THE Northcote–Trevelyan Report created and the Order in Council of 1870 confirmed a secular clerisy. Those “fit and proper persons” were the Victorian mandarins, some of whom settled into a re-formed Civil Service. They were a different kind of gentleman, quite unlike Lord Chesterfield and other landed and titled aristocrats of the eighteenth century. They differed also from the foppish dandies of the Regency period with their mannered and refined politeness. The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury warned against those from the unreformed Eton and other unreformed schools who merely prepared young men for the dining room and sophisticated salons. What Shaftesbury wished for was “nobler, deeper, and sterner stuff; less of refinement and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward, gentleman.” The Northcote–Trevelyan Report gave them to him. These “fit and proper persons,” this different kind of gentleman, this secular clerisy, were serious, earnest, and manly.

With their university educations certified by competitive examinations, the authority of the secular clerisy was indirect rather than political or partisan. Since, as Gladstone, Jowett, and Macaulay had prescribed, they held their positions as a result of success in competitive literary examinations, their authority was a cultural authority which depended on persuasion rather than coercion.