In The Times of 28 July 1853 Osborne cited the case of a very ill man who had recently been presented to the living of St Ervan’s in Cornwall; he was said to be paralytic, and at his induction had to be helped down the aisle and fortified with wine, yet even so was unable to read through the Thirty-nine Articles. He never resided and shortly thereafter died. In a further letter published on 20 August, Osborne accused this clergyman of selling his infirmity for the brief enjoyment of an increased stipend.

Then in The Times of 1 September appeared a letter from one Alfred Cox, naming the clergyman in question as his relative, the Rev. John Pope Cox, and describing him as ‘so peculiarly mild, benevolent and amiable a person, that it seems impossible to conceive that through the whole of his life he could have ever found… anyone who could harbour an unkind thought about him’ (p. 10). Cox claimed that his relative had been neither ‘paralytic’ nor avaricious, that he had accepted the living in good faith, expecting to regain his health and reside at St Ervan’s; and he accused Osborne of using the columns of The Times ‘to harrow the feelings of the widow and relatives of his brother clergyman, by dragging his name before the public, and holding up his memory to public reprobation’ (p. 10). After two more letters from Osborne of a somewhat self-congratulatory kind, and another in support of him signed ‘Pro Bono Publico’, the correspondence closed.

There are several features of this case which make it a likely source for The Warden: the testimony of Escott, the fact that Osborne was known to, and possibly disliked by, Trollope, and the very striking contrast between the reformer’s public view of the abuse, and the private character and feelings of the clergyman and his family. That likelihood becomes a probability when we consider a fact which has never been pointed out before. The Times, Trollope’s Jupiter, took up the St Ervan’s case in a leading article. On 10 September 1853, the second leader magisterially endorsed Osborne’s view of the Rev. Cox (‘a paralytic, or as good as one’) and then turned the accusation against the Church, first mocking the bishops for their powerlessness to prevent the institution of a ‘paralytic’ –

The Bishop is only performing a scene in the splendid melodrama of the Church of England, and has no more to do with the personal qualifications of the man before him than if he and the man were a couple of scene-shifters elevated for five minutes into mitred abbots on the floor of Drury Lane. (p. 6)

– then questioning their utility (‘What need of such great men, such learned men, such well-paid men… Why twenty-six to do a purely mechanical act?’), and ending by pointing soberly to what The Times obviously saw as the real abuse, absenteeism:

The greatest scandals in the Church are those which are not only undeniable, but even confessed, not to say boasted. A man obtaining a living is instituted and inducted, read in, and then informs the Bishop that the house is too damp for him, or the church too spacious, or the parish too extensive; and he takes leave of his parish for ever; only drawing £500 a-year from it, and paying £100 to his curate… There is not an office under Government in which such conduct would be tolerated… (p. 6)

Here, clearly, is the link between the reformer, the accused clergyman and the pronouncements of the Jupiter which figures so largely in The Warden. And although the Rev. Cox is unlike Mr Harding in that he did not live to read the accusation against him, here is a similar contrast between the harsh and mocking publicity of the leading article and the private world of the individual (‘so peculiarly mild, benevolent and amiable a person’) to which Alfred Cox’s letter tried to draw attention. Furthermore, the leader in The Times makes it clear why Trollope, when he mentioned the correspondence to Escott, remembered it as a case of absenteeism.

If the long-running scandals of St Cross and Rochester provided the initial idea, then, and the visit to Salisbury (and the awakened recollection of Winchester) the setting, the trigger for the writing of the novel may well have been the St Ervan’s case and the leading article on it. Certainly this would account for the particular intensity of Trollope’s attack on the Jupiter. The Times had pronounced on clerical scandals before, of course, but in 1853 – the year Trollope was writing The Warden – it was more than usually wide-ranging and scathing in its criticism of the abuse of privilege in the Church: the reference in the St Ervan’s leader to ‘the spendid melodrama of the Church of England’ and the mockery of the bishops are fairly typical. On 21 and 27 June, and again on 10 August 1853, Times leaders mounted an attack on the Bishop of Salisbury, accusing him of misappropriating the revenues of his see by consistently taking an annual salary some £1,700 higher than that allowed by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and computing the excess payment over a fourteen-year period as £24,318. The paper was wholeheartedly in favour of the Charitable Trusts Act of 1853, which at long last gave the Charity Commissioners power to adapt old charities to modern uses (and which, incidentally, became law the day after judgement was given in the St Cross case), and was equally enthusiastic about the Marquis of Blandford’s proposal in June of that year to introduce an Episcopal and Capitular Property Bill, to ensure a more equitable distribution of the Church’s income. In a penetrating editorial, The Times described the Church of England as ‘the most paradoxical body in the world. It is, at the same time, the richest and the poorest; the most popular and the most exclusive’, and to illustrate the point contrasted its appearance in a cathedral town with its virtual absence in the new manufacturing cities. The former is summoned up in words that could describe Mr Harding’s situation at the start of The Warden:

The man whose lot is cast in some one of its pleasant places, and whose curiosity does not betray him beyond the walls of his paradise, may go through life with a very delightful and dreamy idea of the Establishment. Its princely bishops, its magnificent cathedrals, its hospitable canons and zealous archdeacons, its comfortable incumbents, its parochial system, its village churches and devout congregations, all make up a whole which it wants but little poetry to convert into a very respectable anticipation of the heavenly Jerusalem. (22 June 1853, p. 4)

But the situation in a swollen manufacturing town was very different, where the population had grown out of all proportion to the religious provision: ‘What avails it to the myriads that spring up, self-sown, as it were, over these spiritual wastes, that there are cathedrals, bishops, prebendaries, and some thousands of learned, otiose, and well-beneficed clergy?’

This is the most perceptive of all The Times’s comments on the Church in 1853, and whether Trollope read it or not he can hardly have been unaware of the problem to which it drew attention. The real and inescapable challenge which the Established Church faced in the middle of the nineteenth century was the need to adapt to the new social conditions of an industrialized society.