Anglo-Catholicism and Aristocracy
30 May 2009
Rightly and properly the “giants in the land” of the Anglo-Catholic Movement who spring most readily to mind are the founding fathers of the Movement, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey, followed by the great slum priests who so defined the Movement in the public consciousness: those “martyrs for conscience sake” Arthur Tooth, Pelham Dale, Richard William Enraght, Sydney Fairthorne Green, James Bell Cox, who suffered prosecution and imprisonment as a result of the infamous Public Worship Regulation Act: also those like Richard Radcyffe Dolling, Alexander Heriot Mackonochie, Arthur Henry Stanton, Frank Weston, Basil Jellicoe, Percy Maryon-Davis, Henry Fynes-Clinton, Alfred Hope Patten (names taken almost at random); and there are many others whose memory is revered who were among those “giants in the land.” Although we may not recognize them, there is nothing like a prophet without honour in his own country or time, there are giants in the land in our own day who will be honoured and saluted by future generations. The one characteristic that this great litany of names has in common is that they are all priests.
Perhaps it is inevitable that the first names that we reach for are the names of those priests who founded and have formed the Oxford Movement and, more generally, the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. However, that gives rise, equally inevitably, to the criticism that the Catholic Revival is essentially and fundamentally a clerical movement, dominated by priests. Noone should be surprised that a movement that has as one of its foundation principles the call to holiness of living has many priests in its forefront. Such a criticism seems to stem from and to be infected by a degree of anti-clericalism that goes hand-in-glove with the endemic anti-catholicism of post-Reformation England. They suspect that we are all cunning Jesuits, a fifth column, attempting to subvert Church and State. But it is a criticism that also implies a gullible laity, one that is taken in, brainwashed by priestly wiles. Experience of a devout and formidable laity would dispel such a gross and inaccurate caricature. Anglo-Catholicism could not have survived for 175 years without a substantial, informed, devout laity. And Anglo-Catholicism, more than any other part of the Church of England, spans the social and class divisions that have characterized English society and has always had an interesting social composition from aristocrat to artisan, and sometimes with little attraction to those in between. Its pastoral mission has also been polarized between Christian Socialism and Tory paternalism.
We should not blind ourselves to the fact that many found, and still find, Anglo-Catholicism both infuriating and contemptible. Tractarianism and later aspects of the Catholic Revival were taken as an affront to a middle class culture and to notions of protestant, middle class respectability. Anglo-Catholicism attracted some of its strongest adherents from the aristocracy and from the ranks of the urban and rural poor. The ranks of the middle class, nouveau riche respectability, what the historian John Sheldon Reed calls “the stuffy, vulgar … rising commercial class,” were not such fertile soil. Tractarianism and the Catholic Revival did not only challenge the ecclesiastical and ecclesiological assumptions that were prevalent but also the artistic, architectural, and cultural sensibilities that predominated.
The outstanding, towering, aristocratic figure in Anglo-Catholicism is Charles Linley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax. Not least among his achievements was his longevity. He was born on 7 June 1839 and died on 19 January 1934. During the whole of his adult life, he was involved in every aspect of the Catholic Movement, at the heart of its triumphs and its controversies. With a delicious irony, he was the scion of an impeccably Whig political dynasty. His grandfather was Earl Grey, Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834 and it was during his administration that the proposal to suppress several Irish sees and apply their revenues to educational purposes inspired John Keble’s sermon on the National Apostasy that, in effect, launched the Oxford Movement to which Halifax devoted his life.
Halifax was educated at Eton where he made a lifelong friend of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. He resigned from the Prince’s Household during the unpleasantness that surrounded the Public Worship Regulation Act but retained the Prince’s affection and that of the Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra. They both attended Evensong at All Saints’ Margaret Street when in London and the Prince once said that “If I ever become religious, I shall be of Charlie Wood’s religion.” He went up to Christ Church, Oxford and it was there that his protestant family background, leavened by his uncle Samuel Wood’s friendship with John Henry Newman, gave way to the Tractarian influence that still was to be found in the University. He was influenced by Dr Pusey, but even more so by Henry Parry Liddon to whom he made his first confession and with whom he remained friends until Liddon’s early death.
Halifax would not have claimed to be, nor was he, an intellectual, nor a philosopher, nor a theologian but he was intelligent and learned, devout and committed. He accepted the teachings of the Church as dogmatic and authoritative. His life was centred on the Mass. It was he said, “the Mass that really signified … the Blessed Sacrament became more and more the centre of my spiritual life.” It was so much part of the fabric of his existence and that of the household that guests would wake up to the request from the staff, “Breakfast or communion?” His prayer was personal and his devotion simple and uncomplicated. He spent prolonged periods in meditation and devotion and the image of him kneeling silently in his chapel, wrapt in his cloak, fully concentrated and recollected even into extreme old age is moving. This entirely unselfconscious expression of his religious convictions was deeply impressive to many. His protestant parents had been disappointed, not to say alarmed, at his adherence to the Oxford Movement and his decision to devote himself to that cause, principally through his Presidency of the English Church Union, at the cost of a political career. But nearing the end of his life, his father asked him to invite Canon Knox Little to Hickleton and when he arrived Halifax was surprised to hear his father ask Knox Little to hear his confession.
The round of daily Mass, Morning and Evening Prayer, spiritual reading, regular meditation, devotion to Our Lady underpinned his work as an ecclesiastical politician. In following that vocation he turned his back on national political life. He supported Gladstone while he lived but moved towards the Tories thereafter but was never an active partisan in party politics. He had also turned his back on a specifically religious vocation. He had assisted in the formation of the Society of S. John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers, and had contemplated a vocation to that monastic community and to life as a lay brother. He also assisted in the restoration of the Benedictine life and rule in the English Church on Caldey Island and was distressed when Aelred Carlyle and many of the community seceded to Rome. He continued to support those who remained, first at Pershore and then at Nashdom.
He also had a developed social conscience having had first-hand experience of material deprivation during the cholera epidemic of 1866 when he worked with Dr Pusey and Priscilla Sellon and others in the midst of the slums of Spitalfields and Whitechapel. No doubt it was this experience that always made him sympathetic to and elicited his support for the slum priests who were such a notable characteristic of the Catholic Revival. He was not unaware of the extreme disparities that existed in Victorian England: “It is all very hard to reconcile with one’s own comfort and prosperity,” he said. Lest this should portray too sever and austere and humourless individual, it should be remembered that he possessed a great sense of fun, that he enjoyed life to the full and that he had an abhorrence and horror of total abstinence: the perfectly rounded Anglo-Catholic.
Lord Halifax’s great contribution to the Catholic cause was his Presidency of the English Church Union. He was the second President, succeeding the Hon Colin Lindsay who had supervised the creation of the ECU nine years before converting to Rome. Halifax was President from 1868 until 1919 and again from 1927 until his death in 1934. The Union was at the very heart of every controversy in the Church of England and was the political wing of the Catholic Revival. To write the history of the ECU and the successor Church Union is to touch on every aspect of the Church of England from the Public Worship Regulation Act to the present crisis over the ordination of women to the episcopate.
The ECU was not clerically dominated and had a succession of highly intelligent, articulate, theologically aware, politically astute laymen and women to engage in the political battle: from W. J. Birbeck, the Squire of Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, via Athelstan Riley to Ivor Bulmer-Thomas and Maurice Chandler nearer our own day. The Union was by some considerable way the largest of the Catholic societies and had a highly effective network of parish, diocesan and regional branches that made its voice at a national level highly audible. The ECU merged with the Anglo-Catholic Congresses to form the modern Church Union, brought about as Halifax’s last act, and it continued its work until in 1992 its political role was superseded by Forward in Faith, its local structure almost completely collapsed and it has not yet found its role in its 150th anniversary year.
The principle which underlay Halifax’s Presidency was “To see the Church of England what it should be, and ultimately to see the reunion of Christendom.” To this he added that it “exhausts every possible ambition that I can picture to myself. To work for that end, however small the results I may see of my work, is … my vocation in life.” There is much achievement with which he can be credited in whole or in part and, not least, in the ecumenical progress that has been made until the current obstacles have stalled the process. His willingness to engage with other parties in the Church of England, to make common cause where it was possible, prefigured his denominational ecumenism. He tried to enlist Evangelicals in maintaining religious orthodoxy, but suffered rebuff and cruelly suffered a Kensitite outrage with the destruction of a cross on the Hickleton estate which he had erected in memory of his three dead sons.
His ecumenical endeavour was stimulated by his meeting with the Abbé Portal on holiday in Madeira. The English aristocrat and the French son of a village shoemaker formed the warmest of friendships and it was from their personal relationship that the idea of corporate reunion came about, which has dominated the subsequent ecumenical landscape. This round of unofficial and essentially personal conversations led into the cul-de-sac of the Papal Bull Apostolicae Curae in 1896 and the response of the English Archbishops Saepius Officio too often overlooked in the debate.
However unfortunate this conclusion was for Halifax, it did not end his search for ecumenical congruence. There may have been a silence after 1896 but it was not for Halifax the silence of despair, rather it was the silence of hope which led to his second great ecumenical initiative. The First World War had shattered so many uncertainties that Halifax sensed that it was time to re-visit the question. This attempt focussed on the Archbishop Malines, Cardinal Mercier. He had distinguished himself during the War as a symbol of resistance to German aggression and occupation in Belgium and had issued an Appeal to all Christian People in 1920 which had elicited a favourable response, not least in the United States. Mercier visited the USA where he addressed the Episcopalian House of Deputies. These developments re-awakened both Halifax and Portal and they visited Mercier, supported with the cautious approval of Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and tacit approval from the Vatican. From that emerged a series of serious conversation between representative theologians. There were five such conversations between 1921 and 1926 but they ceased after the deaths of Mercier and Portal. The participants varied but the most significant with Halifax were Bishop Walter Frere, Bishop Charles Gore, Armitage Robinson, the Dean of Wells and the Warden of Keble, Dr Kidd. Although these unofficial conversations bore no immediate fruit, and in some ways accentuated differences, their influence could be seen in the development of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and ultimately in the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission which produced significant documents emphasising congruence and common ground rather than differences, although differences remained. This process seems stalled and of tragically less significance at present.
In the short-term the Conversations failed because of hierarchical caution, a degree of indifference beyond the participants, and the opposition of Cardinal Bourne but their long-term significance may not yet be played out. Halifax died on 19 January 1934 with his hopes of reunion unfulfilled but with the most distinguished and significant contribution to Anglo-Catholicism of any other layman. Given his background and his temperament, Halifax has been criticized for a degree of caution in his political dealings but he has also been criticized for a degree of impetuosity in his ecumenical endeavours. Whereas he may have been seen as disappointingly mild to some of his own supporters, the perennial Young Turks of the Catholic Revival, to the outside world, not least sometimes the ecclesiastical establishment, he stood for all that was most uncompromisingly orthodox. By whatever measure, he was a great and good man.
As a footnote: his surviving son and successor, Edward, sometime Viceroy of India, Foreign Secretary, Ambassador to Washingtion, Chancellor of Oxford University was President of the Governors of Pusey House, of which his father had been one of the founders.
Halifax failed to succeed Neville Chamberlain so it is that there were three great Anglo-Catholic Prime Ministers, William Ewart Gladstone, a pall-bearer at Dr Pusey’s funeral and one of those who supported the foundation of Pusey House, Harold Macmillan, who as an undergraduate at Balliol served at the altar of Pusey House, and one, an aristocrat among aristocrats, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. He was an undergraduate at Christ Church and a contemporary and friend of Henry Parry Liddon, and he knew Dr Pusey, although their subsequent relationship, though affectionate, was somewhat rocky. As his modern biographer has put it, “Oxford was the home of High Anglicanism and High Toryism, and Salisbury imbibed deeply of both.” He was an enthusiastic Tractarian and remained very much a Tractarian rather than a ritualistic Anglo-Catholic. The first historian of the Oxford Movement, that very great and good man Richard Church, described the Tracts as “clear, brief, stern appeals to conscience and reason, sparing of words, utterly without rhetoric, intense in purpose” and as such they could have been written with Salisbury in mind. “For a conservative-minded young man with a feeling for history, Tractarianism was an intoxicating force, preaching a traditional creed with clarity and conviction and it was to provide the main spiritual and intellectual influence on Salisbury’s life.”
Oxford was still reeling from Newman’s conversion when Salisbury came up to Christ Church but Dr Pusey was still in residence in the south-west corner of Tom Quad; Salisbury’s rooms were in the north-west corner. Salisbury had a great deal of admiration for Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons yet he had little sympathy for those who took the path of conversion. His aim was to regenerate the Church of England. He never wavered from that view and, in 1882, when he was involved in setting-up Pusey House as Dr Pusey’s abiding memorial, he spoke of “the church of eighteen centuries, in the Prayer Book sense in which the Church of England is that part of Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church established by law in England.” His admiration for Dr Pusey and his friendship with Liddon prompted him to this public appeal for Pusey House. When he became Chancellor of the University, one of the first doctorates he conferred, on his own nomination, was that on Liddon.
His admiration did not mean that he always agreed with Pusey nor that he always acceded to his urgings. Dr Pusey wrote to Salisbury to complain about a proposed honorary degree to be awarded to Charles Darwin. Salisbury replied, with some asperity in a moderately sharp retort to what he regarded as an intemperate letter, that “it is not desirable that the Church and those who represent her should condemn scientific speculations when they are only inferentially and not avowedly hostile to religion.” Salisbury and Dr Pusey may have parted company over that aspect of University policy but they shared a sense that the University was becoming less and less a religious institution, less animated by religious principles and impulses. Salisbury opposed the abolition of religious tests in the University, saying, “You are turning what for centuries has been an institution for the education of youth in the principles of the dominant religion into a simple instrument for grinding Latin and Greek into young brains.” At a Church Congress in Leeds in October 1872, he said that Oxford could become “a nucleus and focus of infidel teaching and practice … the de-Christianisation of the upper and middle classes.” Prescient words.
Beyond the cloistered walls of the University, beyond its dreaming spires, Salisbury feared a wider and more fiercely fought civil war between, as he put it, the “Sacramental, the Emotional and the Philosophical Schools” in the Church; that is, the High, the Evangelical and the Broad Church movements. His secure, austere, reserved Tractarianism was wary of extremes of any kind. He had no sympathy for the more excitable protestants, not least the ludicrously theatrical reaction of Queen Victoria, at times such an absurd figure, who threatened that she would go into exile if the Romeward tendency in the Church of England continued. Equally, he was not drawn to ritualism and ceremonialism. He made no secret of his view that the Ritualists were bringing the cause of the Oxford Movement into contempt by what he saw as their follies. He was, however, firmly sympathetic to a great deal of what Ritualist priests taught and to their heroic pastoral engagement.
He was a member of the Government that pursued the Public Worship Regulation Act to the statute book. The Conservatives had returned, somewhat unexpectedly, to power and as they had little legislation prepared, Disraeli, the supreme opportunist, seized on the Bill of Archbishop Tait to regulate, by which we can read ban, ritual and ceremonial practice. Although they came to have a reasonable working relationship, Salisbury and Disraeli had little liking for each other. Salisbury had resigned from Disraeli’s previous administration after a brief period in office and said that “the prospect of having to serve with this man again is like a nightmare.” However, once back in the Government, he did not think that he could resign again without looking foolish and so he reluctantly stayed despite his distaste for the proposed legislation and sought to modify it in its draft form. He attempted to broker a compromise between Tait and his opponents and was dismayed when Disraeli adopted the measure, allowed it Government time and spoke in insulting and slighting terms about the Ritualists: his rhetorical flourish about putting down Ritiualism “the mass in masquerade” causing particular offence. Although he thought the Bill an intolerant over-reaction, Salisbury did not vote against it, accepting Cabinet collective responsibility. He did not, however, lead for the Government in the House of Lords but he did lend his weight to secure the defeat of an amendment passed in the House of Commons aimed at strengthening the Bill. He spoke so strongly and pugnaciously against it, and urged his fellow Peers not to be afraid of the Commons in doing their constitutional duty, that when the matter returned to the Commons Disraeli, perhaps intending to be playful and to make light of Salisbury’s role, coined a description of him that was to remain attached to him for some considerable time: “Lord Salisbury is not a man who measures his phrases. He is a great master of jibes, and flounts and jeers.” Salisbury was neither proud nor happy with his “disagreeable” position and said with a characteristic honesty: “I think I have been able to prevent more mischief in office than I should have been able to prevent out of it. Perhaps that is not saying much.”
Perhaps the most public role he played in the development of Anglo-Catholicism was as a Trustee of the Woodard Foundation (he was for many years the Senior Trustee) and the building of schools. He spoke at the public meeting to launch the Foundation in Brighton Town Hall (where else?) on 2 December 1856. That meeting saw a vigorous anti-Puseyite demonstration from disaffected protestants. Salisbury, the Bishop of Winchester and Sir James Beresford Hope struggled to be heard above the insults, catcalls, hissing, groans and foot-stamping that greeted them. But the scheme was launched and Salisbury worked assiduously to support the appeal and the results, Hurstpierpoint, Ardingly and Lancing were soon seen within reach of Brighton. Schools were founded elsewhere in the country, not least Worksop College.
As with much of Salisbury’s Tractarian life, there were rocky moments. He almost resigned from the Foundation as a consequence of Woodard’s support for auricular confession, one of the central tenets of the revival of Catholicism in the Church of England. Salisbury stayed but made his views clear, “I dislike the Roman doctrine too heavily to suffer myself to seem to approve it … as a general practice it is, at best, fatal to moral vigour, at its worst an instrument of corruption or ambition.” Not a view shared by Dr Pusey, but it does illustrate that this was no monochrome movement but that there was a range of views within the Anglo-Catholic fold.
To have two Tractarians at the head of Government and for a considerable period of time meant that the exercise of patronage could see the appointment of sympathetic bishops and of others to a number of Livings and canonries and deaneries and it was through that patronage and through the patronage of other private patrons and benefactors that the Movement could spread into unlikely quarters.
Salisbury was active in the political field where his beliefs formed his views and approach and he was active in the foundation of Pusey House but he was not as visible in philanthropic Anglo-Catholicism and in the building of churches as others, not least his brother-in-law James Beresford Hope. Beresford Hope shared with Salisbury a Tractarian outlook rather than an Anglo-Catholic one but he was responsible for the building of one of the great churches of the Catholic Revival: All Saints’ Margaret Street.
He was the scion of an aristocratic line through his maternal grandfather, William Beresford, 1st Baron Decies, Archbishop of Tuam, himself the son of the 1st Marquess of Waterford. Beresford Hope’s step-father, was the 1st Viscount Beresford and it was from him that Beresford Hope inherited his larges estates and wealth. He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he was a member of the Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society, of which he became an active and influential chairman) and was a friend of Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale. He was elected a Member of Parliament shortly after coming down from Cambridge where he had enjoyed a glittering academic career. Apart from a short gap he was a member of the House of Commons from 1841 until his death in 1887. He described himself as Conservative yet liberal and unshackled by party. He did not always toe the party line and was antipathetic, as was his brother-in-law, to Disraeli. He did not achieve high office, or any political office, and commented that “I shall die a second rate nonentity … the rich Mr Beresford Hope.” He was very rich and it was his wealth that gave him a sense of independence.
Through his Tractarian sympathies he was a supporter of the established Church regarding it in the classic Tractarian formulation as a divine society, and as an estate of the realm. Compared with his great friends in the Ecclesiological Society, he was less sacramental in his outlook than John Mason Neale and less of a ritualist than Benjamin Webb. He supported church rates and denominational education and was active in supporting the Woodard Foundation schools. He opposed Gladstone’s proposal to disestablish the Irish Church, which found him on the opposite side to Salisbury who voted for it on the basis that Gladstone had an electoral mandate for the policy and the House of Lords should not seek to oppose such measures. He also opposed the almost perennially contentious proposal to permit marriage with a deceased wife’s sister: “And he shall prick that annual blister,/ Marriage with deceased wife’s sister”, promises the Queen of the Fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe.
Beresford Hope’ real significance and lasting influence was as an architectural writer and as a supporter and financier behind several projects undertaken by Anglo-Catholic architects, as we might term them. That finest of architectural writers J. Mordaunt Crook, has rightly commented that Beresford Hope put his colossal fortune at the service of the Gothic Revival. He wrote extensively about the Gothic Revival in numerous specialist publications and to a wider audience and wrote a series of articles arguing for a “progressive eclecticism” of styles that may have foreshadowed John Ninian Comper’s bringing together the Gothic and the Baroque in his “unity by inclusion.” He bought S. Augustine’s College in Canterbury with the aim of making it a missionary college and he commissioned William Butterfield to design the buildings. But an even greater achievement, perhaps, was the building of All Saints’ Margaret Street. He again commissioned Butterfield to build the church and although their collaboration was not without disagreement the final achievement bears eloquent testimony to their visionary enterprise.
Following Camden Society principles it was to be a 'Model Church on a large and splendid scale.' It was to be in the Gothic style of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, honestly built of solid materials and its ornament should decorate its construction. The architect should be 'a single, pious and laborious artist alone, pondering deeply over his duty to do his best for the service of God's Holy Religion' but above all the church must be built so that the 'Rubricks and Canons of the Church of England may be Consistently observed, and the Sacraments rubrically and decently administered.' All astonishingly achieved, so much so that the art critic and savant, John Ruskin, said of it: 'It is the first piece of architecture I have seen, built in modern days, which is free from all signs of timidity or incapacity...it challenges fearless comparison with the noblest work of any time. Having done this, we may do anything: there need be no limits to our hope or our confidence.' Some thought that Butterfield’s polychromatic brickwork was hideous, some still do, and it proved too progressive for some but Beresford Hope defended it. He also supported a plan by William Burges to complete a mural decoration of S. Paul’s Cathedral but just as Butterfield offended afficiandos of the Early English Gothic, so Burges failed to win over the classicists. He also supported these architects, and others, in secular commissions that illustrated some of the same Gothic architectural principles as in their ecclesiastical work. He was an advocate of the design of Gilbert Scott for the Foreign Office and for William Burges’s plan submitted for the Law Courts’ competition.
After a lifetime of generosity and philanthropic patronage, Berefsord Hope died leaving a relatively modest sum of £78,270 but his real and abiding legacy to the Catholic Revival is still vividly and triumphantly evident.
As a footnote: two of Salisbury’s sons Lord Hugh Cecil and Lord Robert Cecil followed political careers but were also prominent Anglo-Catholics. The present Marquess of Salisbury maintains a Chaplain, is a conscientious patron of Livings and supports traditional religion, perhaps in the mode of his great forebear.
Aristocratic support may be more limited and not so prominent nowadays but it was maintained until last year by Patrick Maitland, 17th Earl of Lauderdale. He was born in 1911, educated at Lancing, the leading Anglo-Catholic Public School of the Woodard Foundation, and at Brasenose College, Oxford. He was attracted to Anglo-Catholicism in the chapel at Lancing and at Oxford where he worshipped at Pusey House and was one of the last links with its prodigiously learned Principal, Darwell Stone. He earned his living as a journalist, a noted War correspondent, later as a Member of Parliament and as a member of the House of Lords where he chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Energy. He was a Director of Elf Petroleum and a consultant to Shell.
But for our purposes he was a Guardian of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, the last to have been appointed by Fr Hope Patten, He was the President of the Church Union between 1956 and 1961 and he restored the Shrine of Our Lady of Haddington and inaugurated an ecumenical pilgrimage that continues to attract and inspire many pilgrims. In researching his family history, he found that a shrine to Our Lady at Whitekirk had been despoiled by the English but had later been revived at S. Mary’s Haddington That too was destroyed at the siege of Haddington in 1548. Lord Lauderdale restored the Lauderdale aisle in S. Mary’s as a private chapel and had a new image of Our Lady installed. The chapel was then consecrated for public worship at an ecumenical service that must have caught the breath in the Calvinist heart of Scotland. The Primus of the Episcopal Church presided, a former Moderator of the Church of Scotland participated, a Polish Orthodox priest offered prayers, the Catholic Abbot of Nunraw blessed the image. After the vote in General Synod in 1992, Lord Lauderdale became the Chairman of the “Church in Danger” – an echo of the beginnings of the Tractarian Movement – and assisted in the presentation of submissions to the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament. A Requiem Mass was offered in S. Mary’s Bourne Street and the Funeral Requiem was sung in Haddington where he is buried. He died aged 97, a link with a glorious past and still resolute in his faith.
Henry Pelham Archibald Douglas Pelham-Clinton, the 7th Duke of Newcastle. He was not as politically engaged as was Lord Halifax. He did not have such a high public profile. He spoke in the House of Lords rarely but he showed a remarkable degree of philanthropy and generosity of means and spirit to many Anglo-Catholic churches and institutions as well as his great work in this county and his estate, of which the glorious Chapel in which we are now gathered is the most conspicuous and “abiding witness of a great and good noble man.” It is not surprising that at his Requiem in Worksop Priory, where he was for many years Vicar’s Warden, Canon d’Arcy said that “there is a Prince and a great man fallen this day.”
He was born in 1864 and must have endured a rather turbulent childhood. His father, the 6th Duke , was such a spendthrift that his father, the 5th Duke , ensured that the estates were placed in the hands of Trustees, the senior of whom was William Ewart Gladstone. The 6th Duke died at the age of only forty-five in 1879 still financially embarrassed, living in a London hotel and separated and estranged from his wife. In these circumstances, the young Henry succeeded to the title while still a schoolboy at Eton on 22 February 1879. In addition to this uncertain heritage, the house at Clumber burned down about a month later, on 20 March 1879.
On 7th April of that year, after the death of his father and the razing of the family home, the young Duke wrote an astonishingly mature letter to Gladstone which foreshadowed much that was to come. He wrote of rebuilding the House to a plan by Sir Charles Barry and said, “I hope too that the chapel will be seen to … I do earnestly hope to grow up a good man, and gain the affection of my people and friends.” He then added, in a remarkably casual and matter-of-fact way, “I am thankful that I had my leg off.” From his birth on 28 September 1864, Lord Lincoln, as he was until he inherited the dukedom, had a problem with his leg. The cause is uncertain. He may have been born with a bone deformity, or, as one story has it, he may have fallen from a table, or, as another story has it, he may have been dropped by a nurse damaging his head and his left leg and treatment was delayed because she was too afraid to admit to the accident. Whatever the cause, he endured constant pain and discomfort during fourteen years of treatment, and we can only shuddered at what that might have involved, until it was amputated. He had also, as a consequence, failed to grow beyond about 5’ and had a disproportionately large head, although his mental capacity and ability was unaffected.
Photographs show these features quite clearly, and they may have something to do with his relative lack of prominence in national and political life as well as continued poor health. He remained shy and reserved throughout his life but even so he engendered great affection and was known as “the little Duke.” And his disabilities did not restrict his enjoyment of life and his pursuit of his responsibilities and interests; not least photography in which he was an early pioneer.
He completed his studies at Eton, for which he retained a life-long affection, and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he came under the influence of the Tractarians. Newman had converted to Rome by then and Keble had retired to his parish at Hursley, which left Dr Pusey as the most prominent Tractarian in Oxford. But he was not alone in Oxford where Henry Parry Liddon and Edward King were both significant and influential in the younger generation.
He completed the education of many young men of wealth by taking the Grand Tour, both in Europe and in America, where he remained a frequent visitor, when he indulged, in particular, his passion and enthusiasm for church architecture. On his return, he married Kathleen Florence May Candy on 20 February 1889 in All Saints’ Margaret Street. The Prince and Princess of Wales attended: All Saints was a church where they regularly worshipped when in London: and Edward King, now Bishop of Lincoln, officiated and in the congregation was Oscar Wilde.
The Duke and Duchess devoted much of their time to the estates and land at Clumber, to the House and the building of the Chapel. They knew their tenants well and were attentive to the needs and concerns of individual tenants. They were known to continue to pay wages when an employee or tenant was sick, gave generous financial gifts on weddings, visited the sick, offered consolation to the dying, paid funeral costs, paid for medical operations and gave help in many kinds of distress, not least by reducing rents in times of economic distress and improving the living conditions of tenants. Both were motivated by their religious beliefs and Christian conscience, and the Duke may have been additionally motivated by his own sufferings and medical history. He fulfilled several local offices: Lord High Steward of Retford, Master Forrester of Dartmoor and Keeper of St Briavel's Castle, President of the local branch of the English Church Union and was the patron of several local churches. The ownership of these advowsons was conveyed to others during his life: Worksop Priory to the Society of S. John the Evangelist (the Cowley Fathers), and from them to S. Stephen’s House: East Markham with Askham, Egmanton, Cromwell, (1913), Kirton (1916) and Elkesley (1924) to The Society for the Maintenance of the Faith, of which he was President from 1911 until his death.
He did make an occasional foray into national life and spoke in the House of Lords to oppose reform of the land tax, the remarriage of the divorced in church, the disestablishment of the Church of England, the abolition of the use at the birch at Eton College but to support the installation of electricity in the area. He was a High Tory as well as a High Churchman and from both emanated his social conscience and his persistent generosity. You will know well enough his immense generosity and philanthropic largesse in this part of the world. He paid for alterations to the Lady Chapel in the Priory, he was a major benefactor of the Woodard Foundation, gave the land on which Worksop College was built and paid for the driveway and the cedar trees which line it. He laid the foundation stone. In 1897 he financed the restoration at Egmanton and supported the re-introduction of the Shrine of Our Lady of Egmanton, still a valued destination of pilgrimage. He was a benefactor of S. Alban’s Holborn where he regularly worshipped and of All Saints’ Margaret Street where, through the Newcastle Trust, he funded the choir which financial generosity he supplemented by taking the choirboys to the pantomime annually, including a young Lawrence Olivier, whose father was a curate at All Saints for several years. He also paid for the hanging pyx in the sanctuary. He gave money to Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell and bought the Old Palace School, Croydon and gave it to Mother Emily and the Sisters of the Church. In this marked pattern of philanthropy he did not forget his love for Eton where he endowed a prize fund for the learning of Russian or other foreign languages. After the First World War he was a particularly generous contributor to funds for War Memorials. The only area of his life that seemed at odds with his philanthropic Anglo-Catholicism was his support of temperance. Despite that he was in every other way “a remarkable example of aristocratic patronage.”
His health deteriorated after the War and his activities became more circumscribed and he appeared less frequently in Clumber. He died in London on 30 May 1928, his Funeral Requiem was sung at All Saints’ Margaret Street and he was buried in Eton Cemetery. “In the church he loved grandeur, for himself he loved simplicity and Eton.” Requiems were also sung in Worksop Priory and here.
He was a supreme example of the benign influence of an Anglo-Catholic aristocrat, committed to his locality and his estates and the surrounding area, making a contribution to churches and institutions within that tradition, defending it where he could, taking his obligations with due seriousness. He never seems to have wavered in his Tractarianism and his devoted and selfless commitment to the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. His mother had converted to Roman Catholicism and the Duke spent much time and energy denying his own imminent conversion or perversion as opponents saw it. As Tractarianism moved from the University, the academic world and the world of theologians, the world of tracts and pamphlets into the life of parishes, there began that process of translating its principles into material architectural, liturgical and pastoral form. The Duke had the resources, the belief and, clearly, the will to be part of that process. His attendance at the most advanced ritualist churches in London was evidence enough. Like many others he was the subject of fierce criticism because of these “romanising” tendencies. But, like those great slum priests, he persisted in the face of such opposition and made as telling a contribution to the growth and success of Anglo-Catholicism as it was to achieve.
With the passage of time, those acts of individual charity have passed from sight but there is much to which the Duke contributed that has endured. Above all else if we seek his memorial, look around. The foundation stone was laid in 1886 and the building that G. F. Bodley created was an expression in stone, marble, wood and glass of the Duke’s religious principles. From the outset Bodley and the Duke “planned the Chapel to be resplendently impressive, full of ritual, colour and splendour, this was a miniature cathedral to Anglo-Catholicism.” The Chapel was originally dedicated to the Blessed Trinity, which was a quintessentially Tractarian dedication: it was the doctrine to which Dr Pusey was especially dedicated. It was later dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which we might regard as a more Anglo-Catholic dedication.
There were many great architects of the Gothic Revival who followed Catholic ecclesiological principles; Pugin, Scott, Butterfield, Pearson, Street, Temple Moore, Ninian Comper, of a slightly later generation. By the time Bodley came to build this Chapel, the Gothic Revival had matured and had been refined through experience and developing sensibility and taste and ecclesiastical knowledge so that this Chapel is an exemplary and harmonious building. And all enhanced by the stained glass windows of that non-pareille designer and craftsman, C. E. Kempe. But there is one feature that encapsulates the heart of Anglo-Catholicism; amidst all the colour and drama, windows of clear, unstained glass pierce the two easternmost bays of the chancel and Bodley has made them much lower than the other windows. A small detail, possibly easily missed, they allow light to flood in from north and south to fall on the high altar, the altar of the sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood. At the base of the east window are the words “Orate pro bono statu Henrici Septimi Nove Castelli sub Lyme, hujus Ecclesiae Fundatoris.” Pray for the good estate of Henry, 7th Duke of Newcastle under Lyme, founder of this church. May the soul of the little Duke rest in the peace and felicity of God.
Father William Davage