On becoming Master he increased the salaries of the steward and chaplain; he saw to it that the old men were well fed and housed, paid their doctor’s bills, and like Mr Harding added to their allowance. All this cost him about £1,000 a year. What made St Cross a scandal in the 1840s was not so much the Master’s conduct of the Hospital, which by the standards of the day was hardly outrageous, as his conduct of the properties belonging to the Hospital, which he was leasing on fines (i.e. granting long leases at low rents in exchange for a capital sum, or fine) and pocketing the proceeds. Thousands of pounds which should have gone to expand the charitable work of the Hospital were being misappropriated by its clerical Master. The abuse was taken up by the newspapers, a resolution was passed in Parliament, and the St Cross case was referred to the Court of Chancery in 1849. Nearly four years later the Master of the Rolls found against the Earl of Guilford. He was prevented from taking future fines and made to repay those taken since 1849, the Master’s salary was reduced to £250 and his clerical duties re-established, and the mangement of the Hospital was transferred to a board of trustees.6

There are several features of the St Cross case which may have struck Trollope and influenced the conception of The Warden: the Winchester setting with its reminder that he, like Lord Guilford, had suffered humiliation there; the advanced age of the Master and the relative conscientiousness with which he had looked after the old men in his charge; the activities of a reformer (in this case a retired clergyman) and the newspapers in bringing the abuse to light; and most suggestive of all perhaps, the dramatic potential in the figure of a clergyman grown old in the comfortable and corrupt ways of the eighteenth-century Church, blinking in the sudden light of reform and publicity. The case of the Rev. Robert Whiston at Rochester is less immediately relevant to the action of The Warden. Whiston was the energetic and successful Headmaster of the Cathedral Grammar School, who had fallen foul of the dean and chapter by his efforts to persuade them to increase the value of the allowances which, by cathedral statute, they were required to pay for the maintenance of four Exhibitioners at university and twenty cathedral scholars, and which had been little changed for centuries. In 1849 he published a pamphlet on Cathedral Trusts and Their Fulfilment, which not only set out his complaint against the Rochester Chapter but pointed the finger at other cathedrals where the clergy had enriched themselves at the expense of the charities they were bound by statute to maintain. The Chapter promptly dismissed him, but Whiston bravely took his case to law, where after the usual slow progress through the courts he won a rather grudging verdict in his favour and was reinstated.

It has been suggested that Whiston was a John Bold, but this can only be true in so far as he brought into the open the mismanagement of cathedral revenues. Trollope’s point about Bold is that he sets out to reform an institution in which he has no personal stake, and of whose true workings he is largely ignorant. The same cannot be said of Whiston: he had a direct, professional interest in improving the maintenance provided for his pupils, and his campaign on their behalf was entirely honourable, albeit intemperately conducted at times. There is, however, one aspect of his case that may have struck Trollope: Whiston’s faith in, and resort to, public opinion and the power of the press. After winning his case in 1852 he sent a letter of thanks to the various newspapers that had supported him, including The Times, in which he wrote: ‘Without the support of the Press, in forming, guiding and reflecting the irresistible supremacy of public opinion, I might have indeed appealed in vain for even that measure of justice which I have at last obtained.’7 It is just such a faith in ‘the irresistible supremacy of public opinion’, when applied to an ancient institution like the Church, that The Warden sets out to question.

If only because they were widely discussed in the newspapers and are mentioned several times in the text, the St Cross and Whiston scandals must be considered the chief topicalities in the background of this highly topical novel. But there is another less well-known issue that may have counted for just as much in the genesis of The Warden, because it offers a particularly clear link between a scandal involving an elderly clergyman, an impetuous reformer, and The Times newspaper. According to T. H. S. Escott, Trollope’s friend and first biographer, the novelist told him that the first two Barsetshire novels ‘grew out of The Times correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare he was responsible.’8 This correspondence has been tracked down by Carol H. Ganzel,9 and the issue at stake turns out to be not absenteeism but simony, the buying and selling of Church livings (although, as we shall see, there are reasons why Trollope should have recalled it as a dispute about absenteeism). The reformer was a Dorset clergyman, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who like the fictional Bold was something of a busybody, taking up one ‘abuse’ after another, and a favoured correspondent with the editor of The Times, who published his letters and sometimes took up the issues they raised in leading articles. Moreover, he was known to Trollope, who had earlier written an article for the Examiner criticizing the views on Ireland which Osborne had expressed in a previous series of letters to The Times. In 1853 Osborne was concerned with a loophole in the Simony Law. At that time it was legal for the patron, or owner, of a clerical living to sell it to a clergyman only in prospect: he could sell the next presentation to the living, but not a vacant living. If the incumbent died before the living had been sold, another clergyman had to be instituted. There was therefore a temptation for a greedy patron to institute an old or dying man, on the likelihood of whose early death the next presentation could be sold profitably.