I

Leading Victorian clergy, like their upper-middle-class lay peers, were often indefatigable travellers. Their diaries, letters and other writings testify to a fascination with all things continental that belies the common supposition that they largely ignored developments across the Channel. Admittedly this runs counter to the impression often given in historical writing. For a long time it was almost a scholarly commonplace that the British Churches in the early and mid-nineteenth century had stood aloof. Separated by water, language, distinct economic and social development, and a cultural suspicion of all things foreign that prefigured the ‘splendid isolation’ of British foreign policy in the second half of the century, it was assumed that British Christians had shown little interest in the continent, stoutly resisting many of the intellectual influences stemming from theologians there.Footnote ¹ The conservatism of British biblical criticism was often cited as evidence.Footnote ² So too was the strong current of popular anti-Catholic opinion.Footnote ³ The theory of separate development was often implied rather than openly stated, however, simply through a failure to consider continental influences as they may have influenced British churchmen.Footnote ⁴ Movements in British church history were seen as ‘sui generis’, either unaffected directly by what was happening across the Channel or, if affected, largely so in reaction against developments in continental Protestantism as well as Catholicism. This was true even for historians of the High Church revival in Anglicanism, for whom the temptation was often to view High Church Anglicanism as the central strand of an ‘English religious tradition’ that could be expressed and understood largely on its own terms.Footnote ⁵

This article uses travel accounts to support and broaden the trend in recent scholarly work which has undermined this embedded narrative of isolation. Reassessment has been under way for some time. Building on the pioneering work of W. R. Ward, who reawakened interest in the continental roots of the Evangelical Revival, historians have begun to rediscover contacts between British Evangelicals and the continental Reformed and Lutheran Churches.Footnote ⁶ The formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846, and the network of continental contacts that it drew together, have been studied by Timothy Stunt; others have drawn attention to the work of the Bible Societies.Footnote ⁷ In relation to High Churchmanship specifically, revision of the ‘separate development’ view has also begun. Connections between the Oxford Movement and French Catholicism have sometimes been noted, if rarely explored in depth until recently.Footnote ⁸ The use made by Pusey and others of French devotional manuals again is noted by a number of historians and, in an often overlooked work, R. W. Franklin has shown strong threads of connection between the Catholic Tübingen school of Drey, Moehler and Hirscher, the liturgical theology and practice of Prosper Guéranger, and the Oxford Movement.Footnote ⁹ These are disparate strands, but they suggest that the presumed ‘splendid isolation’ of British church history is not quite what it seems. However distinct Britain may have been, nevertheless British church life was open to developments on the continent of Europe at many different levels. By implication, many aspects of the High Church revival in Anglicanism cannot readily be understood without some consideration of the broader continental context.

Travel literature written or published by clergy in the nineteenth century raises a number of questions pertinent to general explanations of the High Church revival. First, was there a difference between the impressions of those High Churchmen who subsequently converted to Rome, and those who did not? Second, in the case of those who did subsequently convert, what evidence is there that travel was instrumental in the process of conversion? Third, did continental church tourism, and travel in a more general sense, help to shape the views of High Anglicans on theology, ritual and liturgy? These questions will be addressed after a discussion of the scope and range of this source material, and then of the three most extensive published accounts.

Consideration of the source material inevitably must start with that which was published in book form. Some of this was once sufficiently well known to have drawn the attention of biographers. Edmund Purcell, the biographer of Henry Manning, noted in particular the published accounts by Thomas Allies and Frederick Faber, both of whom subsequently converted.Footnote ¹⁰ Allies and Faber were not unique, however. Driven partly by the Tractarians' refocusing of interest on Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy via the ‘apostolic paradigm’, in Paul Avis's phrase, other High Churchmen were also travelling the continent, touring churches, making contacts with church leaders and attempting to interpret what they found.Footnote ¹¹ Christopher Wordsworth's Diary in France (1845) was another example, as was his later Notes at Paris (1854).Footnote ¹² So too was Arthur Perceval's Results of an ecclesiastical tour in Holland and northern Germany (1846).Footnote ¹³ A little later, Malcolm MacColl wrote at length of his visit to Oberammergau in Bavaria to see the passion play; so too did Henry Scott Holland.Footnote ¹⁴ J. M. Neale, co-founder of the Camden Society, travelled extensively on the continent studying Gothic church architecture, but also undertook several tours specifically to examine the religious life of overseas Churches, including research trips to the Netherlands and to Scandinavia.Footnote ¹⁵ His Notes, ecclesiological and picturesque (1861), drew on a visit to the Balkans in 1860 accompanied by Joseph Oldknow, himself another published traveller and church observer.Footnote ¹⁶ Benjamin Webb, another leading Ecclesiologist, was instrumental in refocusing the society's interests on continental examples of church architecture.Footnote ¹⁷

Alongside these accounts, there are also the letters and travel diaries of British churchmen posthumously published in memoirs. More selective and more diffuse, nevertheless they are more numerous. The invention of the steamboat and steam train made the business of continental travel both cheaper and easier than it had been in the great age of the ‘Grand Tour’. Given the relative affluence of the upper ranks of the Victorian clergy, it comes as no surprise that many of them also toured the continent.Footnote ¹⁸ The young Henry Liddon, later canon of St Paul's, did so in late 1851, keeping extensive travel diaries, and visiting churches, for everywhere, his biographer observed, ‘he notes with interest the Church life’.Footnote ¹⁹ Later journeys took him back to France (many times), Italy and Switzerland, Russia, Bavaria (he was there to see the Oberammergau passion play at the same time as MacColl and Holland), Bonn for the reunion conferences with the Old Catholics, the Balkans, and the Low Countries, as well as the Middle East.Footnote ²⁰ A typical six-week tour in 1865 took in Brussels, Trèves, Freihof, Nuremberg, Munich, Salzburg, Gölling, Radstadt, Villach, Trieste, Venice, Padua, Verona, Brescia, Bellagio, Lugano, Lucerne, Basle and Paris.Footnote ²¹ That was his second overseas trip that year: an earlier one had taken him to Pau, via Paris, Poitiers and Bordeaux, in order to give the Holy Week addresses to the English congregation.Footnote ²² Few English churchmen can have been as well informed about French church affairs as was Liddon. Breaking into conversation with an abbé whom he met on the train to Bordeaux, for example, he noted that the abbé ‘argued that there was not much difference between the 2 churches, & that all would be reunited in no distant time. He thought that the attacks of infidelity would help to produce this result’.Footnote ²³

Another frequent traveller was R. W. Church, dean of St Paul's, who spent most of his early youth on the continent, especially in Italy.Footnote ²⁴ Trips mentioned in the Life included a long vacation in Belgium and Germany in 1839 with Frederick Faber and A. P. Stanley, a few weeks in Brittany in 1844 with Frederic Rogers, almost a whole year abroad in Greece and Italy in 1847 and early 1848 (some sixty-nine pages are devoted to it), a summer in France in 1862, almost annual Alpine holidays from 1866, a trip to Italy in 1875, again to Italy as well as Germany and Austria in 1883, and again to Italy in 1885.Footnote ²⁵

These are just a few indicative examples of the scale of continental tourism undertaken by many High Churchmen in the nineteenth century. There are many more – indeed, so many that the non-travelling senior Anglican clergyman has to be considered something of a rarity in the period.Footnote ²⁶ Certainly, other Anglicans than High Churchmen were also touring the continent and writing about their experiences, including William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Evangelical Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury.Footnote ²⁷ Alford's Life records numerous trips abroad.Footnote ²⁸ His 1862 tour, for example, took in at least twenty-two different European cities.Footnote ²⁹ Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster and a Broad or Liberal Churchman, was an equally ardent traveller: a long summer tour was an almost annual occurrence with him, his interests driven as much by political and social matters as by church affairs.Footnote ³⁰ Another travelling Broad Churchman was George Ridding, the first bishop of Southwell and a man blessed with a large private income. Though the biography by his wife makes little of them, the manuscript addenda to her interleaved copy in the Bodleian Library lists no less than thirty-one trips abroad in the fifty years from 1852 to 1902.Footnote ³¹

With such a profusion of material available, this article is necessarily selective, focusing particularly on the reactions of High Churchmen to continental Catholicism, principally in France and Italy. It uses mostly the more extensive published accounts, yet draws wherever appropriate on wider material available in biographies and private papers. ‘High Church’ here, incidentally, is taken in a broad sense – ‘High’ as opposed to ‘Broad’ or ‘Low’ – to encompass not only the ‘orthodox’ High Churchmen studied by Peter Nockles, but also Tractarians, Anglo-Catholics and Ritualists.Footnote ³²

II

Prejudice about the practice and doctrine of Roman Catholicism on the continent of Europe was central to the controversies surrounding Tractarianism. Following the ‘branch’ ecclesiology epitomised by Palmer's Treatise, Tractarians acknowledged the Roman Church's theoretical apostolicity, but pointed out its apparent abandonment of the patristic regulum fidei in the latitude that it permitted to popular devotion. This distinction between theory and practice mirrored the distinction that they made themselves between the theory of Anglicanism, and the practice lacking in it. Newman, as is well known, came to accept the accusation that Anglican Catholicism (or ‘Anglicanism’) was but a ‘paper’ theory.Footnote ³³ Tractarian arguments, then, whether apologetic or critical, often relied on the presumption of a certain elasticity between teaching and popular devotion, opening up a wide range of differing reactions to continental Catholicism.

Most of the accounts to be explored here date from the late 1830s and 1840s, when the Tractarian controversy was at its height. Perhaps the best known journey of all is that of Newman himself, with Hurrell Froude and his father, Archdeacon Froude, through the Mediterranean from December 1832 to mid-1833. Newman especially appears to have left England with an acute sense of coming crisis about the Church of England: his experience of overseas travel was bound to lead him to reflect on the state of Anglican worship in comparison with that of continental Catholicism. As he wrote to his mother, his vacation was to be ‘a preparation and strengthening time for future toil’.Footnote ³⁴ All this indicates a certain suggestibility on the part of Newman and Froude about what they might encounter of continental Catholicism. But it does not significantly alter the fact that their observations were a by-product of their travel, and not the main purpose of it.

Three substantial, published accounts were precisely that – those of Allies, Faber and Wordsworth. Allies's Journal in France (1849) was a composite volume which contained material from three separate visits, in 1845, 1847 and 1848, which drew on both diaries and letters, and which included testimony from Charles Marriott, who had travelled with Allies in 1845.Footnote ³⁵ Unlike conventional travel-writing it had little topographical description. Its audience was plainly a theologically-informed or clerical one: Allies's aim was to correct the ‘prodigious ignorance’ of each other's Churches, and to see things ‘as they are’ in the Roman system out of an assumption that Anglicans and Roman Catholics differed very rarely ‘in principle, though sometimes in facts’.Footnote ³⁶ His interest in France was partly stimulated, he said, by its tyrannical separation of Church and State during the Revolution; France served in effect as a sort of experiment, where the Church of God was so externally oppressed ‘that nothing but the irrepressible life of the Gospel could penetrate and leaven society under such conditions’.Footnote ³⁷ In the light of Allies's conversion in 1850, after the Gorham judgement, these terms are telling, and the book for the most part reads like judicious, sometimes critical and yet generally admiring reportage on the whole condition of the French Church, with brief excursions into northern Italy. Allies travelled widely in France, visited many churches, built up contacts with leading Catholic scholars and educationalists, and particularly concerned himself with the life of the religious orders and with Catholic educational institutions. He carefully noted details of daily routines in religious houses and schools, the course of conversations with Catholic clergy, and his impressions of all he saw. Over a hundred pages are devoted simply to a month's intensive travel in 1845. When he returned to France in 1847 he renewed some of his Catholic acquaintance, before travelling south to northern Italy in the company of John Hungerford Pollen and J. H. Wynne, also subsequently converts: here, after meeting Manzoni in Milan, they visited two Italian Tyrolese women stigmatics, Maria Domenica Lazzari, or the ‘Addolorata’, and Maria Mörl (more conventionally ‘Marie de Moerl’), or the ‘Ecstatica’, who experienced recurrent states of ecstasy.Footnote ³⁸ Allies went back to Paris again in July 1848 in Pollen's company, and stayed for nearly six weeks, resuming his round of visits, conversations and church attendance, and noting much of this in his journal.

Faber's earlier Sights and thoughts in foreign churches and among foreign peoples (1842), by contrast, reads largely as a literary travelogue. Inviting the reader to travel with him ‘as one from the Middle Ages’, the author traces a journey down France, through Amiens, Paris, Chartres, Orléans, Lyons and Avignon, and then on via Provence to northern Italy and Venice, and eventually to Greece and the Aegean.Footnote ³⁹ The book combines topographical description with extensive quotations from continental writers and with commentary on the state of religion on the continent. It was based on a six-month journey taken in 1841 with the son of a friend, Matthew Harrison, for whom he was acting as tutor, through France and Italy, on to Greece and Constantinople, and back through central Europe and Germany.Footnote ⁴⁰ But fact and fantasy are somewhat blurred through the literary device of a ghostlike, medieval figure who accompanies the author at various points of his journey and challenges him about his Anglican convictions. Faber converted in 1845, just after Newman, but his continental travels were evidently significant steps in his disillusionment with the Church of England. By the point in the book at which he has reached the Certosa outside Pavia, he can admit that the appearance of the ‘man of the Middle Ages’ felt to him ‘not unfrequently … as a weight upon my spirit’, and from then on the conversations recounted feel more and more one-sided, as the author is forced to make concession after concession to his ghostly interlocutor.Footnote ⁴¹ In Venice, the stranger's tone has become almost polemical: ‘You are not a fasting Church; yet every other Church has been so from the earliest times.’Footnote ⁴² And it is with the stranger's words that the book comes nearly to an end, when he disavows the intention of making Faber leave the Church of England, but aims merely to make him feel that ‘there is a catholic body above and beyond particular churches, which is capable of being realized’.Footnote ⁴³ In all this, Faber's observation of the Catholic churches that he encounters are threaded through with admiration, as he gradually uncovers authentic elements of the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of Christopher Wordsworth's Diary in France (1845). Almost all of Wordsworth's month-long stay was in Paris. Like its successor volume, the Notes at Paris (1854), the Diary as published was just that – a series of journal entries, covering visits to churches and schools, and meetings with individuals. Originally private letters for the ‘interest and amusement’ of a female friend, however, it was only drawn up as a diary for publication.Footnote ⁴⁴ A strong current of contempt for recent French history and culture runs through both books, as does great suspicion of Ultramontane Catholicism. Wordsworth claimed that the turbulence of recent French history had left an indelible mark on its culture and politics: there seemed to be a ‘natural disposition in the French people to be soon weary of their toys’.Footnote ⁴⁵ He criticised the double standards of the French clergy on authority, the social exclusiveness of city congregations, the faulty logic of Catholic preaching, superstitions surrounding relics and the empty show and magnificence of the mass.Footnote ⁴⁶ He met a number of leaders of the French Church and commentators on French religious affairs, including Jules Gondon, Prosper Guéranger and the abbés Migne, Bautain and Jager. But his encounters were as much an opportunity to defend the Church of England (especially for the benefit of his readers) as to learn about the French Church. This was even more evident in the Notes, where Wordsworth's suspicion of the extreme elements of Anglo-Catholicism was even more to the fore. A conversation with a ‘learned friend’ in Paris raised the example of Robert Wilberforce's recently-published On the doctrine of the holy eucharist (1853); intersplicing quotations from the book with passages from various French texts, Wordsworth implied that Wilberforce's understanding of objective presence and eucharistic sacrifice was identical to that of Ultramontane Catholicism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Whilst not without some positive appreciation of French Catholicism, both of Wordsworth's books in effect presented travel largely as a pretext for ecclesiastical apologetic, rather than as an opportunity for sympathetic study of another religious tradition.

III

The accounts of Allies, Faber and Wordsworth represent the most extensive published repertoire of High Church or Tractarian reactions to continental Catholicism, but they vary considerably in form and content. This makes it difficult to summarise their impressions easily – a difficulty certainly increased when other accounts, published and unpublished, such as those of Neale, Liddon, Church, Manning and MacColl, are added to the reckoning. Webb's Sketches of continental ecclesiology (1848) is another: intended to be a ‘book of reference’, containing detailed church descriptions from several journeys in Belgium, Germany and Italy in the 1840s, it also included some observations on church life.Footnote ⁴⁸ If the variety of impressions and reactions is broad, however, how confident can we be that travel exercised a significant influence on High Churchmen?

At first sight it looks relatively easy to distinguish between the reactions of those who did and those who did not subsequently convert to Roman Catholicism. After all, both Allies and Faber converted, and both men published travelogues which presumed a purpose or disposition essentially favourable to much of the Roman line, unlike Wordsworth, who did not convert. Right at the very beginning of his volume, Allies claimed that the reunion of the English Church with the Church of Rome would be an ‘incalculable blessing’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was unlikely to endear him to many Anglican readers, except perhaps those on the extreme fringe of Tractarianism, and it was but a year before his conversion. Faber's inclination towards the Roman position is also very evident in his work: at Avignon, for example, he was prompted to exclaim that the unshakeable allegiance of distant nations was evidence of the ‘inherent vitality (one might almost rise to higher words) of the papacy’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like Allies, Faber peppered his book with comments critical of the Church of England. Faber had toured Belgium and Rhenish Germany with Arthur Stanley and Richard Church in 1839, a visit which is also mentioned briefly in Church's biography.Footnote ⁵¹ Faber mentions this trip in Sights and thoughts only to draw a parallel between the beautiful procession that he had seen in Bruges and the ‘entire tumult of holyday’ he saw in Genoa, on the Feast of the Annunciation, when the churches were thronged, the bells ringing and the streets filled with flowers.Footnote ⁵² If one were to follow this account, already in 1839, then, his reaction to Catholic piety had been one of admiration; two years later this had become an instinctive sympathy. The picture is more complex, however. Bowden included a letter to J. B. Morris, written from Cologne in August 1839, in which Faber was scathing about the ‘careless irreverence, the noise, the going out and in, the spitting of the priests on the Altar steps, the distressing representations of our Blessed Lord’ that he had witnessed.Footnote ⁵³ This was despite his efforts to accustom himself to Roman devotions, via a breviary he had bought in Mechlin.Footnote ⁵⁴ The change in his views in just two years is evident, and Faber's resultant inner turmoil about his religious identity was evident again, another two years on, in 1843, when he revisited Rome and witnessed the devotion and seriousness of Catholic piety.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wordsworth, by contrast, remained steadfastly critical of great swathes of continental Catholic life and teaching, even as he expressed admiration for the devotional spirit of some of the congregations that he witnessed. He found the congregation at vespers at Notre Dame des Victoires, for example, ‘very attentive and devout’, so that ‘on the whole the service … presented one of the happiest specimens of social fervent worship’, and he was especially admiring of the French Church's emphasis on catechising.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, even when he returned to Paris in 1853, he found that ‘public display’ and ostentation were an important aspect of French Catholicism, and so severe was his judgement on the Marian images decorating Parisian churches, quite overwhelming the images of Jesus, that he could exclaim ‘How near Romanism sometimes approaches to Socinianism!’Footnote ⁵⁷ Likewise, Richard Church's admiration of aspects of continental Catholicism was almost always tempered by criticism too. A long and full description of the procession celebrating St Paul in Valetta in 1847 dwelt on the ‘shouting and skirmishing’ of the boys witnessing it, and concluded, ‘But of course all displays of popular religion, however imposing, must be grotesque also. Certainly this was.’Footnote ⁵⁸

It is scarcely surprising that High Churchmen who did subsequently convert to Roman Catholicism voiced admiration for elements of continental Catholicism. But even the accounts of Allies and Faber do contain significant critical comments. Marian doctrine and devotion came in for attack from both authors. Allies, for example, was alarmed by the extremism of the Marian litanies that he encountered in Paris in 1845, and taxed M. Noirlieu, curé of St Jacques, with his objection that repeated invocations of Mary under various titles ‘threw the Godhead into the shade’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Marriott (a non-convert) went even further, though the publication of his comments in Allies's book presumably suggested the author's approval: ‘The system of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, as it now stands, wants some foundation beyond all they tell me of when I ask them to give an account of it.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Faber claimed that the Catholic revival in France was being thrown onto devotion to Mary without ‘even refining any of its grossness and dishonourable excess’.Footnote ⁶¹ He was particularly critical of French Catholic approaches to baptism, which in his view almost completely subordinated it to the eucharist: ‘One Sacrament is made to obscure, if not eclipse, the other.’Footnote ⁶² This opinion was based largely on a reading of the Abbé Genoude's Exposition du dogme Catholique (1840), which Faber regarded as ‘very poor’, and in which the word ‘regenerate’ was constantly used, Faber alleged, in reference to the eucharist rather than baptism, which it barely mentioned: in this respect, he claimed, Catholicism was nearer to the spirit of Puritanism.Footnote ⁶³

Just as the future converts could be, at times, critical of Roman Catholicism, so the non-converts could be positive and appreciative, as in the cases of Wordsworth and Church. An early example was Edward Copleston, later bishop of Llandaff. Confounding the usual claims that English people could not visit the continent until after Waterloo, Copleston travelled extensively through Europe in 1813 and 1814 (including some days in Paris even before the fall of Napoleon), and again in 1816.Footnote ⁶⁴ He seems to have encountered Catholicism with a genuinely open, if sometimes surprised, mind. Describing the monastery of Great St Bernard, for example, he wrote to a friend that the prior was ‘just what a monk ought to be, that is, just the opposite of what they are represented to be in all books – mild, well-bred, well acquainted with what is going on in the world, and, though very temperate himself, pressing his hospitality as far as decorum will allow’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He was very impressed with the piety of people in Flanders in 1816. He was surprised by the well-marshalled processions that he observed, with figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and women and children singing with the appearance of sincere piety: ‘I was not aware that the people took so warm a part in the performance of religious offices, it being one of the commonest objections to popery, that it leaves all to the priests, while the people are merely passive.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Another non-convert who recorded many favourable impressions of Roman Catholicism was Henry Liddon. Of high mass in Ghent Cathedral in 1851, for example, he could say: ‘The Service was very imposing; the people uniformly devotional … it had about it a winning awe, which was distinct from poetry; it must have conveyed to the most uninitiated a semblance of the Supernatural.’Footnote ⁶⁷ At Auxonne in June 1864, he visited a large church – presumably Notre-Dame – in the evening, finding several worshippers there ‘kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. How ones [sic] heart was with them! The mischief of separation in the Ch [sic] came home to me today most powerfully my heart ached: if we are strong in other formuli [?] in this we English are assuredly weak’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Liddon was courted by Catholic clergy eager to secure his conversion, but there is no evidence that he was ever seriously tempted.Footnote ⁶⁹ However his positive comments on continental Catholic liturgy and devotion in his diaries are so frequent that one can understand the effort. Liddon's practice was often to say the office in Catholic churches that he visited, as well as hearing mass on occasions.Footnote ⁷⁰ For balance's sake, it should be noted that he sometimes also recorded aspects of Lutheran, Reformed or simply ‘low’ church worship favourably: at Baveno, for example, again in 1864, he attended the English service at the Pension, noting that ‘the H. C. administered, but very irreverently’ before proceeding ‘Still the sermon contained some beautiful passages on Providence.’Footnote ⁷¹ Again, exactly three years later, he admired the ‘earnestness and devoutness’ of the Lutheran congregation at the (Lutheran) Petruskirche in Berlin.Footnote ⁷² Liddon's openness, incidentally, contrasts favourably with Benjamin Webb's criticism of Lutheran churches in terms reminiscent of the way in which High Churchmen commonly saw Dissent: at Nassau, for example, he noted ‘a most miserable pued [sic] and galleried preaching-room for Lutheran worship’.Footnote ⁷³

From much later in the century, Malcolm MacColl provides another example of a non-convert. Attending high mass in the village church at Oberammergau, he noted, evidently with approval, that much of the service (the greeting, the sermon, the creed, the Lord's prayer, the litany) was in the vernacular, and that the service was very well attended; he had never seen a more devout congregation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Liddon was equally impressed by their devotion, noting of the passion play that it was ‘unequally sustained but on the whole was an astonishing product of the faith and love of the village’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Brooke Foss Westcott, hardly a High Churchman in any party-specific sense, visited the Marian shrine of La Salette near Grenoble in 1865 in the company of J. B. Lightfoot and E. W. Benson, and prepared an appreciative article on it, which Lightfoot managed to persuade him not to publish for fear that it would damage his reputation.Footnote ⁷⁶ As David Thompson has pointed out, Westcott's concern was not so much with Marian doctrine per se, as with the sign – represented by the miracles taking place at La Salette – that the ‘age of faith’ was returning.Footnote ⁷⁷ La Salette nevertheless drew from Liddon a particularly sharp criticism: ‘a miracle like that of La Salette, and many of which it is a sample, is discredited by its typical character, and still more by the insufficiency of the producible proof that it ever occurred’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the point still stands that Anglican church tourists cannot be divided into pro- and anti-Catholic witnesses simply on the grounds of whether they converted or not.

The effusiveness of some of the comments of Faber and Allies nevertheless leaves in place the suggestion that travel was instrumental to their conversion. Was this indeed the case? This is much harder to prove with any certainty. Allies, late in life, thought it had been. In his autobiography he noted how he had drawn contrasts ‘in the exuberance of my strength as an Anglican’ between the richness and vitality of the worship that he observed in France, and the poverty of Anglican church life.Footnote ⁷⁹ So, in addition to the example of the Fathers and his parish experience, he now had a ‘third force’ propelling him towards conversion, namely ‘the actual sight of the Church abroad’, struck as he was by all the evidence of its revival.Footnote ⁸⁰ Faber's book certainly implied that continental Catholicism was a strong influence on him. It mapped a journey in three dimensions: geographically, through France and down into the Mediterranean; historically, into the Middle Ages; and theologically, into the catholicity and apostolicity of the Roman Church. In all three senses, this was a journey away from Anglicanism. Having noted, at Avignon, the vitality of the papacy, he could go on to criticise its bondage to the French State in the years of papal exile in Avignon, and then to criticise Gallicanism itself, for, as he said, what ‘high-hearted man’ could sympathise with it or (significantly) with ‘any other national Church system?’.Footnote ⁸¹ Another touchstone of his changing sympathies was clerical celibacy. His ghostly companion offered no less than nineteen reasons in favour of celibacy, which left Faber apparently unconvinced, except that he remained sitting on the beach ‘with a very vacant mind’ and threw pebbles into the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁸² Commenting on the mass that he observed in Genoa, he claimed to have been repulsed by it at first, and yet at the same time said that the Roman liturgies were

Faber's book was published more than three years before his conversion, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, by the time that he had completed it, his resistance to Roman Catholicism was all but gone.

Another convert for whom travel was evidently significant was Henry Manning. His travel diaries were not published in his lifetime; only extracts from them appeared in Purcell's Life. On his first visit to Rome, in 1838, his reactions were negative: he deplored the secular nature of church music there, and found Roman devotions and practices ‘actually repugnant’.Footnote ⁸⁴ But extensive travel ten years later, following a near-fatal illness (and long after the death of his wife), found him much more receptive. At Malines, for example, he was unsettled at finding his claim to the title ‘Catholic’ challenged by simple monks, observed the Salut and exposition in the cathedral with admiration, and noted, of the relics deposited in the seminary, that ‘I could not but feel that the effect of such objects is to awaken and keep alive a high standard of personal devotion.’Footnote ⁸⁵ When he reached Rome, in November 1847 (he stayed until early May 1848, and naturally was interested in the turbulent events of that year), his reactions were quite different from nine years earlier. Though he spent much time in the company of expatriate Anglicans, he attended the English Protestant Church outside the walls ‘but very occasionally’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He met Newman and Ambrose St John, before their return to England in December 1847, visited Catholic churches, heard mass and observed Catholic ceremonial, and carefully recorded what he saw and his impressions. At the Quirinal in early December, for example, he attended a mass in the papal chapel: ‘It was a splendid sight. The Pope in white and gold, and gold mitre, on a throne of white and gold.’Footnote ⁸⁷ He was there again in March 1848: ‘The Pope gave the benediction [from the palace balcony] with a mixture of majesty, love, and supplication I never saw. It was a sight beyond words. A man near me said with emotion: “Non é un uomo, é un angelo”.’Footnote ⁸⁸ It seems very unlikely that an Anglican of Manning's strength of character, already wavering in his Anglican convictions and recording such impressions as this, was not influenced by travel in favour of his eventual conversion.

If travel was an important and possibly decisive influence on those Anglican High Churchmen who converted to Roman Catholicism, did it have any long-term influence on the views and practices of non-converts? It is very difficult to answer this with any degree of certainty, since it was not a question most of them appear to have faced in quite that form – something entirely understandable given both the reluctance of High Churchmen to tamper with the Anglican formularies and popular sensitivity over Romanism. Benjamin Webb is an exception here. Despite concentrating mostly on architecture in his Sketches of continental ecclesiology, in the preface he professed that the more his observation of continental Catholicism confirmed him in his ‘hearty allegiance’ to the Church of England, the more confidently he felt able

On the very first page of his travelogue he noted how the light cast from the windows of the church of SS Peter and Paul at Ostend, from the lamp before the Blessed Sacrament, ‘seemed to take off all feelings of loneliness, such as sometimes our own churches produce: it made one feel as if the church was tenanted’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Most of Webb's descriptions of Catholic services are matter-of-fact, as if deliberately stepping back from risky comment, but here and there approbation appears: the ‘grouping and general ministration’ of the twenty-one clergy whom he observed engaged in the liturgy at Ratisbon cathedral in 1844, for example, he found ‘most beautiful’.Footnote ⁹¹ If anything Webb's friend J. M. Neale surpassed his profound interest in strands of continental Catholicism and extended it to embrace Eastern Orthodoxy, though in his published account of his Balkan tour in 1861 comments on church life and worship are relatively spare. They are, none the less, revealing. Echoing Liddon, Neale appears to have had no qualms about participating in services to the fullest extent possible for an Anglican priest, naturally stopping short of receiving communion. In Graz, for example, he was most impressed by a visit to an infirmary and dispensary run by the Barmherzige Brüder: ‘We made some little offering to the House, – on which the Prior took us in to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, in a small distinct oratory. These brethren quite took my heart.’Footnote ⁹²

The example of Henry Liddon is particularly telling, given his personal acquaintance with the some of the circle of ‘Liberal Catholics’ out of whom liturgical reform in the Church of England was eventually to come. According to his biographer, Liddon was restrained in ritual matters.Footnote ⁹³ But Johnston chose not to publish entries from Liddon's diaries which show another side of him. At Pau in 1865, for example, on Good Friday he slipped out to St Jacques, the local Catholic church, for the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified, ‘at which I had never assisted before. I went up to the altar & kissed the cross’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the same year, Liddon was one of the signatories to a petition to the archbishop of Canterbury requesting that any revision of the Prayer Book be undertaken in conformity with the arrangements and contents of the First Prayer Book of King Edward vi, a touchstone for Anglo-Catholic ritual and liturgical matters.Footnote ⁹⁵ When he was admitted as a canon of St Paul's in 1870, Liddon noted in his diary that it was ‘according to the Sarum use’, probably the first time such a thing had happened at the cathedral since the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁶

IV

Given the piecemeal and diverse nature of the evidence for continental church tourism, its impact on High Churchmen is difficult to assess comprehensively. Unquestionably travel was an important influence on the outlook of many leading High Churchmen, helping to propel some towards conversion to Rome. But the precise contours of any broader influence on the liturgical and devotional life of the Church of England are harder to describe, especially when other factors such as the translation of theological and devotional texts, the study of patristic and medieval sources, and scholarship on English liturgical history, are taken into account. Further work is needed to test the range and scope of continental church tourism, taking into consideration both High Church reactions to Eastern Orthodoxy and to the Protestant traditions, and the observations that other Anglicans made on the whole range of Christian practice across Europe. The cumulative evidence assembled in this article suggests that links between the ritual controversies in the Church of England in the second half of the century and observation of ritual practices on the continent of Europe are plausible, indeed likely, and there are striking cases in which High Churchmen who did play a considerable part in promoting ritual and liturgical reform were influenced by their experience of travel as well as by their theological and liturgical scholarship. At the very least, the continental context supplies a new dimension to our understanding of the changing character of High Churchmanship in this period.

It is tempting to extend these admittedly cautious and provisional conclusions to the history of subsequent liturgical change too. Donald Gray, in a widely-appreciated study of the theological roots of modern Anglican liturgical reform, implied that it was largely sui generis, and in particular the product of a fusion of Tractarian sacramentalism with the social theology of F. D. Maurice and his ilk.Footnote ⁹⁷ Without questioning the general outline of Gray's account, continental church travel in the nineteenth century does at least imply that the steady erosion of popular hostility to ritual practices and eucharistic renewal experienced by High Churchmen in the early twentieth century owed something to wider cultural trends, and in particular to a growing appreciation of elements of continuity between their vision of Anglicanism and their observation of continental Catholicism. As we have seen, in the early and mid-nineteenth century Anglican church travellers on the continent of Europe were often struck by the piety and devotion of the Catholic congregations that they observed, and by many of the ritual and ceremonial practices, at times seeking to draw out implications for the practice of the Church of England. We can at least posit an amplification, amongst leading High Churchmen, of the practical content of their understanding of Catholicism's devotional practice, enriched as it was by contact with the continental churches.

It seems ironic, then, that the chief authors of the proposals for liturgical change in modern Anglicanism, including Charles Gore, Armitage Robinson and Walter Frere, were not likely to have been influenced much, at least directly and personally, by continental models. To judge from their biographies, they were not great travellers, and indeed the decline of the kind of church tourism that I have described here towards the end of the nineteenth century is itself a phenomenon requiring explanation. Their work was shaped particularly by historical scholarship, and the study of the English liturgy, and also by the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a division in Anglo-Catholicism between advocates of the Roman or ‘papal’ style and the more common neo-Gothic ‘English’ or Prayer-Book style.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet even here things may not be quite as they seem. Both Frere and Gore were founders of the Community of the Resurrection, and certainly well acquainted with Liddon and with the cultural and intellectual world of Tractarianism. Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, for long president of the English Church Union and probably, after Gladstone, the most influential Anglo-Catholic layman in the late nineteenth century, was profoundly influenced by Liddon, and himself a frequent traveller on the continent; his outlook was also far from insular.Footnote ⁹⁹ Halifax, with Frere, Robinson and Gore, was a participant in the informal Malines conversations with Belgian Catholics on reunion which took place from 1921 to 1926, and although by then the impetus for Prayer Book revision was well under way, Frere's own account of the conversations gives no hint of unease or strong disagreement over liturgical matters.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When the modern Anglican equivalent of the continental Liturgical Movement got under way in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly under the influence of the liturgist Gabriel Hebert, the influence of continental trends was readily acknowledged.Footnote ¹⁰¹ All this is not to suggest that close parallels and patterns of influence can be found consistently between Anglicanism and church traditions on the continent of Europe; but it is to suggest that there are far richer seams of influence to be studied here than previously thought.