The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Thomas Hughes and Dean Stanley, no Ritualists they, had intervened to persuade the bishop of London, however ‘illegal’ the rituals might seem to him, not to side with the mob, but to support his clergy. (In any case, many of those who rioted in London Docks were not motivated by Protestant frenzy: some were Irish Roman Catholics angered at what they took to be the aping of true Catholic ways; others were pimps, publicans and prostitutes who feared that Christianity, if authentic, would have a disastrous effect on trade.)

  You would have thought that an attempt by Anglican clergy to engage with the lives of the poor in an imaginative and unselfish way might have received support, even from those who found the ‘smells and bells’ bizarre. Archibald Campbell Tait (1811–82), a Rugbeian Liberal, was certainly inclined to reach accommodation with the Ritualists when he was bishop of London. He yearned to bring Christianity to the poor – he it was who insisted on services at Westminster Abbey being free and open to the public. He built churches. He preached in omnibus yards, in Covent Garden Market and in ragged schools. Had the Ritualists been prepared to tone down some of their departures from the liturgical norm, Tait’s inclination was to sympathize with their pastoral devotion.8 Nine hundred people came to hear Tait preach when he and his wife visited the survivors of the cholera epidemic of 1866 and to speak at the newly consecrated St Peter’s, London Docks.9 But during Disraeli’s brief tenure of the prime ministership (1868) Tait had succeeded Longley as archbishop of Canterbury, and on Disraeli’s return in 1874 Tait found himself as primate while a Parliament now composed of a handful of Jews and atheists as well as many Nonconformists brought on to the statute-book the Public Worship Regulation Act, forbidding certain ritual acts – the mixing of wine and water in the chalice, the wearing of Eucharistic vestments – which emphasized the Catholic nature of the Church of England and seemed to some Protestants to be letting in Popery by the back door.

  Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli was not an ecclesiastical obsessive: indeed he felt somewhat out of his depth when Church was being discussed. ‘Ecclesiastical affairs rage here. Send me Crockford’s Directory. I must be armed,’ he had written in some panic to his private secretary from Balmoral.10 Quite why Disraeli should have chosen to spend much of his first session introducing this Bill remains something of a mystery, but perhaps he saw it as a comparatively easy way of bringing cheer to his monarch. Queen Victoria was obsessed by the Ritualists. When staying at Balmoral she made her Communion with the Presbyterians at Crathie parish church, a fact which scandalized loyal Anglicans. Ten days after doing so, she wrote to Dean Stanley, ‘She thinks a complete Reformation is what we want. But if that is impossible, the archbishop should have the power given him, by Parliament, to stop all these ritualistic practices, dressings, bowings, etc. and everything of that kind, and above all, all attempts at confession.’11

  Needless to say it was Church ritual to which she objected. She still expected ‘bowings etc.’ to herself by her subjects, and on her rare appearances in Parliament would have been shocked had the Lord Chancellor not walked backwards down the steps of the throne. She had an instinctual fear that the Church of England was becoming too high for her – ‘I am very nearly a Dissenter – or rather more a Presbyterian – in my feelings, so very Catholic do I feel we are.’12 And though she believed Bismarck had gone too far in his persecution of the Catholics, ‘they are dreadfully aggressive people who must be put down – just as our Ritualists’.13

  The sovereign was not alone in her detestation of the Ritualists. Pamphlets and sermons by the score rolled from the presses denouncing them for their crypto-Romanism, their ‘mass in masquerade’, their advocacy of auricular confession (‘the enemy of domestic peace’), their links with ‘the bondage of Judaism’ (this from the dean of Carlisle, who believed their sacerdotalism to derive from the Jews); there were even those who saw Father Lowder and Father Wainwright and their friends as ‘the enemy of national independence’. The Rev. W.F. Taylor Lt.D. of Liverpool, lecturing to the Church Association in St James’s Hall, London, could say, ‘I am old-fashioned enough to agree with old Bishop Hall, who said, “No peace with Rome till Rome makes peace with God” … The object of the Church of Rome is the subjugation of this land … If we go back to Rome we go back to our national slavery, and national subjugation to Rome …’ And so on.14

  Some Ritualists, a minority, were aspirant Roman Catholics or in two minds about the question. For most of them, it was not an issue. For such as Mackonochie or Lowder, the point was, first, to bring Christ to the poor, next – in reaction to the intrusive parliamentary interference – to preserve the ‘doctrines, rights, and liberties of the Church’.15 The 1874 Act provided the Ritualist movement with its ‘martyrs’. Five clergymen were imprisoned for refusing to comply with the requirements of the Act, Arthur Tooth of Hatcham (22 January 1877 to 17 February 1877), Thomas Pelham Dale of St Vedast’s, Foster Lane, in the city of London, 30 October 1880 to 24 December 1880; R.W. Enraght of Bordesley, Birmingham, 27 November 1880 to 17 January 1881; S.F. Green of St John’s, Miles Platting, Manchester, who had much the longest imprisonment – 19 March 1881 to 4 November 1882; and Bell Cox of St Margaret’s, Liverpool, 5 to 21 May 1887. The Gladstone scholar Dr Matthew says, rightly, that ‘no industrial economy can have existed in which the State played a smaller role than that of the United Kingdom in the 1860s’, but the British, in their persecution of Ritualists, had found their own version of the Prussian Kulturkampf. Nor can one forget that these laws were brought into effect when the Contagious Diseases Act defined any woman detained by the police in garrison towns as a common prostitute; when many forms of sexual ‘deviancy’ were outlawed; when the ‘rights’ of married women were on a par with those of children and horses; when most adults still had no vote.

  For those, perhaps, who actually knew the Ritualist heroes, these political points counted for less than the witness of their lives and deaths. Charles Lowder was the first secular priest known by his people as ‘Father’ – a custom subsequently imitated by Roman Catholics. The people of Docklands called him ‘the Father’, ‘Father’ or just ‘Dad’: he had quite simply made the island parish feel like a family. The funerals of these priests tell us so much. When Lowder died, exhausted, in September 1880, Wainwright preached at his Requiem from the text ‘Weep not!’ No one, the preacher included, could keep the injunction.

  The wonderful stillness as the procession left the densely packed church for the bridge in Old Gravel Lane was one that could be felt. There were hundreds of people lining the lane. Round the bier were grouped priests representing all shades of opinion, but all at one in their respect and veneration for him who never spoke unkindly of others or showed want of respect for those whose religious convictions kept them apart from us. And when one remembers that twenty-four years before the crowd had tried to throw him over that bridge, one sees that it was the ultimate triumph of the right.16

  The Ritualist movement was, as Canon Scott Holland was later to remark, ‘the recovery in the slums by the Oxford movement of what it had lost in the university … It wore poverty as a cloak, and lived the life of the suffering and the destitute. It was irresistible in its élan, in its pluck, in its thoroughness, in its buoyancy, in its self-abandonment, in its laughter, in its devotion. Nothing could hold it. It won, in spite of all that could be done by authorities in high places, or by rabid Protestant mobs to drive it under.’17

  A pleasing evidence of human counter-suggestibility is revealed by the statistics. In 1874, the year of the Public Worship Regulation Act, 14 Anglican churches in England used incense, and 30 Eucharistic vestments. In 74 the clergyman stood to the east, rather than at the north end of the Holy Table when celebrating Holy Communion. By 1879 one had dropped the use of incense, but 33 were using vestments, and the number of priests using the eastward position had risen to 214.

  Taking the country at large, in 1882, outside London, 9 churches used incense, and 336 vestments; 1,662 used the eastward position. By 1901,
2,158 churches used vestments – about a quarter of all the parish churches in England; 393 used incense; 7,397 used the eastward position. Customs which before the 1874 Act had been the esoteric preserve of a handful of exotic slum-shrines had become, within a generation, the normal practice of Anglicans.18

  Of course, if this had simply been a matter of the aesthetic and liturgical preferences of a few churchgoers a century ago, it would not have been worth the space we have devoted to it. But it was more than that. Disraeli’s government introduced these anti-Ritualistic measures in part, surely, as a consequence of something which had nothing to do with a few High Churchmen in the slums. It was a self-defining gesture, in response to what had been happening in Europe over the previous five years. No one was more conscious of this than Gladstone himself.

  As a High Churchman who went to church every day of his life, Gladstone was dismayed by the Public Worship Regulation Act, partly because he sympathized with the religion of the Ritualists – though it was not quite his type of Anglicanism – chiefly because he distrusted the Erastian thinking behind the legislation. All his adult life he had been considering the relationship between Church and state. His change of heart over Ireland, his wish to liberate the Irish Catholics from the implication that they ought to be Anglicans, had lost him many friends among the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, but he had done what he deemed to be right. There were those Anglicans (whatever they thought about the comparatively trivial question of whether incense was desirable) who saw the 1874 Act as an interference by the Secular Power in what should be a sacred sphere. They began to talk of not merely the Irish but also the whole English Church cutting its ties with the state – disestablishing itself.

  Gladstone did not want this, but, keen student of Dante that he was, he knew that this conflict between Church and state, pope and emperor, ran through European history like a fault-line. Dante, who believed all power came from God, consigned to hell those popes and ecclesiastics who seized for themselves powers which should be exercised by the emperors. St Peter, in Dante’s heaven, goes crimson with rage at the sight of Boniface VIII’s corrupt practices and gives utterance to the belief that his throne, the Papacy, is now in effect vacant while the corruption of popes and anti-popes poisons the Church Militant. Gladstone really did believe, with the majority of thinking Anglicans, that his Church, for all its faults, was closer to the ideal Catholicism of Dante than was the Church of Pope Pius IX. That is, he thought you could be a Catholic without owing obedience to a pope who, in the theological sphere, peddled the blasphemous notion of his own infallibility, and in the political sphere had so far left behind him the liberalism of his youth as to support such dreadful tyrannies as the kingdom of Naples, whose prisons and police-cruelty had so shocked Gladstone when he saw them.

  Pius IX had lined up his Church behind the forces of extreme reaction. The case of Edgar Mortara had shocked Europe. The Mortaras were a rich Jewish family from Bologna whose maid – a Christian – baptized their son without, needless to say, the consent of the parents. The papal police arrived at the house when the child was seven and abducted him. When, at the customary papal audience with the Jews of Rome on New Year’s Day 1859, the boy’s parents pleaded for his return, Pius IX replied, ‘In the past year you’ve given a fine example of submissiveness! To turn all Europe topsy-turvy on account of the Mortara case … But let the newspapers, for their part go on talking all they want … I don’t care a rap for the whole world!’ Two years later, Pius IX displayed Edgar Mortara, now dressed as a Catholic seminarian, to the Jews of Rome. Ten years later, Pius ordered two Italian revolutionaries, Monti and Tognetti, to be beheaded in the Piazza del Popolo for attempting to blow up the papal barracks; and just two weeks before Rome was taken by storm, one Paolo Muzi was hanged in Frosinone, the last citizen of the Papal States to be executed.19

  It is against this background that one is to consider the debate over the First Vatican Council and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. (Or, indeed, the contemporary debate about whether Pius IX – now the Blessed Pius, should be promoted to full Catholic sainthood.) The twentieth century saw a Roman Catholic Church, stripped of all temporal lands though not devoid of political influence, spiritually revitalized though shaken by doubts and dissensions within its own ranks, still playing political roles in the world. In the 1930s, this role was conspicuous, in Spain most markedly, for its identification with fascism. In the 1960s and 1970s by contrast, in Central and South America, Catholics influenced by Liberation Theology lined up with the Left. In the closing decades of the twentieth century a Polish pope used his mighty influence to contribute to the collapse of materialist-atheist Soviet governments throughout the Eastern bloc.

  It would be a mistake to identify Catholicism, or the Papacy, solely with any one of these political developments – and this perhaps was Gladstone’s mistake: to identify the extreme political, as well as theological, authoritarianism of Pius IX with the Roman Catholic religion per se. After all, his once-close friend Archbishop Manning, one of Pius’s keenest supporters in a theological way, was a man of the Left politically.

  Nevertheless, the Council itself had caused grave concern to many Catholics, not least to the Fathers assembled in Conclave. There was no real opportunity given to the bishops and theologians to debate the matter of the pope’s supposed Infallibility. The official minutes of the Council state that all the bishops present rose and gave their assent, but this is not what happened. Seeing the sort of doctrines they would be required to ratify, many of the nearly 700 bishops left Rome before the vote was cast. The Infallibility definition received just 451 placets, 88 non-placets and 62 placets juxta modum (Church Latin for ‘Don’t know’) and the constitution Pastor Aeternus was passed by 533 placets.20 ‘Quite a few men in the minority were caught napping,’ wrote Bishop Joseph Hefele, on 10 August 1870, ‘and gave way before the roaring fanaticism. It really took a little strength to fight off the importunate people from the majority, to remain seated and not to sign.’21

  The bishop was writing to the most distinguished historian of Catholicism in Germany, arguably in Europe, Ignaz von Döllinger, who had been such an influence on English Catholics and Anglicans, including on Newman, whose Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine owes much to him. It was to visit Döllinger, now resident in Munich, that Gladstone set out in September 1874. Döllinger had written, as recently as 1861, in Papstthum und Kirchenstaat that Churches which separate themselves from the Papacy risk dissolving themselves into chaos. But he did not like the extreme ultramontane theology of the First Vatican Council and following the Declaration of Infallibility he let it be known that he was opposed. He was excommunicated in 1871. In the year that Gladstone visited him (they’d met before back in the Forties) Dr Döllinger was seventy-five years old. He had refused to join the so-called Old Catholics who formed what was in effect a non-papal Catholic Church – a little like a Church of England only for Dutch, Germans and others; but he had taken part in conferences at Bonn with the Old Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox and others to see if there was a way forward.22 Very many theologians and historians flocked to talk to Dr Döllinger. Gladstone and he appear to have got on well. Gladstone called on him ‘at six o’clock in the evening’, Döllinger recollected; ‘we began talking on political and theological subjects and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation that it was two o’clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket – true to his principle of never losing time – during my momentary absence.’

  Gladstone had subsequently enjoyed a brief walking tour in the Bavarian Alps with a son and daughter and then came home to write his pamphlet The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. Writing it, Gladstone would have found himself thinking of the wreckage of broken friendships with which his circle was littered as a result of the many English conversions to Rome. He
no doubt thought of his sister Helen, whom he had failed to see in Germany – a Catholic convert living in Cologne. When he had finished the pamphlet he had an emotional collapse – ‘Broke down from over work and hurry in afternoon from diarrhoea. In the night I rose & took castor oil.’23 It is a curious work for a man who regarded it as his prime political mission to pacify Ireland. For if disestablishing the Irish Church was calculated to alienate the Protestants of that island, the Vatican Decrees pamphlet was calculated to offend the Catholics. It questions whether, after the First Vatican Council, the Catholic could be a completely loyal citizen of a non-Catholic state. It ends with a peroration whose meaning in intellectual terms is opaque, but whose patriotic music is unmistakable. It is frankly rabble-rousing, and Gladstone can only have been pleased that his pamphlet sold 145,000 copies, with a large number also buying its sequel, Vaticanism, in the following year of 1875:

  It is not then for the dignity of the Crown and people of the United Kingdom to be diverted from a path which they have deliberately chosen, and which it does not rest with all the myrmidons of the Apostolic Chamber either openly to obstruct, or secretly to undermine. It is rightfully to be expected, it is greatly to be desired, that the Roman Catholics of this country should do in the Nineteenth century what their forefathers of England, except a handful of emissaries, did in the Sixteenth, when they were marshalled in resistance to the Armada, and in the Seventeenth when, in despite of the Papal Chair, they sat in the House of Lords under the Oath of Allegiance. That which we are entitled to desire, we are entitled also to expect: indeed, to say we did not expect it, would, in my judgment, be the true way of conveying an ‘insult’ to those concerned.