FREEDOM AND CONVERSION
THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE

Marvin R. O'Connell^(*)
©Copyright 1993, Texas Catholic Historical Society.
May not be reproduced mechanically or electronically without permission of Catholic Southwest.

The portrayals in Mozart's operas of ladies of high fashion seldom come off very well from a dramatic point of view. It seems as though neither the composer nor his various librettists were completely at ease in depicting female members of the upper classes. This goes without saying about the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte. But it also appears to have been the case with the countess in Figaro and, most particularly, with Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. Indeed, Donna Anna, invariably sung by a stout soprano with the voice of an angel, stands in the middle of the stage and utters a series of verbal banalities set to some of the most gorgeous music ever written.

The story is quite different when the maestro presents us with feminine characters he would have called, since he lived in less-decorous times than ours, his honest wenches. The vibrant Susanna in Figaro makes the case persuasively even more so does the peasant coquette, Zerlina, in Don Giovanni. Contrast the sprightly serving maid, Blonde, with her neurasthenic mistress, Constanze, in Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Perhaps Peter Shaffer, in his celebrated Amadeus, was correct in making of Mozart a boorish guttersnipe who had been nevertheless unaccountably imbued with a genuinely divine genius.

So at any rate, in Shaffer's version, Antonio Salieri thought--the envious Salieri, dedicated to the proprieties of the class system of the ancien regime, which, like his own music, has long since passed away. By contrast the maid Blonde, in Die Entfûhrung, gave utterance about halfway through the opera to a reality that has proved enduring. The chief guardian of the harem, the brute, Osmin, had taken a fancy to Blonde and told her he intended to make her his personal slave. "Thy

slave?" she exclaimed. "I, thy slave? I am an English girl, born free; and I defy anyone who seeks to enslave me."⁽¹⁾

Nobody in the Viennese audience that heard the first performance of the opera, on 16 July 1782, would have been startled by Blonde's assertion. It was a truism, even then, that English men and women were singularly "born free," that they enjoyed a measure of self-determination unmatched anywhere else in the world--and this, significantly, a full half-century before the great Reform Act of 1832, which was England's first hesitant step toward modern democracy. In that Viennese opera house, there must have been some listening to Blonde's saucy rejoinder to the loutish Osmin, who were at least vaguely aware that across the ocean a war was winding down, a war fought by one group of Englishmen against another on the principle that "taxation without representation is tyranny."

The perfidies of perfidious Albion, to be sure, are writ large in the book of life, for all to see who would see. The English have no corner on virtue, and their vices are no less vicious than those of other peoples. In the cultivation of individual rights, however, the English have had no peers in the history of the world. In none of the polities so often praised by historians for their liberality--neither in the splendid city-states of renaissance Italy, nor in the Roman republic during the fresh exuberance of its early days, nor even in the fabled Athens of Pericles--had people of every rank been able to take for granted their innate dignity and freedom as they could in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "These infernal Englishmen," groaned the Turk, Osmin; and Blonde, hands on hips, threw back her head and laughed at him.

Such was the fact in 1801 when John Henry Newman was born, and such was the fact forty-four years later when John Henry Newman, a free-born Englishman, became a Roman Catholic. Here it might be instructive to employ that admittedly slippery analytical tool of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If so, let the English regard for individual freedom serve as a thesis, never better stated than by England's greatest poet: "Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own."⁽²⁾Nor would it be difficult to suggest an antithesis. Nothing has so permeated English culture since the Reformation as its dismay at, its fear

of, its revulsion at, and its hatred for Catholicism. Not of course contemporary, post-Christian Britain, where indifference to religious matters is matched at this day only perhaps in chilly Scandinavia; and such indifference offers as a happy by-product benign neglect to those peculiar few who choose to practice a religion, even the once-dreaded popery. This was hardly the case on that day in early October, 1845, a day of mist and driving rain, when the Italian Passionist, Domenico Barbieri, walked out from Oxford to Littlemore, heard Newman's confession and witnessed his profession of Catholic faith, made, the priest recalled, "with such fervor and piety that I was almost out of myself with joy."⁽³⁾

Newman's act appeared to most of his English contemporaries as a piece of treason, a "perversion" rather than a conversion, as one of his erstwhile Anglican disciples expressed it. Another clergyman, his colleague at Oriel College, Oxford, for twenty years, hoped that Newman "may still be saved from some of the worst errors of the Church of Rome, praying to human mediators or falling down before images."⁽⁴⁾ To become a Catholic was tantamount to repudiating one's English birthright. This assumption had little to do with specific doctrines or practices but was rather a prejudice bred into English bones and hearts and minds since the Reformation or, more precisely, since the days of Elizabeth I.

Indeed good Queen Bess serves as an appropriate transition between thesis and antithesis; for it was she who proclaimed that she had no desire to peer into her subjects' souls to discover what they believed; and yet it was she also who, at the same time, demanded that her subjects, whatever they believed, conform to a Protestant creed and practice a Protestant worship. Upon those who refused she imposed at first monetary fines, then imprisonment, and finally torture and a hideously painful and humiliating death. Through a series of formal statutes Queen Elizabeth's parliaments redefined treason in a manner unknown in the west between the regimes of Diocletian and Lenin: thus, to receive priestly ordination or to celebrate mass in England or to give shelter to a priest who said mass or simply to be reconciled to the Catholic faith

were all capital crimes of lese majeste, for which 183 of the queen's subjects were hanged, drawn, and quartered.⁽⁵⁾ To be proscribed in Elizabeth's England it was enough simply to be a Catholic, as it was, later, enough simply to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

To be sure, it would be feckless to ignore that during this harsh sixteenth century, and over the centuries that followed, confessional conflicts were the rule rather than the exception. This was the age when, as Sir John Neale put it, religion provided the same kind of ideological fervor that communism and fascism and liberalism have provided in our own time.⁽⁶⁾ One conspiracy after another against Queen Elizabeth and her successors was hatched by continental Catholics from the pope on down. England entered into a century-long contest with Catholic Spain and then with Catholic France. The Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the misadventures and connivings of two English Catholic kings--Charles II secretly and James II openly and awkwardly--confirmed in the mind of the Englishman that Catholicism was, as the official propaganda relentlessly told him, not merely mummery and priestcraft but a threat to his hearth and home.

Never far away--only the few miles across the misty Irish sea--lay the land that would constantly prey upon the consciences of English men and women, unless they could convince themselves that stubborn loyalty to the old religion was proof enough of Celtic barbarism and racial inferiority. So they drank the "Orange toast" to the Protestant king who helped reduce Catholic Ireland to that state of servitude and penury that has poisoned relations between the two peoples down to our own day: "To the immortal memory of good King William III, who saved us from popery, slavery, and wooden shoes."

The cry of "No popery!" unfailingly brought the mob into English streets, burning and pillaging, whether egged on by the lies of Titus Oates or by the grotesque fantasies of Lord George Gordon or by the absurd charge of "papal aggression" in 1850, five years after Newman's conversion. So the generations passed, and numberless English nannies frightened the recalcitrant children under their charge with the threat that, if they continued to be naughty, some sly Jesuit, like Thackery's

Father Holt,⁽⁷⁾ would creep into their affections and then corrupt them body and soul. Nor was it the mob and the nursery only: how else explain but by reason of a national delusion that a member of the academic elite--an intimate of Newman with whom he had shared the Oriel high table and common room for over two decades--could have supposed his colleague, the pride of Oxford, capable of "falling down before images"?

So there is thesis set over against antithesis, both well tried and documented. For synthesis, why not Newman's conversion itself? Leaving aside all confessional considerations and also those aspects of individual genius that attach to his person, we can see that no one represented the ideals of English life better than Newman did. Indeed, one sometimes gets the impression that he was too good to be true--too good, that is, in the way in which fiction and films, from Henry Esmondto The Bridge on the River Kwai--have glamorized conceptions of English courage, honor, steadfastness, truthfulness. Was it not over snide allusions questioning his respect for the truth that brought Newman out like a roaring lion seeking to devour Charles Kingsley and that produced that superb autobiography, the Apologia pro Vita sua? Newman resented Kingsley's insinuations because he was a Catholic, to be sure, but also--and perhaps even more so--because he was an English gentleman. In his tastes and personal habits, in his hearty if measured patriotism, in his friendships, even in the wonderful uses he made of his native language, and--most to the point here--in his reverence for individual freedom and free inquiry, Newman demonstrated his unabashed love for "England's green and pleasant land."⁽⁸⁾And when, on that dreary day in October 1845, he freely assented to what he conceived to be eternal truth, far from considering that act as somehow unEnglish, he looked upon it as fulfilling the highest aspirations of his race; for he, like the serving-wench, Blonde, was English, and therefore "born free."

Newman was not without his precursors. There appeared to be, even in the darkest days of persecution and legal exclusion, a kind of nostalgia--to put no more grand a title to it--for the old religion, especially among intellectuals. During the reign of Elizabeth I the

composer, William Byrd, often called the Father of English music, became a Catholic, as did Edmund Plowden, the most distinguished jurist of his age. Of the 123 priests executed by Elizabeth, forty were graduates of Oxford, as undergraduate and don, a level of esteem matched in the whole history of the university only by Newman two and a half centuries later. The queen herself was charmed by Edmund Campion, and her chief minister called him "one of the diamonds of England"; but they racked him nonetheless and killed him and mutilated his dead body.

A century later this sort of bloodthirstiness was out of fashion, though the proscription of Catholics continued as rigidly as ever. When John Dryden freely assented to the Catholic claims, he lost not his life but his livelihood and his position as laureate of England. Note well, it is not Richard Lovelace or Sir John Suckling or some other forgotten versifier spoken of here, but Dryden, one of the great poets in the language, who described the embattled Catholic community he had joined, at such worldly loss to himself, as "a milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged."⁽⁹⁾ Alexander Pope, who met Dryden when he, Pope, was a boy, was born and died a Catholic, though it can scarcely be said that he did much about it in between. The precocious Edward Gibbon, chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Joined the Catholic Church briefly while an undergraduate at Oxford, more, however, to annoy his father than for any really substantive reason.⁽¹⁰⁾The case with James Boswell was quite otherwise. The author of the most famous of all biographies was received into the church secretly when he was a young man, and for the rest of his life, whenever feeling guilty at one of his frequent bouts of drunkenness or of sexual excess--or perhaps feeling weary after recording Dr. Johnson's latest tedious monologue--he renewed his intention, never fulfilled of course, of retiring to a French monastery.⁽¹¹⁾ Only a few years before Newman's conversion, Augustus Welby Pugin the architect became a Catholic; the imprint of his neo-

Gothic genius can still be seen in scores of churches across the land and, most familiarly, in the houses of parliament along the Thames.

These were all persons of great distinction, freeborn Englishmen who assented to the claims of Catholicism at high cost to themselves. Newman's conversion, however, marked a watershed; what had been a rivulet turned into a flood as the Oxford Movement--what Newman called "the religious movement of 1833"⁽¹²⁾--split in two, with hundreds and eventually thousands belonging to the educated classes abandoning their former allegiance for a new one. It was--to quote Newman again-- "the parting of friends,"⁽¹³⁾ and those who sorrowfully left the house of their fathers had reason to dread the cold and darkness outside.

Instead they came to share in English Catholicism's second spring. And that spring bloomed for all of England as the years passed, and many of the best and brightest of her sons and daughters exercised their own freedom by embracing the old religion. Hope-Scott, Bellasis, and Badeley, Faber and W. G. Ward and Frederick Oakeley, the brothers Wilberforce--these and so many other intimates of Newman did not put off their Englishness, nor fail to enrich the larger society around them. Any allusion to social amelioration must immediately bring before the mind the name of Henry Edward Manning, sometime fellow of Merton College, Oxford, sometime archdeacon of Chicester, cardinal-archbishop of Westminster. No love was lost between him and Newman, but the clash of their strong personalities may perhaps be best seen at this distance of time as a token of the vitality of the second spring. At any rate their last meeting had a fine poignancy; by then they were withered old men, wrapped in cardinals' scarlet as they assisted at the funeral of the dowager Duchess of Norfolk. "What do you think Manning did?" Newman said to a friend afterward. "He kissed me!"⁽¹⁴⁾ One may doubt that the touch of those thin lips was more than a gesture of courtesy from one prince of the church to another, but if one doubts that Manning, in

the incredible multiplicity of his good works, ranks among the greatest ecclesiastical statesmen who ever lived, one should first reflect upon the hundreds of thousands of London poor who, many of them weeping, lined the route of his funeral procession.

Manning too, of course, had been deeply influenced by Newman in their Anglican days, and so even he must be included among those for whom Newman's conversion was, in the present context, an act of synthesis. The roll continued into the next generation and beyond. In 1866 the young Gerard Manley Hopkins was received into the church by Newman himself.⁽¹⁵⁾ Hopkins became during his brief career the finest English poet since--dare one say it?--Dryden. All these superlatives, and particularly this last comparison, may seem a misuse of hyperbole or perhaps a bit of old-fashioned apologetic frenzy. But jump forward in time. Has anyone written better novels in English during the twentieth century than the converts Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene? No one disputes that Brideshead Revisited and The Heart of the Matter are classics--classics at once English and Catholic. Now that Olivier is dead, is there a more accomplished actor in the English-speaking world than Alec Guinness?

This movement to Rome of a small but qualitatively significant portion of the English elite began with Newman's conversion, which was rooted, if one may say so without presumption, in the agony of indecision and alienation that absorbed his last years as an Anglican. Each of those who took the same difficult step that he did--whether directly influenced by him or not--reenacted, so to speak, the same scene of personal Golgotha-- "a deathbed," as he poignantly described it. It is no small thing to risk life and limb for one's beliefs, like Campion, or a prosperous career, like Dryden, or, in softer times, the good opinion of one's peers and friends: Bernard Shaw dismissed G. K. Chesterton's conversion as "a startling gesture,' which possessed, claimed the ever-cynical Shaw, not a shred of intellectual content.⁽¹⁶⁾ But Newman had foreseen all these vicissitudes. "To set up the Church again in England," he said in 1852,

is too great an act to be done in a corner. We have had reason to expect that such a boon would not be given to us without a cross. . . . Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the spring-time of the Church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering--of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms.⁽¹⁷⁾

Each of these acts of English free assent was of course unique and proper to the person involved. In the case of Alice Meynell the movement to Catholicism was quiet and subtle, a reflection almost of that fine poet's verse. The bohemian artist Eric Gill, by contrast, wrestled as fiercely with the problems of faith as Jacob did with the angel, and Gill had to contend with his ferocious sexual drives as well. The poet and critic Coventry Patmore also mixed religion with sexuality, but he, the most uxorious of men, was attracted to Catholicism because of its idealization of conjugal love. There were cerebral converts like Christopher Dawson and Outram-Evennet, visionaries like Barbara Ward, minstrels like Maurice Baring. With them stood still another luminary of Oxford, Ronald Knox, son of an Anglican bishop, a scholar and a litterateur at once learned and playful, whose simple goodness won the heart of that very British establishment he had himself forsaken. "Ronnie Knox was . . . the only man I ever knew," Harold Macmillan recalled toward the end of his long life, "who really was a saint." After a pause, the old prime minister added, "He was a little bit like Newman."⁽¹⁸⁾

They were all a little bit like Newman.

It is very improbable that Newman ever heard a performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. He was, after all, a rather strait-laced Victorian clergyman and therefore not likely to have been a frequenter of opera houses. Besides, he was temperamentally less in sympathy with the tinkling melodies of Mozart, so characteristic in their neatness and mathematical precision of the self-confidence of the Enlightenment, than he was with the dark, moody themes of Beethoven. Beethoven had a sense of sin entirely lacking in Mozart, as it was lacking in Blonde as she teased and taunted the wretched Osmin. Newman would have appreciated

wholeheartedly Blonde's assertion of her title to liberty as an Englishwoman. He would have insisted, however, that freedom of itself is not enough. One is free so that one can assent to a truth that can carry one beyond the stars. So he sang his own love song to England, and he called it "Home."

Where'er I roam in this fair English land
The vision of a Temple meets my eyes;
Modest without; within, all glorious rise
Its love-encluster's columns, and expand
Their slender arms. Like olive-plants they stand
Each answ'ring each, in home's soft sympathies,
Sisters and brothers. At the altar sighs
Parental fondness, and with anxious hand
Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers.
The same, and not the same, go where I will,
The vision beams! ten thousand shrines, all one.
Dear fertile soil! what foreign culture bears
Such fruit? And I through distant climes may run
My weary round, yet miss thy likeness still.⁽¹⁹⁾

Notes

*. Marvin R. O'Connell is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

1. W.A. Mozart, Die Entfûhrung aus dem Sarail, act 2, scene 1.

2. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, act 4, scene 1.

3. Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (London, 1962), 359.

4. Marvin R. O'Connel, The Oxford Conspirators. A History of the Oxford Movement, 1833-1845 (New York, 1969), 414, 419-21.

5. For an analysis see Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 3 vols. (New York, 1954), 3: 338-49.

6. John Neale, The Age of Catherine de' Medici, (London, 1951), 63.

7. William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond(London, 1852).

8. William Blake, Milton (London, 1804).

9. John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (London, 1687).

10. Patricia B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon (Baltimore, 1982), 49-52.

11. See Derek Jarrett, "Guilt-edged Insecurity," The New York Review of Books, 37 (April 26, 1990): 11-3.

12. J. H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita sua, ed. by Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), 43.

13. The title of the last sermon Newman preached as an Anglican. See Sermons Bearing on the Subjects of the Day (London, 1902), 395­409.

14. Marvin R. O'Connell, "Newman: the Victorian Intellectual as Pastor," Theological Studies, 46 (June, 1985): 342.

15. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman. A Biography (Oxford, 1988), 595.

16. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw. Vol. 2: The Pursuit of Power(London, 1989), 219.

17. J. H. Newman, "The Second Spring," Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London, 1921), 178-80.

18. Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan, 2 vols. (London, 1988) 1: 18.

19. J. H. Newman, "Home" (1832), Verses on Various Occasions(London, 1918), 62.