this context
that Gladstone gained the idea of a project for sweeping reform of the
civil service, persuading a reluctant Northcote (who considered the
Aberdeen government, with people like Lord John Russell and schemes
for franchise reform, as too radical for his high Tory tastes) to come
and work for him on administrative reform. Gladstone then commissioned the report from Trevelyan and made sure that its contents
were in harmony with his fundamental strategic ideas. Gladstone was
quite explicit in linking together the issues of Oxford Reform, the
abolition of Haileybury and the NorthcoteTrevelyan report. The strategic nature of his thinking also explains why, although he was well
aware that the inclusion of the principle that Parliamentary patronage
must be abolished might very likely mean the defeat of the Report in
the Commons, he nevertheless decided to press ahead. The Report for
him was no small package of administrative proposals but a manifesto
for a long compaign. Once out of office, Gladstone set to work on the
second book of his career: his work on Homer, which was in fact a
manifesto for classics, for a Liberal Education. Political historians may
treat Gladstones books lightly, but the author did not: this was a
manifesto for the kind of education he believed his new embodiment
of the Idea of the clerisy required.
The Coleridgean structure of Gladstones political thought and his
commitment to the idea of a clerisy bring into sharp focus the elements
of continuity between his earlier adherence to the Tory camp and his
later liberalism. Economic liberalism and laissez-faire could readily
coexist with a profoundly conservative hostility to democracy and a
commitment to the aristocractic principle that did not at all exclude
the striving for government by consent. The Coleridgean conception
of the clerisy was not simply one of a religiousmoral leadership of the
nation. It was anti-democratic in principle in that it considered the
clerisy elite to be the bearer of a superior political wisdom overriding
any mere popular majority. At the same time, this wisdom was not the
cleverness of rootless intellectuals good at passing exams: it was the
attribute of highly cultured and devout intellectuals rooted in the landed
interest, the aristocracy, and its ancient institutions. With this ideological
background, Gladstone was the Victorian political leader who was able
to negotiate the perilous transition to the twentieth-century British
state.
A Safety-Net for the Leap in the Dark

In failing adequately to explain the origins of the NorthcoteTrevelyan

report, the ToryFabian consensus has also tended to obscure and
fragment the central, practical aim of the report. It has split these aims
into particular partial proposals, such as the open, competitive exam
81

Gladstone was a close friend of the High Church Bishop of Oxford, Wilberforce, who in turn was
amongst the reactionary clerics with their grip on the University and fiercely reactionary against
reform. By 1854 Gladstone was sweeping aside Jowetts own delicate manoeuvres of reform, circulating
his own plan to the Cabinet. He graciously made Jowetts available as well, but his more confrontational
approach won and Jowett was furious, concluding that there was a dangerously wild streak in
Gladstone that boded ill for the future!

30

procedure for recruitment, the abolition of parliamentary patronage, or

the application of the merit-promotion principle within (though not
across) grades. But it has largely ignored the fact that these served a
unified, double objective that was obvious to informed contemporaries:
namely, the creation of a new, unified elite of Oxbridge-trained, upperclass men devoted to matters of policy and political management, and
a simultaneous shift in the structure of political power within the state.
There was nothing natural or necessarily modern about the creation
of such a policy-making mandarinate, and when the report appeared it
was widely greeted with a great deal of surprise, even shock and
amazement. In the House of Lords it was denounced as a Chinese
import and subjected to humiliation by laughter.82 The great majority
of senior civil servants were extremely hostileand furious with Trevelyans attempt at demagogic news management and populist mobilization
through portraying many civil servants as the offspring of Old Corruption. Sir James Stephens summed up the Report in the famous phrase
that it was seeking to establish a group of statesmen in disguise.83 For
his part, Chadwick made a judgement whose truth it took seventy years
of experience for his Fabian spiritual progeny to catch up with. The
plan, he said, would recruit the gentleman who . . . wrote articles in
the Reviews to show the impracticability of steam navigation across the
Atlantic, and . . . (would exclude) those who accomplished the feat
. . .84 The Report failed to gain the crucial political support in Parliament because the leaders of the Parliamentary oligarchy could find no
cogent reason why they should surrender their near-untrammelled
power or share it with such an administrative elite.
A cogent reason did, however, arrive when it became clear to party
leaders in the mid 1860s that the doors of the Parliamentary oligarchy
would have to be opened and a larger portion of the multitude would
have to be given a vote. They thus finally faced the appalling prospect
that had haunted the propertied classes throughout the century: that
the formidable powers which had been concentrated in Parliament
would be within the reach of other social classes, even the propertyless.
By passing the Second Reform Act of 1867 they were, in Lord Derbys
phrase, taking a leap in the dark. Here at last was justification for
shifting power from the Parliamentary to the executive branch of the
state.
Two key changes were accomplished at this time, both under Gladstones inspiration. The first was an historic amendment to the Standing
Orders of the House of Commons, banning Parliament from approving
any motion for increased public spending unless the motion came from
the Crown.85 (This rule is still in force today.) The second was, of
82

The Economist said of the Reports proposals that they have all the air of having been borrowed
out and dried from Berlin and Pekin. See the quotation in Morstein Marx, The Administrative State,
Chicago 1957, p. 55.
83 Sir James Stephenss full remark was: You stand in need, not of statesmen in disguise, but of
intelligent, steady, methodical men of business. Why invite an athlete into a theatre where no combat
and no applause and no reward awaits him? Chapman and Greenaway, op. cit.
84 Quoted in Mueller, op. cit., Chapter 5.
85 See Gordon Reid, The Politics of Financial Control, London 1966, pp. 4041 for a detailed account
of this.

31

course, the 1870 Order in Council. In explaining his thinking in securing

the Order, Lowe, ever indiscreet, openly recommended the kind of
freemasonry that developed between old boys of the great public
schools and Oxbridge.
The next great leap in the dark was to occur after the First World War
with the further enlargement of the franchise, and more importantly
with the rise of a mass, organized labour movement. This time, the
machinery of Treasury Control was firmly in place and Milners changes,
as carried out by Warren Fisher, ensured a fully integrated administrative
elite with a centralized directorate in the Treasury. It was this essentially
political structure of power within the core executive of the British
state which allowed the leaders of the British ruling class to look upon
the rise of the Labour Party as a Parliamentary force with relative
equanimity.
To appreciate the scale of the outlet that NorthcoteTrevelyan provided
for public-school and Oxbridge-educated sons of the gentry, we can
note the fact that the Colonial administration alone was recruiting on
average 411 administrative personnel per annum between 1919 and 1925
and that the overwhelming majority of these were from Oxbridge
normally well over eighty per cent. But problems arose in the inter-war
years. A memorandum by Furze, the head of recruitment in the Colonial
Office, spelt them out for an internal conference on the Colonial service.
Increasing tax burdens and the flow of wealth away from the land in
the 1920s had hit the gentry hard. Many could no longer afford to send
their sons to Oxbridge and thus gain eligibility to enter the Civil Service.
Worst of all, he complained, business firms are far more alive than they
used to be to the value of the type of man we seek to attract. If the
younger son of a county family could be drawn into trade a mighty
blow would have been struck at the very roots of the upper-class ethic.
Furzes 1929 memorandum was warmly approved by Warren Fisher,
and in the Colonial service recuitment proceeded without the encumbrance of written examinations.86 The American scholar Moses had
predicated with a chuckle before the First World War that if the right
class was not being recruited through the system of written exams then
the exam system would be dropped. And this is indeed what happened,
on Treasury initiative, during the Second World War. The ingenious
argument was that the exam system favoured lower-class boys who
worked so hard that they were exhausted by the time they had gained
entry to the service!87

86

This material on the Colonial Office can be found in Robert Henssler, Yesterdays Rulers. The Making
of the British Colonial Service, Syracuse 1963, pp. 346, 50, 5866.
87 The actual decision on this was proposed by the report on The Home Civil Service After the War
by the Crookshank Committee (PRO/CSC5/386). After noting that between 1925 and 1939, 87 per
cent of successful candidates for the administrative grade came from Oxbridge, it said that with the
increasing democratization of Universities the exam tended to attract the wrong sort of candidate:
In the interests of a brilliant academic career, much else had been sacrificed . . . success in the
examination was all too often the peak of an effort which had tried and even exhausted the candidate.
The full story is told, in rather coy fashion, in R.A. Chapman, Leadership in the British Civil Service,
London 1984.

32

Conclusion

Among historians of 19th-century politics it is now widely accepted

that there was an aristocratic recuperation after the turmoil of chartism
and the anti-Corn Law agitation of the 1840s. The central thesis of this
article is that one of the most important fruits of that recuperation was
the NorthcoteTrevelyan programme: it, rather than the preceding
Benthamite era, was the decisive moulding influence on the central
institutions of the state right through into the twentieth century.
The indispensable category for analysing the NorthcoteTrevelyan
programme is Coleridgean conservatism, understood as a dynamic,
reforming current for shoring up the aristocraticoligarchic state and
social order against the threat from democracy and the working class.
Attempts to analyse changes in the state purely in terms of its socioeconomic rolelaissez-faire versus collectivismobscure the issue that
obsessed the Victorian ruling class, and structured the evolution of the
Victorian and post-Victorian state.
Coleridgean conservatism was spread widely if diffusely within the
intelligentsia and ruling class, expressed in such disparate influences as
the Arnolds (father and son), Oxbridge elites, the Broad Church movement, and even to a degree the thought of John Stuart Mill (as well as
Christian socialists like Maurice). But it was by no means the only
current in such circles: strong repressive and counter-revolutionary
impulses were also present, not least in the Church itself; and there
remained the potential for a rupturing confrontation between landed
interests and the urban middle classes. Gladstones great achievement,
at a time when the aristocracygentry and their educational institutions
feared their demise within the parliamentary apparatus, was to find a
way of consolidating the landed interest within the state while presenting
this political reorganization in the colours of the urban middle classes,
as a purely administrative-efficiency reform based on objective tests and
meritocratic criteria. This was a formidable solution which managed to
bemuse a couple of generations of Fabian writers and historians.
A narrow political historiography of parliamentarism and parties, and
a parallel administrative approach to the evolution of the state bureaucracy, have combined in a reductionist exclusion of the central historical
issues of class power and state power. The debate around the Northcote
Trevelyan project was above all concerned with the problem of remoulding state institutions as effective deliberative and protective instruments
of class dominance in state and society. The Report gave a concrete
answer to the haunting issue of how to defend the propertied classes
in the face of ever-growing pressure for democracy. At a wider level,
the NorthcoteTrevelyan programme provided a new and powerful
instrumental rationale for the dominance of liberal education and
therefore of Oxbridge and the top public schools. These now had the
role of supplying a suitably educated elite not only in the social realm
but in the state itself. As the construction of an institution like the BBC
shows, this method would retain its vigour into the twentieth century.
So successful was the NorthcoteTrevelyan formula for legitimating as
technocracy a closed zone of political deliberation and will formation
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within the core executive that it risked being hoist with its own petard
in the 1960s when the external technocrats of the Wilson era, represented
by the Fulton enquiry, denounced the mandarinate for failing to be
what it was never intended to bea technocratic elite. But the real
Waterloo of the NorthcoteTrevelyan system arrived in the debacle of
the Heath administration. Here it was put to the test in its own
privileged field of political management of the state and it failed
miserably: no more damning indictment of a century-long culture of
cool ascendancy could be found than the nervous breakdown of the
head of the Civil Service, Lord Armstrong, in the winter crisis of 1973
74. From that moment a current within the Conservative Party has been
working to make NorthcoteTrevelyan redundant by removing Labour
as a major force on the politcal scene, Americanizing the party system
and state bureaucracy and breaking up the mandarinate. The unprecedented sacking of the head of the Civil Service, the shifting of power
from the Treasury to the Cabinet Secretariat, the use of Sir Robert
Armstrong to destroy the inner coherence of the Whitehall elite so that
its prerogatives can be used for Thatcherite purposesall these are
symptoms of profound crisis. Perhaps only a strong showing for Labour
and the Alliance parties in the next election will, ironically, rescue the
greatest political invention of the Victorian era from collapse.

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