English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847–1902

Eric G Tenbus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317323884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Filling an important gap in the historiography of Victorian Britain, this book examines the English Catholic Church's efforts during the second half of the nineteenth century to provide elementary education for Catholics.

1 A CHURCH DIVIDED AND THE EDUCATIONAL SOLUTION

‘The Catholic Church is springing up again’, boasted the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, before a captive audience of European Catholic leaders in Malines, Belgium, on 21 August 1863. ‘It had left its tap root’, he continued, ‘under the religious soil of England, from which new suckers are now shooting upwards; the sap which was believed to be drained out is rising in them once more. The old plant scents again the waters, and revives, endowed with a marvellous fertility.’ As Wiseman regaled his audience with the triumphs of the Catholic faith in England since the restoration of the hierarchy had placed him at the titular head of English Catholicism thirteen years before, he realized he had to step gently around the one matter that he uncharacteristically described in rather blunt, truthful terms which betrayed a certain lack of success. That issue was education. ‘Our weak side is the education of our children’, he declared, ‘whom our poverty prevents us from bringing up as we would desire’.¹

These statements comprise two of the central messages of this study. The first is the enthusiasm and confidence reflected in Wiseman’s portrait of his Church in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The second is the sober realization that, despite recent advances for Catholics in England and Wales, education, namely education of the Catholic poor, was an issue in need of tireless effort and one that had to be a priority for Catholics. This same feeling was aptly expressed in a notice in the July 1850 issue of the Rambler, a notoriously provocative liberal Catholic journal from mid-century.² With the paper’s characteristically hyperbolic and alarmist tone, the editors wrote, ‘Without the Catholic education of the Catholic poor, all our other efforts are something very like a mockery and a self-delusion’.³ Within this dichotomy of Catholic exuberance and cautious reflection on education lies the heart of this project. This book argues that the English Catholic community evolved in its pursuit of the education question.⁴ This pursuit was a long, tiresome and challenging ordeal which left an indelible mark on the Catholic community. As a result, the Catholic community that witnessed the historic Balfour Act in 1902, which removed many of the most troublesome remaining educational grievances for Catholics, bore little resemblance to that which had welcomed the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 or even that which restored the Church hierarchy in 1850. Other factors such as a growing Catholic middle class and economic prosperity, the extension of political reform, and changes in Catholic forms of devotion contributed to that evolution in identity. However, education predominated.⁵

Understanding and monitoring the identity of a community, even one as small as the English Catholic community, can be a daunting and arduous task given the intricacies of human behaviour and the dangers of generalization. Yet an understanding of the complexity of the Roman Catholic community in the 1840s is essential to an understanding of how education may have helped change the face of Catholicism in England and Wales. Much like other English denominations in the early nineteenth century, English Catholicism contained disparate identities split along ethnic and socio-economic divisions. Beginning with the first Catholic Acts in the last half of the eighteenth century, a series of events occurred which allowed for gradual changes in the Catholic community. The Emancipation Act followed by the Oxford Movement in the 1830s and its wave of conversions in the following decade and the Irish Famine in the 1840s all exerted pressures on the English Catholic community; these events kept the community in a continual state of flux. The three important groups which comprised the English Catholic community in the first half of the century were the old English Catholic gentry, the Oxford Movement converts and Irish Catholic immigrants.

English Catholic society following the Glorious Revolution was burdened by the onerous penal laws which severely restricted the religious and political rights of Catholics in both Ireland and England. Although enforcement of the penal codes, which connected civil disabilities with religious constraints, was sporadic and often non-existent, the government treated Catholics as second-class citizens, even if they happened to be wealthy members of the gentry or nobility. In 1778, in the midst of the War of American Independence, Lord North’s government passed the first Roman Catholic Relief Act which allowed Catholics to serve in the armed forces and also gave them rights of land ownership. Further Acts removed restrictions on the franchise, entrance into the legal profession and the practices of Catholic clergy in England. By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the civil disabilities and religious restrictions on Catholics had been removed, except for the final indignity – the prohibition of Catholics sitting in Parliament. However, the identity of a community that spent the better part of a century under severe penal laws would undoubtedly be reflected in its actions.⁶

John Bossy’s authoritative work The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 has long provided English Catholic historians with a valuable revisionist interpretation of the nature of the Catholic community just prior to the hierarchy’s restoration in 1850. His argument detects a healthy, growing Catholic community throughout the penal era. This is an argument that may be used to temper somewhat the ebullience of Cardinal Wiseman’s remarks on the recent growth of the Church in England. Bossy’s work did the same to that strain of historiography that used John Henry Newman’s famous Second Spring sermon as its starting point, which Bossy argues was not grounded in historical evidence.⁷ Since Bossy traces the English Catholic community from its Elizabethan roots, he paints the most complete portrait of the early nineteenth-century Catholic gentry, who had dominated recusant Catholic history. Gentry families were losing their control over the faith in England, due mainly to behavioural changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. One of those behavioural changes was rural to urban flight which led to their separation from fellow rural Catholics of a lesser economic status. This occurrence was accompanied by a renewed clerical mission chiefly to those same rural Catholics who had relied upon the gentry for leadership. Both of these phenomena lessened gentry influence so that by 1820, Bossy contends, the gentry were no longer a significant contributor to the Catholic community.⁸

Nonetheless, Mary Heimann has shown more recently that Catholic devotional practices of the gentry-dominated recusant period did not disappear when the gentry lost their pre-eminence. In her examination of devotional literature in the nineteenth century, Heimann concludes that it was popular recusant devotions such as benediction and the rosary that dominated the faith of Catholics in the nineteenth century, even after the restoration of the hierarchy. Her strongest piece of evidence that English Catholicism did not become ‘more Roman than Rome’ was the continued use of Bishop Challoner’s Garden of the Soul prayer book, first published in 1740 and thereafter until 1899.⁹ If we are to accept her thesis, we might clarify some details here. The political and social influence of the old Catholic gentry may have diminished, but the religious traditions from the period in which they dominated with their quieter spirituality did not, even under the glaring light of late nineteenth-century hierarchical ultramontanism in England.¹⁰ Yet the question remains, what would happen to that identity, which was held together for so long by political disabilities, once those disabilities were removed?

Part of the answer is found in Bossy’s description of the gentry’s waning influence. As the gentry’s leadership role declined, Catholic identity evolved as a whole, a process that Bossy explains ‘managed to combine fidelity to its tradition and openness to its environment with a rare … measure of success’.¹¹ Another part of the answer is found in the gentry’s contribution to the education question, along with other members of Catholic society, after their power as a social class had been eclipsed. This part is most relevant to the present book since education played the most important role in the evolution of the Catholic identity because it dominated Catholic interests from the restoration of the hierarchy until the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A survey of the Catholic press in that period bears witness to its thematic dominance. Whereas Bossy concludes that between 1780 and 1850 English Catholicism experienced several ‘processes’, all working towards the ‘creation of a complicated whole’,¹² this book will build upon and extend his conclusion. It will be argued that education was the major change mechanism or agent in the evolution of that ‘complicated whole’ – that new late nineteenth-century Catholic identity. The education question continued to transform the Catholic community fifty years beyond where Bossy ends his study, becoming the dominant issue of the last half of the century for the English Catholic Church. This was especially so for the hierarchy which picked up the mantle of leadership from the Catholic gentry and made education their top priority.

Since the decline of the gentry’s influence opened the door to other Catholic leaders and other Catholic influences, it is important to examine the other two dominant components of the Catholic population. The Oxford Movement converts who began to enter the ranks of English Catholicism in the 1840s can be viewed as one of the more obvious examples of the ‘Catholic advance’ in the nineteenth century. Emerging from the internal conflicts that plagued the Church of England in the early nineteenth century, Oxford converts were a diverse group. Many were men and women of education, public schooling and university, who held diverse religious and political opinions. They included eventual ultramontanes like Henry Edward Manning, William George Ward and Frederick Faber, as well as men like Newman and Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, both of whom exuded a less Roman, more independent style of Catholicism.¹³ Interestingly, women played a more substantial role in convert Catholicism compared with old English Catholicism, especially considering the many who funded, founded and joined the numerous religious orders that flourished in the century and added so much to the Catholic educational effort.¹⁴ One historian has interpreted the Oxford conversions as coming in two distinct waves. Earlier waves of converts associated with Newman consisted of those more closely tied into the Oxford intellectual nexus and were clergymen or had very close ties to that world. The later wave brought a wider variety of converts, from clergymen to business professionals to aristocratic women, all of whom converted for a myriad of reasons.¹⁵ It has also been argued that this later wave tended to draw more converts from nonconformity than from Anglicanism.¹⁶

While the converts were a small group, their contributions were significant, including social and intellectual standing and financial means. The initial wave of conversions convinced emerging ultramontanes like Wiseman that the conversion of England was a possibility, albeit a remote one. However, the energy they infused into the faith contributed to that overall confidence Catholicism began to exhibit after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, a confidence represented by their public call for that conversion. Lastly, converts also brought a high level of educational expectations from their Oxbridge experiences that, when applied to the current condition of Catholic education, caused them to question the seriousness and ability of English Catholicism to wage an effective battle for education. This was just one of the issues that led to the profound antagonism that developed between converts and old Catholics, a conflict, for example, carried out publicly in the pages of the Rambler. This vehicle of convert ideology consistently violated what old Catholics and burgeoning ultramontanes deemed acceptable. There is no question that consistent points of dissension about education existed between old Catholics and new from the middle until the last two decades of the century, plaguing the educational efforts of the Church. But afterwards, Catholics ended the century with a significant degree of unity, a significant result of the arduous struggle over education.

The Irish Catholics who emigrated to England are the final group.¹⁷ They began moving to Britain late in the eighteenth century in small but steady numbers. Three waves of Irish immigration occurred: around 1790, in the 1820s and in the 1840s. The ‘point of equilibrium’ between Irish and English Catholics throughout England occurred around 1818, with the percentage of native English Catholics dropping to 20 per cent by 1851.¹⁸ Irish immigrants to Britain tended to settle in three main areas – London, western Scotland and Lancashire – and, by 1851, were a predominantly urban phenomenon, with over 80 per cent living in towns with populations above 10,000.¹⁹ Much has been written about the immigrant Irish Catholics in England during the nineteenth century, which has helped to create a portrait of Irish Catholic identity. Generally, the Irish Catholic immigrants arrived poor, uneducated and unskilled in the labour market. Large numbers of Irish lived in squalid conditions in the industrial towns ridden with disease, overcrowding, alcoholism and a host of other social ills. Lynn Hollen Lees’s excellent urban history of the Irish community in London argues that the Irish practised self-segregation and existed in a sub-culture that resisted assimilation into English and English Catholic society. This occurred despite the wishes of the hierarchy, which wanted assimilation and the severing of their cultural attachment to the Irish countryside. Lees concludes that some practices, such as the use of the Irish language, were discarded but others, such as the wake, were continued, even against the wishes of the hierarchy, thus creating a unique community premised on pre-famine tradition as well as the changes that an alien, industrial and urban society forced upon them.²⁰ M. A. G. O’Tuathaigh also writes convincingly of Irish resistance to assimilation into English society, a resistance based on factors such as lack of education, proximity to home, disappointment of not making it to America, suspicion of the British and the belief that British meddling in Irish affairs caused them to leave in the first place. The Irish segregated themselves from the remainder of society, even Catholic society, purposely, and in this separation were likewise viewed with suspicion and disdain by not only their English Protestant neighbours, but their English Catholic co-religionists as well.²¹

Another more interesting attribute of Irish Catholic immigrants that has also received ample study is the nature of their Catholicism. The idea is a myth that all Irish Catholics regularly practised a robust, orthodox faith by virtue of their having come from a country that had remained Catholic after the tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Bossy argues, to assume that all Irish Catholic immigrants were assiduous churchgoers before they arrived and only fell into non-practice after experiencing the degradations of the English industrial town is to buy into the myth. His estimates put the rate of consistent religious practice at about 50 per cent for all Irish Catholic immigrants, no matter where they settled.²² Lees places this number at around 30 per cent in metropolitan London at mid-century.²³ The kind of Catholicism practised by immigrants relates to this argument. Both Bossy and Gerard Connolly dismiss the notion that Irish Catholicism in the form of Irish immigration inspired and saved a dispirited English Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Connolly argues that the opposite was true; Irish Catholic immigration actually weakened a thriving English Catholicism on account of Irish non-practice of many of the sacraments and non-attendance at chapel.²⁴ Bossy adds that Irish Catholicism bordered on the nature of being a ‘folk religion, barely touched by the counter-Reformation … and unfamiliar with the obligations of regular religious observance and sacramental practice’, a thesis first developed by Emmet Larkin, who argued that Irish Catholicism did not begin its ‘devotional revolution’ until after the famine and under the direction of Archbishop Paul Cullen.²⁵ Larkin’s thesis, however, has been judiciously countered by Thomas McGrath, who saw in Ireland not a post-famine ‘devotional revolution’, but the last stages of Tridentine reforms that had been delayed in Ireland due to the penal laws.²⁶ Into this heady historiographical mix is added the notion that although regular attendance at Mass and adherence to the sacraments were lacking, one cannot discount the Irish immigrants’ strong psychological attachment to the Catholic Church, even if that attachment was loose enough to cause a decline in religiosity.²⁷ Clearly, the Irish dimension presented an enigmatic challenge to Church leaders in England, especially since their sheer numbers, most in dire poverty, required the greatest attention and use of Church resources.

If the Roman Catholic communities had little in common with one another besides their faith, the challenge for the Church would be to unite these disparate groups so that English Catholicism could benefit from their collective strength rather than be hindered by their respective differences. The one iss...