Lady Thatcher at the Oxford Union

Last night was the farewell debate of the Oxford Union and the retiring President gave it a Falklands theme, having been spent part of her upbringing in the islands. Nonetheless it was something of a surprise to see Lady Thatcher in the Union bar, resplendent in blue and pearls as in those heady days of 1982. the distinctive husky voice, the authoritative manner and the handbag were all in evidence.

Now I do not want to mislead you too far, this was not actually the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven LG, OM, but a former President of OUCA attired in the persona - and I must add that the young man concerned made a very good effort in the part. Almost worryingly so, considering how well he managed to walk in high heels, though he did admit to having bought them and then dashed from the shop concerned. So last night the unwary could have seem the Lady herself in the Oxford Union bar, pint of ale in hand, or standing with said pint smoking a cheroot in the gardens. The Oxford Union, where else?

Photographs were being taken - I will track one down, dear readers.

Lead Kindly Light

Supremacy and Survival had this post yesterday, which as an Orielensis caught my eye, and which may interest others in this year of Newman's beatification.

June 16, 1833--Newman's Journey Home

On June 16, 1833, John Henry Newman was finally returning to England, eager to take up a new cause. He had been travelling on the Continent for eight months and had been deathly ill in Sicily.
He described the circumstances of writing the poem "Lead, Kindly Light" which he first called "The Pillar of the Cloud" referring to the journey of the Hebrew people guided in the desert thus:

Before starting from my inn, I sat down on my bed and began to sob bitterly. My servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer, "I have a work to do in England." I was aching to get home, yet for want of a vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the churches, and they calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. At last I got off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. We were becalmed for whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio, and it was there that I wrote the lines, Lead, Kindly Light, which have since become so well known.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that
Thou Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now,
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

Newman would find that work to do within a month of writing this poem when he heard Keble's "National Apostacy" sermon on July 14, 1833: The Tractarian or Oxford Movement!

The blogger, Stephanie Mann, adds that last year whilst in Oxford she was unable to tour Oriel College, it being closed to visitors every time she called in. She wanted to see the stained glass window pictured above (at least to see the details as described in the piece from the college website). I was a college Bible Clerk for part of the time when the window was being made and installed - we began to wonder if it would ever appear. There was a lavish Evensong and dinner to mark its dedication. The window is a fine piece of work and worth seeing if you do have the opportunity.

It occurs to me that depending how you pronounce Lead in relation to the window Lead Kindly Light  could apply  to the glazing, but that is just me being silly...

Charles Waterton

The Lion And The Cardinal, always a wonderful source of visual images, had this rather splendid piece on Charles Waterton on June 9th, and I have ventured to copy and comment on it, as I have several reasons to be interested in this remarkable and endearing nineteenth century naturalist and pioneer concervationist.

First of all he was from Wakefield, my home area. Secondly I might have been born in what had been his home, Walton Hall on the outskirts of the city and which was used in the years before my birth as a maternity hospital as it was I was born in another hospital on the site of the battle of Wakefield - which may, conceivably, explain in some way my late-medieval interests.

Thirdly Waterton was descended from Robert Waterton (d.1425) and his second wife, Cicely, the sister of Bishop Richard Fleming, so he ties in with my thesis, however remotely - though I doubt if he will make it to more than a footnote.

Fourthly Waterton was a Catholic of recusant stock; his son, Edmund, wrote the earliest, or one of the earliest studies of English medieval devotion to Our Lady - a piece valuable in itself and a part of that process whereby historians have helped recover the Catholic life of pre-Reformation England.

Fifthly he played, I suspect, a small part in my conversion. Sometime after I came to Oxford I came across a copy of the modern biography of Waterton, and remember sitting in Oriel MCR reading about Waterton's funeral in 1865, and being struck by the way the Mass was conceived by Waterton and his family as a Thing of itself, something that stands in its own right as the act of propitiation and salvation. Though not a new idea to me as an Anglo-Catholic, I do recall the impact the way the concept was presented had on my mind, and I suspect confirmed and encouraged all those right instincts which eventually brought me to be in the same Communion as Charles Waterton.



Chelonian Research Institute:

The Victorian period was also a time of profound and cultivated eccentricity. For example, the English explorer Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a passionate aristocratic Catholic in a Protestant-dominated society, who sported a short crewcut in a society of Victorian hirsute extravagance, had his home in Yorkshire made into a museum with such exhibits as The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated, in which preserved reptiles were contorted into caricatures of famous Protestants. Waterton's idiosyncrasies were so profound and far-reaching as to border on actual insanity. But his was a fine madness - a creative and extraordinarily frolicsome spirit combined with genuine originality, true religious faith, a decidedly experimental approach to problem-solving, and a great capacity for affection, sympathy and passionate love. Perhaps it all had something to do with his ancestry - his documented ancestors included seven saints (Vladimir the Great; Anne of Russia; the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb; King Stephen of Hungary; Queen Margaret of Scotland; and Mathilde of Germany, not counting Sir Thomas More, executed in 1535, who was not canonized until 1935; nor Count Humbert III of Savoy, King Ferdinand III of Castile and Louis IX of France, whose relationships with Waterton hinge upon an alleged 15th-century marriage), and four historical individuals portrayed in the plays of Shakespeare.

Certainly, it seems that only England could have produced a Waterton. The Squire, as he was always called, set up a nature reserve, mainly for waterfowl, on his estate near Wakefield, and experimented extensively with jumping foxes to determine how high the walls should be to exclude these predators (the answer was nine feet). Having fallen off a ladder while climbing a tree when he was in his seventies, he concluded with his own peculiar logic that ladders were dangerous and he should thenceforth climb trees without them. And when his doctor told him to place his injured foot under running water, Waterton, on tour in America at the time, travelled to Niagara and stuck the limb in question under the famous falls, on the theory that, if one pill is good, two will be better.

And most touching of all was his marriage. Waterton was in the habit of travelling to Demerara (now part of Guyana) every few years, and it was on one of these trips that he attended the Baptism of a beautiful baby, the daughter of an Arawak princess (and fathered by an English colleague of his by the name of Charles Edmonstone). He fell in love with the infant, checked on her growth and progress in the course of periodic subsequent trips to Demerara, and finally, when she was seventeen, he took her to England and married her. The bride, despite her extreme youth, proved to be a dignified and respected lady of the manor, but tragically she died in childbirth just one year later. Waterton was so devastated that he actually slept on the floor every night for the rest of his life, with just a thin blanket and a wooden block for a pillow. His rationale was a serious one of self-penance; he felt responsible for her death from puerpural sepsis, attributing it to bacteria from dead specimens that he handled and kept in the house, and he earnestly wanted to earn the privilege of being re-united with her in Heaven. But his public statement about his new sleeping habits was, as ever, a joke. He explained that, at least when travelling, you never knew who had been the last user of a bed that was offered. While it could conceivably have been some lovely form divine like his late wife, it is just as likely to have been some horrid alderman... a rough-skinned, pimpled victim to turtle soup and Curacao (the liqueur, not the island).

Waterton's playful side inevitably intruded into his role as Museum Director, and he was responsible for producing not only the famous gallery of distorted Protestant reptiles, but also for a weird specimen, laboriously fashioned from the backside of a hirsute howler monkey into a somewhat humanoid countenance, that he dubbed The Nondescript. But more seriously, he developed a methodology for dry preservation and mounting of vertebrates that involved complete removal of the skeleton, muscles and viscera, stiffening and preservation of the integument with corrosive sublimate, and artistic replication and coloring of features likely to prove unstable if not so treated. The specimens are still in the Wakefield Museum, marvelously intact, and bearing mute testimony to the excellence of the Walton Technique.

Sally Shelton:

He abhorred scientific nomenclature, John James Audubon (whom he called a charlatan), Protestants, Hanoverians, Hanoverian Protestants, rats (the presence of which in England he blamed on the Hanoverian Protestants), and, late in life, Charles Darwin; he loved the natural world, birds, taxidermy, and practical jokes.

More information about Waterton from the Catholic Encyclopaedia is here, and about his books and biographies of him here, and here.


Taxidermic caricature of Martin Luther


The Nondescript


John Bull and the National Debt

Another blog to read

My friend and fellow Oratorian Brother David Forster has drawn my attention to a new blog by Arthur Crumly. I have met Arthur on a couple of occasions and he has a wealth of experience as a server and MC in the Traditional rite which has been built up over decades of faithful service. He is now sharing that expertise with others through this new venture, The Blog of Arthur Crumly. I have added it to the blogroll as Arthur Crumly blog so as to fit my listings style.

He is very much to be commended in that as a means of sharing his knowledge and helping to ensure the survival of good liturgical practice.

Envisaging the past

The other day I reproduced a reconstruction of the monastic buildings at Dorchester by Dominic Andrews from his site www.archeoart.co.uk .

This is a very attractive source of historical reconstructions. I have always been drawn to such workd, and as a boy used to attempt drawings of the castle, priory, and other vanished buildings in my home town - as the title of the blog says, once I was a clever boy...but enough about me.

Here are one or two more examples of Dominic Andrews' work, chosen because they reflect my own high medieval enthusiasms - there are many more on his site from earlier and later periods.

Lewes castle in Sussex, in 1340, looking northwest

Clun Castle, Shropshire, seen around 1300. © English Heritage

In the sixteenth century, Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was stuck by lightning, causing the spire and tower to fall and demolish half the church.

The 431 feet tall spire, taller than that of Salisbury cathedral (404 feet), and the tower it was built upon, collapsed in a storm around 1500 destroying much of the church, including part of the nave and the transept. The choir was a casualty of the dissolution of the abbey. The west tower fell around 1550, demolishing the three western bays of the nave. This was probably due in part, as with the west tower of Hereford cathedral which collapsed in 1786, to it having been up on pre-existing arcades and walls rather than from the ground on solid foundations. As a result of these two collapses less than a half of the original building stands today. The white part on this other reconstruction drawing shows how much, or perhaps one should say how little, survives of the abbey church today, and can be compared with the photograph of the building:

All of which makes one realise something of what we have lost since the medieval period, which is, of course, an aim of artists who do such work.

New Blogs

Browsing through the internet continues to turn up interesting blogs. I came across Le Fleur de Lys too recently. This is devoted, as its name suggests, to the French Royalist cause, in the person of King Louis XX rather than King Henri VII, and has some very interesting posts. I thought it a little unfair in picking up a Daily Mail report on the Prince of Wales' recent speech here in Oxford on Islam and the Environment, which sounds to have been innocuous enough, whilst discussing important ideas - but some people seem , quite unfairly, to take issue with whatever the Prince says or does. That aside the blog is very good and informative.

I also came across Supremacy and Survival which deals with English Reformation and recusant history. This follows a pattern of an anniversary of the day for its postings and has some good reminders of the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular - though today's is about G.K. Chesterton who died on June 14 1936. The postings about the Reformation era do raise a number of those what-might-have-been questions, which give one pause for thought.

I have added both to the blogroll.

Heraldry Society visit to Dorchester

Today I joined members of the Oxford University Heraldry Society on a visit to Dorchester on Thames.

Dorchester has a remarkable history. The bishopric established there in 634 by St Birinus began the conversion of Wessex and the mid-Thames valley. Had it remained the centre of the power of the Kings of Wessex, who, faced with Mercian pressure to the north, moved south to Winchester, it has been suggested it might have become the capital of England when the House of Wessex unified the kingdom three centuries later. Why St Birinus brought King Cynigils there for baptism, a journey of some twelve miles, and settled at Dorchester may well be explained not just by the fact that it had Roman remains which afforded shelter, but possibly or probably a continuing Christian presence. In addition there is evidence that long before the Romans what is now Dorchester was a Neolithic cult centre. The bishopric, with some intermissions remained there until 1072 when it was transferred to Lincoln, and the former cathedral re-established as an Augustinian priory of the Arrouaisian congregation.

Dorchester is a beautiful and charming small town, which has an old fashioned quality rare in modern England, but more than that, a sense of the numinous to those who reflect upon its history

Our first visit was to the abbey church. Here, despite preparations for a choral concert this evening, we had a guided tour of this extremely interesting building. Dorchester is a somewhat unusual survivor of a medium-sized monastic church from the middle ages - not on the scale of Tewkesbury or Sherborne, or those which became cathedrals. It has retained some wonderful specimens of medieval art - carvings, glass, tombs and brasses and wall paintings - some of the last only being recovered in the recent restoration. We also looked at the fine display of architectural fragments in the reconstructed cloister walk. This display was largely the work of a friend and fellow Orielensis, David Kendrick.

One thing that irritated was that the information boards in the abbey all referred to 'monks' being there in the period after 1072 until the Dissolution - but Dorchester was served by Augustinian canons - do they think their visitors so stupid that they cannot understand the subtle difference of nomenclature and function? It would be simple enough to explain.

Something that had appeared since my last visit to Dorchester was a rather fine reconstruction of the monastery as it might have been in the fourteenth century by Dominic Andrew - for his work look at www.archeoart.co.uk

We then moved over to the Catholic presbytery for tea and cakes on the lawn courtesy of Fr Osman, the parish priest, before visiting his wonderful church of St Birinus. Built in 1849 its website is St Birinus, Dorchester. In recent years Fr Osman has undertaken a marvellous work of restoration in the Puginesque church, and has enhanced it with much care and thought. Not least amongst this has been introducing a decorative scheme of heraldry reproducing the arms of benefactors of the abbey which still survive there or are recorded in Heraldic Visitations together with others from the recusant period as well as more recent contacts.

These were all described to us by Fr Mark Elvins OFM. Cap., Warden of Greyfriars in Oxford, and the inspirer of the revival of the Heraldry Society. As a pointer he used a crozier once owned by St Frideswide - well, one that once belonging to a statue of St Frideswide that was stolen some time ago from Greyfriars in Oxford. As we were leaving, Fr Elvins, who was providing me with a lift asked me to hold the crozier. Friends will not be surprised to learn that I immediately turned my cravat into a wimper with which to hold it.

Sung EF Mass at Milton Manor next Saturday

There will be a Sung Mass in the Extraordinary Form on Saturday 19th June at Milton Manor House at 11.30. It will be a Votive Mass of Our Lady.

There will be a polyphonic Ordinary provided by the Schola Abelis.

Milton Manor is a historic refuge for Catholics, including the great Bishop Challoner, who died there, and the private chapel is a fine example of 'Strawberry Hill Gothick'. It is very much worth a visit.

In addition the Sung Sunday Mass on 11th July in SS Gregory and Augustine's in Oxford, at 10.30, will be in the Extraordinary Form.