Despite limited knowledge of foreign languages, MacColl corresponded with continental Roman Catholic dissidents after the
First Vatican Council:
Josip Juraj Strossmayer of Diakova, and
Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich. He acted as a discreet intermediary between them and Gladstone. Both Strossmayer and Döllinger were interested in the "Eastern Question" and the ending of Turkish rule in the Balkans. This, as well as similar currents of opinion in the Liberal Party, may have been responsible for MacColl's own interest in combatting Turkish political power during the last three decades of his life. From 1876 onwards, MacColl was an active defender of the Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, writing a series of vitriolic attacks on the
Ottoman Empire and its friends in Britain in letters to newspapers, articles in reviews, and publishing several books. In August 1876, soon after the exposure of the killings of up to 15,000 Bulgarians the previous spring by Circassian irregulars in the Ottoman army, MacColl and
Henry Liddon of
St Paul's Cathedral travelled to
Vienna and
Serbia on a fact-finding tour. During a boat ride on the River Sava, then the frontier between
Serbia and the
Ottoman Empire, the two clergymen claimed to have seen an impaled human corpse. Though their testimony could not be independently confirmed, and was challenged by the local British Consul who suggested that the object in question might have been only a bag of beans, MacColl and Liddon used this sighting as proof of the iniquity of Turkish rule in the Balkans. This fitted in with a theme in their sermons that those in Britain (such as Gladstone's arch-opponent
Benjamin Disraeli) who did not actively oppose Turkish rule were themselves guilty of its sins. In his private correspondent with Gladstone after the Bulgarian atrocities, MacColl urged the Liberal leader to denounce the Ottomans and is perhaps partly responsible for the campaigning speeches Gladstone made on the issue in the last months of 1876 and early 1877. After returning to power Gladstone rewarded MacColl with the London living of
St George Botolph Lane, in 1871, and with a canonry of Ripon in 1884. The latter posting aroused the active opposition of
Queen Victoria who had not forgotten or forgiven MacColl's virulent campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1876–78 after the 'Bulgarian Agitation'. The living at Ripon was practically a sinecure. MacColl maintained a large house at Kirby Overblow, south of Harrogate, and continued to devote himself to political pamphleteering and newspaper correspondence, the result of extensive European travel, a wide acquaintance with the leading personages of the day, strong views on ecclesiastical subjects from a high-church standpoint, and particularly on the politics of the
Eastern Question, the uprising in
Crete, then still an Ottoman province, the cause of the
Armenians and
Islam. ==Later life and death==