[Illustration: SERIOUS FLUNKEY: "I should require, Madam, forty pounds a year, two suits of clothes, two 'ats, meat and hale three times a day, and piety hindispensable."]
The wealth, the obscurantism, and the Olympian detachment of the great prince bishops were a constant source of exasperation and comment. _Punch_ was a supporter of cheap divorce. He preferred this reform to the Bill for flogging wife-beaters, and securing the right of the wife to keep part of her earnings when separated from a bad husband. The Parliamentary records of the middle 'fifties are full of debates on the subject, but one extract from _Punch's_ "Essence of Parliament" may suffice to illustrate his _nolo episcopari_ attitude:--
_Thursday_, June 26th. The Divorce Bill came to the Lords from their Select Committee, and Lord Lyndhurst most ably explained its present character. What is proposed is this. A new Tribunal for deciding upon matrimonial causes. That a divorced woman who acquires property shall have it for herself. That she may sue, in actions, as a single woman. That a wife shall be placed somewhat more upon a footing with a husband as regards the obtaining divorce. That in all cases of a husband's infidelity (accompanied with cruelty), in certain still worse cases, and in those of bigamy, a woman shall be entitled to ask divorce. Lord Lansdowne gave eloquent support to the Bill. The Bishop of Oxford (_Mr. Punch_ does not misrepresent him, for the Church's stalwart friend, the _Standard_, manifests indignant surprise at his Lordship's speech) objected to the proposed increased facility of divorce. "The lower classes did not demand the _privilegia_ afforded to the higher and wealthier classes." The Bishop of St. David's thought with Dr. Wilberforce. Lord Campbell, in reply, cited Mr. Justice Maule's scorching irony, when a poor man, whose wife had robbed him and absconded, had sought to provide his children with a mother, and had committed bigamy. The Bishop of Oxford contrived to carry a postponement of the next stage of the Bill, which he means to "amend." Let the Lords protect the Women of England against the Priests.
It may be added that _Punch_ was also a supporter of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and that here again he found considerable scope for the display of his anti-episcopal animus. When Lord St. Germans' Bill was defeated in the Lords on April 25, 1856, _Punch_ notes that the result was chiefly due to "four priests"--the Bishops of Oxford, Cashel, St. David's and Exeter--and applauds Lord Albemarle, one of the heroes of Waterloo, for his "courageous condemnation of clerical intolerance." Lord Albemarle, in the course of his speech, made bold to say that "the opinions generally expressed by ladies on this subject were attributable to the ignorance of their spiritual advisers, and to the undue reverence for the Common Prayer-book." _Punch's_ own reasons for supporting the change included the ironical argument that a widower debarred from relief, when he remarries takes on a _second_ mother-in-law.