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John Mitchell Kemble was a shrewd observer of the universities, perhaps because his career was stunted: he was unable to get a position in either Oxford or Cambridge and his subject (Anglo-Saxon) was not recognised as a discipline worth studying. In the quotation with which this article begins, Kemble was discussing an earlier period but what he had to say resonated with his own times. Kemble knew a thing or two about universities and he felt strongly that state coercion and confessional claims must yield to the intellectual tools that he himself had mastered and that ancient institutions had to open themselves to people who had been excluded previously. He pointed to two processes: the opening of universities, and the recognition of different forms of thought. He described a world of necessity yielding to a world of choice. These processes were at issue at the end of the nineteenth century when St Edmund's sought university recognition.

In 1897 Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th duke of Norfolk, purchased, for £6,600, Ayrest House in Mount Pleasant, Cambridge, with two acres of land, and created the legal corporation which became St Edmund's House, a Roman Catholic house of study.Footnote ² Joined by Lord Clifford and his kinsman, Lord Herries, as subscribers, Norfolk became the House's president for life. The next year the House sought university recognition. The Council of the Senate made its report on 21 February 1898 following which, on 3 March, the members of the Regent House held a discussion.Footnote ³ At the outset the issue seemed uncontroversial and supporters of recognition, such as Neville Keynes and Henry Jackson, anticipated few difficulties. Then they learned that those opposed to the grace were preparing to bring in non-resident members to participate in the Senate House vote and they realised that they would have to mobilise support.Footnote ⁴ When the matter came to a vote it was defeated: placet 218, non placet 471.Footnote ⁵ And, in the event, the votes of the non-residents did not make the difference. Neville Keynes estimated the numbers of resident placets and non-placets to be 130 to 170.Footnote ⁶

The cast of characters in this dispute was varied and great: Norfolk and his nephew James Fitzalan Hope, John Ross of Bladensburg, Bernard Ward (principal of St Edmund's, Ware) and his brother Wilfrid Ward, were deeply engaged. In the university, Baron Anatole Andreas Aloys von Hügel (1854–1928), director of the Museum of Archaeology, and his wife played the leading parts. Von Hügel was the son of the Austrian minister at Florence and Brussels and the brother of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the Roman Catholic Modernist.Footnote ⁷ Anatole von Hügel, born in Florence but educated at Stonyhurst, spent three years in Fiji putting together the collections which would form part of the holdings of the museum.Footnote ⁸ He was the founder and first president of the Cambridge University Catholic Association (1895–1922), and he succeeded the duke of Norfolk as president of St Edmund's. The dispute over the recognition of St Edmund's involved leading figures in the university: John McTaggart, Richard Jebb (Regius Professor of Greek and MP for the university), Henry Jackson (future Regius Professor of Greek); John Neville Keynes (the Registrary), Henry Montagu Butler (Master of Trinity College: ‘our suave Master’, as von Hügel called himFootnote ⁹), Lowes Dickinson and Henry Sidgwick.

Lord Acton was the only guest missing from this feast. The duke of Norfolk had written to ask him to join the enterprise, and von Hügel met him in Jackson's rooms in Trinity. Though Acton was keenly interested, he could not make up his mind immediately and asked for a day or two ‘for reflection’. He found that there were ‘insuperable objections’, and told von Hügel that he feared his name would be ‘distasteful to some of the Bishops & therefore harmful to the scheme’. Again, Acton gently rebuffed von Hügel at dinner in November at St John's. Acton ‘was in excellent form and very friendly’, but von Hügel thought ‘it best not to probe his [secret?] mind’.Footnote ¹⁰

It was an odd event. Superficially, the question of the university's recognition of St Edmund's would only seem to raise old questions, ones that would not be expected to be a part of the history of the modern university. Yet, upon consideration, it involved some of the most important issues about religion in the modern university and, indeed, about the nature of the university itself. Consequently, this article sets this incident in university history in wider terms as a chapter in the history of liberalism, of Roman Catholicism, of education and of secularism.

The debate over the position of St Edmund's in the university was one between liberal and liberal, not between liberal and conservative.Footnote ¹¹ John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was a lecturer in moral sciences and a Fellow of Trinity. Though an atheist, he was a keen supporter of the Church of England. As a schoolboy at Clifton McTaggart had been a republican and he was hauled before a court of boys for holding that a madman who had tried to assassinate the queen should have been a better shot. McTaggart had opposed St Edmund's from the beginning. The great reform of the universities, he said, had been ‘the step by which colleges were no longer confined to the members of one religious body. Are we prepared to retrace that step?’ He went on to say in the Cambridge Review in 1896 that ‘[t]he idea of comprehensiveness is fascinating, but comprehensiveness can be bought too dear. For real breadth is not always the result of the most complete collection of narrownesses’.Footnote ¹² Two years later McTaggart opposed recognition of St Edmund's because it would, in his view, narrow the ‘sympathies of undergraduates’. The recognition of one ‘sectarian’ hostel would be the thin end of the wedge: ‘[I]f there were a number of sectarian Hostels there would like to be a large amount of controversy of an unprofitable nature. The different sects would unite only in attempting to crush a fair and scientific manner of study in the subjects of their controversies.’ Francis (‘Sligger’) Urquhart, the first Roman Catholic Fellow of an Oxford college since the Reformation, who had met McTaggart in the previous vacation, called him ‘an extreme example of the brutally intolerant “liberal”’.Footnote ¹³ Lowes Dickinson, Fellow of King's College who later in life was one of the first to propose a League of Nations, also opposed recognition: ‘Of all systems of sectarian education’, he said, ‘the Roman Catholic system is the most sectarian.’ The function of the university was to seek truth and, therefore, sanction should not be given to a body ‘whose basis was not the pursuit of truth, but the presupposition that the truth was known’.

Montagu Butler was on the other side of the question. Typically, when he intervened in the Senate House discussion, Butler, as he said about himself, ‘left out, as usual, most of what I hoped to say, but the feeling was there’.Footnote ¹⁴ He found it strange that McTaggart, ‘a liberal of liberals’, should argue ‘in favour of intolerance’. ‘From a national point of view’ Butler held that the laity and the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church should attend the university ‘to fraternise there, and share with others the love of knowledge and freedom’. Henry Jackson, then on the Council of the Senate and one of the most prominent reformers in the university,Footnote ¹⁵ pointed out that the university reforms of the 1870s had provided for the maintenance of worship and instruction in the Church of England. Therefore ‘it was reasonable that the University should not exclude establishments founded to provide for the religious needs of other denominations’. Richard Jebb (who would be knighted in 1900 and named to the Order of Merit in 1905) said that ‘this university had always in recent times been thoroughly liberal in the best sense of this word. It would be illiberal [to fail to recognise St Edmund's]’. For Oscar Browning the university was a training college which ‘imparts skills in bread-subjects’. As the Great OB went on to say, if the training of Roman Catholic priests was disqualified as somehow ‘technical’, so also was the training of Anglican priests: ‘[I]f the University wishes to purge itself from the stain of “technicality”, it must begin by surrendering the training of doctors, clergymen, lawyers, musicians and schoolmasters, not to mention other classes of student who throng its courts and swell its fees’.Footnote ¹⁶ As this discussions shows, liberalism was multidimensional, a point which emerges more fully in a revealing exchange of correspondence between Francis John Henry Jenkinson (1853–1923) and Anatole von Hügel.

Jenkinson had been educated at Marlborough and came up to Trinity where he finished in the First Class of the Classical Tripos and thereupon was elected a Fellow of his college. As curator in zoology in the university he became an expert on Lepidoptera. Under the influence of Henry Bradshaw, the University Librarian whom he succeeded, Jenkinson applied the techniques he had adopted in his study of moths, what he called the ‘natural history method’, to the university's collection of incunabula. That is, rather than descriptive cataloguing, he classified them according to their fonts, the names of their printers and the towns and counties of provenance. He was considered ‘[a] character of extraordinary sweetness and charm’.Footnote ¹⁷ So it was with some rather considerable sadness that Jenkinson wrote to von Hügel in the dispute over St Edmund's:

Jenkinson thought that some people would vote for the grace to recognise St Edmund's because it would assist reform. ‘I do not feel sure of that’, he said, ‘but if I did, I should not consider that an honourable course to take.’Footnote ¹⁸ Jenkinson agreed with von Hügel's characterisation of the non placets as a ‘menagerie’. ‘I should not often find myself acting with any (much less all) of them’, he said. However, ‘it does not follow that our action is wrong’: ‘You must remember (I think you generally do) that it is quite as painful for your friends outside the pale to see you pulling in what seems to them the wrong direction as it is for you to find them in opposition to you. But I hope never to cease to trust you as thoroughly as I do now.’Footnote ¹⁹

Issues dividing liberals ruptured friendships. One the one hand, liberals thought that the university should include all sects and liberalise them. On the other, liberals recognised that in sectarianism there is an authoritarianism which cannot be liberalised. For some liberals, religion was benign; for other liberals religion was dangerous. There is a further implication to this. Such views were not opposites in a bipolar system. These complex views inhabited the same style of thinking. They reveal that attitudes toward policy questions cannot always be arranged along a single dimension which seeks to describe experience, one extremity of which might be labelled conservative and the other liberal. There were several dimensions representing liberal experience. Where one was located on one dimension would not indicate, necessarily, where one was located on other dimensions.

At the end of a letter to von Hügel giving him advice about the next steps to be taken following the negative Senate House vote, Henry Sidgwick wrote: ‘What a “No Popery” show it was.’Footnote ²⁰ Sidgwick's was an outburst which suggested that ancient bigotries lay behind the opposition. Actually they were new and aggressive bigotries. And bigotries may be the wrong word since the contested conceptions of Roman Catholicism were about power and authority rather than dogma and doctrine. (Though, the way to put it, actually, is that dogma and doctrine in this case were about power and authority.)

This chapter in the history of Roman Catholicism was aggressive. Jenkinson thought that von Hügel's Church was ‘countenanced in its aggression’, much as he disagreed with it: ‘I might say if your church could have kept quiet & and been content to minister to its own community & do so – but of course it feels it can fight, & that it is its duty (at least some people probably feel that). And when one party fights, the other party must fight in self defence.’Footnote ²¹ Lying behind and around the controversy over St Edmund's was the nineteenth-century Catholic revival. In France, for example, following the reestablishment of the monarchy in 1815 there was a resurgence of monasticism and, though most of the new regulars were women and their institutions could not regain the magnificence of those of the ancien régime, the number of regulars had attained its pre-Revolutionary level by 1860.Footnote ²² There was also the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain (the so-called Papal Aggression), the publication of the Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I and the declaration of papal infallibility. They were part of the Roman Catholic Church's effort to sustain itself against the Risorgimento in Italy and nationalist revolution in Ireland where the Plan of Campaign, regarded by the government as a criminal conspiracy, was actually condoned by some priests and bishops.Footnote ²³ In addition there were the expressions of popular Roman Catholic piety as at Lourdes and Marpingen.Footnote ²⁴ And on 17 July 1907 the Holy Office would go on to publish the decree Lamentabili which condemned the writings of the Modernists (especially Loisy). The decree was followed on 8 September 1907 by Pius x's Pascendi dominici gregis which condemned Modernism, agnosticism, evolution and the claims of university dons to pursue truth in opposition to church authority.Footnote ²⁵ Pius x claimed that it was his duty to defend against ‘profane novelties of speech and the contradictions of false science’ and called for the creation of ‘councils of vigilance’ in each diocese, to meet secretly every two months to search out teaching and writing which violated the prohibitions of the encyclical.Footnote ²⁶

These were themselves aggressive novelties which were too much for many of those who had been involved in the effort to gain recognition for St Edmund's. These men, in their turn, advanced their own aggressive novelties, some vehemently. As early as 1867, in speaking about papal government, Acton had exclaimed to Odo Russell, ‘I pray to God that I might live to see the whole of this Fabric destroyed and the Tiber flow with the blood of the massacred Priests.’ ‘On our exclaiming’, Russell wrote, ‘he repeated these words in a solemn voice with great stress.’Footnote ²⁷ In 1897, very much less vehemently, Wilfrid Ward wrote to the duke of Norfolk (his uncle by marriage) that ‘I have a strong feeling as to the real danger of the present tendency in Rome … [The condemnation of modern theories] … will, if persevered in remove the best thought among us, drive some valuable men out of the Church, and give the world a good excuse for laughing at us, thus turning back many enquiries.’Footnote ²⁸ It was a generational cleavage in which Roman Catholics disagreed among themselves. Wilfrid Ward's father, W. G. Ward (the ‘Ideal’ Ward of the Oxford Movement) had converted from Anglicanism. Both father and son had been editors of the Dublin Review. Both belonged to intellectual societies committed to the expression and confirmation of knowledge (including religious knowledge), the father in the Metaphysical Society and the son in the Synthetic Society. But, as Wilfrid's daughter Maisie pointed out, father and son had rather different views of the Church. The father regarded it as a garrison in a fort which had the simple duty to fight. The son (and this explains his support for St Edmund's) regarded the Church as a school, with a portico looking out on the market place. When he was editor of the Dublin Review, the elder Ward gathered round himself a small party, to fight even with his own coreligionists. The son never found it possible to be a party man.Footnote ²⁹ In the Metaphysical Society W. G. Ward could tolerate neither the ‘intellectual indecision’ of Henry Sidgwick nor the iconoclastic views of Huxley who thought that God was unknowable. When Sidgwick once asked him about Catholic doctrine on some point of conduct, the elder Ward responded that opinion was divided and of the two views, he said, ‘I, of course take the most bigoted’.Footnote ³⁰ In the Synthetic Society the younger Ward assembled an extremely odd collection: Arthur Balfour, Haldane the Hegelian, McTaggart, whose conception of God was in his mind alone, and Modernist Catholics such as George Tyrrell, the Jesuit who would die excommunicate.Footnote ³¹

On the question of papal infallibility and the Vatican decrees, W. G. Ward followed a line set down by de Maistre: the Church represented the constructive principle as a safeguard against excessive individualism (not individuality). Even before the decrees were issued, the elder Ward preached not only docility to papal pronouncements but also acquiescence in the ‘“intimations of the Holy See”’. The best Catholic was the one who not only believed what ‘the Church directly requires, but labours to bring his intellect into increasing sympathy with her mind and spirit’. W. G. Ward identified infallibility with revelation and inspiration.Footnote ³²

But for Wilfrid Ward truth could not be pronounced by popes, by governments or even explained in the simplifications of journalists. It had to be worked out by theologians and others with genuine intellectual gifts. So, the younger Ward was sharply critical of the encyclical Pascendi when Pius x published it. It was not drawn up by a ‘keen mind alive to the religious controversies of the age (or to the established facts of history even)’. As he put it to the duke of Norfolk, ‘[t]heologians all tell us that the Pope has no inspiration. How can he without either inspiration or special training and capacity, teach us in detail on matters of research and criticism?’ Rome, he held, ‘of set purpose kept absolutely outside the movement of religious thought which has been going on for many years’. The Roman system ‘had become cast iron and really open minded thought had ceased’. What this Ward had sought to do at the Dublin Review, and what his wife Josephine (daughter of James Hope-Scott) had attempted in her novel Out of due time (1906), ‘were feeble attempts to make some bridge between the narrow theology still strong in Rome and the views which by now are very general in the Catholic body’.Footnote ³³

Ward was fairly circumspect in all of this. Some were already suspicious of him because of his biography of Newman. Father John Norris at the Birmingham Oratory found that Ward's articles in the Dublin Review ‘jar on’ his ‘Catholic instincts’. Norris felt that Ward read Newman ‘with a preconceived idea in his mind and therefore he makes Newman say what he never meant to say and teach what he had no intention of teaching’.Footnote ³⁴ So, in writing to Norfolk, Ward realised that he must contain himself, as least publicly:

Some close to the Modernists escaped censure, such as Baron Friedrich von Hügel, perhaps because his ‘mind was laborious, many-side-regarding, fully weighing, slow-moving, deep ploughing’.Footnote ³⁶

Others did not escape. George Tyrrell went too far, even for those sympathetic to his views. The Church, ‘as the creator and saviour of true liberty’, had been ‘obscured’. He sought ‘to set truth free again; to destroy the notion that narrowness & orthodoxy go hand in hand; to show that the deeper we dig into Catholic truth & the less close we hold to her vows, the broader we can afford to be; the narrow is always the less truthful way, depending upon a partial view’.Footnote ³⁷ At his wits end, finally, at the end of his life, he wrote to Maude Petre, ‘[d]id you see that Pius x has taken the nomination of French bishops into his own hands entirely. It only remains for him to appoint his own successor’.Footnote ³⁸ Wilfrid Ward admired Tyrrell's theology: ‘[H]e began with a wonderfully keen perception of present difficulties and the lines of reasoning necessary for keeping Catholicism in such a position as to appear to the educated man.’ But, according to Ward, Tyrrell lost his temper. ‘His mind is weak.’ Under attack from the authorities ‘he became too modern and fell too much into the arms of non-Catholic thinkers’. Ward concluded that ‘[h]e has now gone too far’.Footnote ³⁹ In contrast to Friedrich von Hügel's ‘deep ploughing’ thought which saved him from censure, Tyrrell's ‘swift and impatient mind’ brought him into conflict with the authorities and he was forced to conclude that Modernist Catholicism would have to exist as a graft rather than a growth from the Church. He held to ‘heterogeneous indigestible principles that can never possibly work into one system with Ultramontanism, any more than the Gospel of Jesus could blend with and transfigure the legalism of the Pharisees’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Novelty clashed with novelty as two forms of Catholicism contested each other.

Because St Edmund's was a means whereby Roman Catholics might enter civic life, its history is also a chapter in the history of education. Charles Januarius Edward Cardinal Acton (1803–47) had been at Magdalene College, Cambridge, but his nephew, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834–1902) had been denied admission to three Cambridge colleges.Footnote ⁴¹ The 13th duke of Norfolk (earl of Arundel and Surrey until he succeeded) sent his three sons, Lord Fitzalan (later the 14th duke), Lord Edward Howard (who became the first Baron Howard of Glossop) and Bernard Howard, to Trinity College, Cambridge. He showed a good deal of personal interest in them while they were there.Footnote ⁴² They followed the normal course of studies and activities: chapel morning and evening, classical and mathematical lectures, private time with tutors afternoon and evening. But there were also what might be called modern studies: Lord Fitzalan studied with a German master, went to chemical lectures and had an ‘electrical machine’.Footnote ⁴³ Of course the 13th duke was typical of nothing. He regarded his religion as a private matter, disapproved of ultramontane enthusiasms and supported the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill when Russell brought it in as his protest against the restoration of Roman Catholic bishops.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even his grandson, the 15th duke, whose piety and loyalty to Rome were beyond dispute, sent his nephew, James Fitzalan Hope, to Christ Church, Oxford.

These are very much exceptional cases. For most of the nineteenth century Rome and the British hierarchy opposed sending young Catholics to the ancient universities.Footnote ⁴⁵ They feared that the Roman Catholic undergraduate would be a ‘well educated man but a badly educated Catholic’. He would ‘lose his grasp of Catholic principles and his esprit de corps’ and run ‘such danger to his faith as is likely to prove injurious both to himself and to his power of benefiting the Catholic cause’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Alfred Thomas Townsend Verney-Cave, 5th Baron Braye, who converted to Catholicism in 1870, firmly favoured university education for Catholics. At Eton he had an elaborate triptych containing a crucifix and candles. His housemaster, on finding it, said ‘boy, this kind of thing ends in one of two ways – Rome or infidelity’. At Christ Church Braye, ‘taking a walk toward Magdalen Bridge, and thinking of nothing in particular’, had his ‘attention arrested by a curious sight and one which will not easily fade from my memory. Arm-in-arm Lord Bute and a priest were crossing the bridge bound for Oxford’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet Braye saw dangers for Catholic young men in the university without ‘a Catholic staff or professors & tutors & superintendents of studies’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The bishop of Shrewsbury thought Catholics at Oxford or Cambridge would have to be protected against the likes of T. H. Green and Henry Sidgwick, what he called ‘the somewhat shifting phases of University-Christian, semi-rationalism, agnosticism &c. which seem to follow one another at intervals when no one standard of belief or certain guidance exists’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even so enthusiastic a spirit as John Ross of Bladensburg, who very much favoured Roman Catholic university education in Ireland as a device to dampen revolutionary sentiments,Footnote ⁵⁰ was cautious about combining Catholic and non-Catholic education and wished for an institution ‘where all literature, learning, and science can be taught without danger to Faith’.Footnote ⁵¹ Many Catholics spoke of the necessity of protecting ‘religious liberty’, which was but another way of expressing their own dogmatisms and bigotries.

A somewhat larger issue lurked here. As in so many cases this was an argument about respectability and the qualities required of a gentleman. Transubstantiation and the reservation of the sacrament in the tabernacle, which had especially commended itself to Newman,Footnote ⁵² held open the implication that the Catholic priest and the Anglican clergyman were different kinds of gentlemen with different kinds of respectability (or in the Catholic case none at all), requiring different kinds of education. Because of the Book of Common Prayer, classical letters and mathematics was a plausible education for an Anglican clergyman. It was a verbal and cerebral education providing dignity and taste. The mass on the other hand was democratic drama, open to even the meanest intelligence. The Catholic priest, therefore, required a different kind of education, of a curiously classless sort. Charles Reding, the hero of Newman's novel Loss and gain, was astonished to find in Catholicism a ‘popular’ religion which ‘seems to possess all classes … indiscriminately’.

Such predilections and the fears expressed by the hierarchy, Braye and Ross of Bladensburg ghettoised British Roman Catholicism. It was a point which Lord Acton realised in the 1850s. Roman Catholicism had many advantages – ‘an excellent priesthood and a faithful flock, and also political liberty’ – he said, but it had not what he called ‘the weight we deserve because we have so little literature, or at least so few contributors to the national literature’.Footnote ⁵³ Young Catholics had ‘no higher studies’ of the sort university life could produce. Moreover, ‘[l]iterary labor [sic] cannot be left to the clergy’, and the laity also had ‘the duty of being well prepared not only for literary and scientific labour but even for religious controversy for everyone must be prepared to bear witness for the faith in his own circle’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Hon. and Revd William Petre (1847–93), a domestic prelate in Rome and educator who became the 13th Baron Petre, called attention to the ways in which Catholics were ‘internally divided and more hotly in disagreement’ on the question of liberal education:

They found their way forward in the 1890s.

Following a meeting at Norfolk House in 1894 Wilfrid Ward drafted a memorandum on university education for Catholics to be sent to the British hierarchy and ultimately to Rome.Footnote ⁵⁶ The duke of Norfolk, the marquesses of Bute and Ripon, Lords Denbigh, Clifford, Herries and Russell of Killowen, Admiral Walter Kerr, Baron von Hügel, Wilfrid Ward and others signed a statement which asserted that

A friend of Baroness von Hügel put the case for university education for priests rather more sharply in the run-up to the recognition of St Edmund's: ‘But it is terribly wanted among our clergy. They are so rough, so uncultured, so bumptious, all who are not well bred & there are too many of such.’Footnote ⁵⁸ As a chapter in the history of education the recognition of St Edmund's House, consequently, is a part of the culture wars which raged in Britain and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

The master narrative of secularism lurks over these chapters of liberalism, Roman Catholicism and education. It is a complex master narrative and it has several strands or features. One of which, as a prominent scholar argues, was that it is partially hidden. Secularism ‘remains in the background to fill in the gaps of the historian's narrative, and to provide implicit explanations where explicit ones cannot be found’.Footnote ⁵⁹ As another scholar has pointed out, it was a part of ‘a war without boundaries’.Footnote ⁶⁰ It raged within as well as between forces which were hardly homogeneous. Many theories about secularisation have been advanced: it was the result of scientific advances, of modern industrialisation and urbanisation, of ‘post modernity’ or of competition between Churches or between religious and alternative ideologies.Footnote ⁶¹ Greater exactness in discussing the master narrative of secularisation may be gained by showing how the St Edmund's controversy was an aspect of a uniquely Anglican anticlericalism, an anticlericalism that was multiple, intellectual and lay.

Two examples establish the background to this secularisation narrative in Britain. First, in 1868, Fenton Hort, a member of the Alpine Club and of the Committee to Revise the New Testament and much else besides, writing from his parish, St Ippolyts, in Hertfordshire, advanced a theory of Anglican secularisation. He wrote to Lightfoot that ‘I have come to the conviction that the College as well as the University must be thrown open.’ He was, he said, ‘not at all insensible to the immediate evils and future danger of the change, but I am hopeful about their being surmounted’. Hort continued: ‘If we are wise now, I think we may keep our position as the standard “denomination”, though not the exclusive one; and if so, the most important parts of the religious machinery may be preserved, and I believe neither Church nor religion will suffer in the long run.’Footnote ⁶² Thus religion and secularisation were multiple.

Second, in 1911, Francis Cornford, the classicist who is perhaps remembered best for his shrewd and ironic analysis of academic politics,Footnote ⁶³ addressed the Heretics Society in Cambridge. Despite their somewhat flamboyant title, the Heretics were quite at the centre of university life. Of the fifteen original members, two were professors and four others became Heads of Houses.Footnote ⁶⁴ All the likely subjects were members: J. B. Bury, Sir Francis Darwin, Lowes Dickinson, Maynard Keynes, G. H. Hardy, Leonard Greenwood, John Sheppard, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, G. M. Trevelyan. As their printed programmes show, the Heretics did not dedicate themselves to a full-throated attack on religion. Their object was to promote the discussion of philosophy and art as well as religion. Membership, they held, ‘shall imply the rejection of all appeal to authority in the discussion of religious questions’. So Jane Harrison addressed them on ‘Russia and the Russian verb’ (17 Oct. 1917), Hardy addressed them on ‘The value of knowledge’ (30 Jan. 1916), Lytton Strachey, as one would expect, on ‘Art and indecency’ (20 Feb. 1921), Lionel Penrose on ‘The chess problem: a neglected art form’ (30 Apr. 1922), M. D. Dobb on ‘The decline of capitalism’ (18 May 1922), Richard Braithwaite on ‘Quakers’ (22 Oct. 1922) and E. M. Forster on ‘Anonymity’ (13 May 1923).Footnote ⁶⁵

When he addressed the Heretics in 1911, Cornford advanced two propositions. First, the university ought to stand absolutely free of all dogmatic systems. The first step was to abolish all tests for teaching posts: ‘[A]ppointments must be taken out of the hands of people professionally pledged to any belief.’ Second, religion is a world-wide phenomenon with a legion of different forms and ‘the study of [religion] is one of the most important branches of human knowledge’. Associating himself with Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray and the so-called Cambridge Ritualists who attempted to find the origins of Greek tragedy in agricultural fertility rituals, Cornford said that ‘[t]heology is already taking its place as a branch of anthropology’. According to Cornford, Christ reduced theology to ‘two old Hebrew doctrines – that God exists and is the father of man; it marked him as the arch-heretic and rebel of his time and country’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Cornford was not anything like a Christian, but he was not a materialist either. As one might expect of someone so closely associated with Harrison and Murray, he was particularly sensitive to religious values and sensibilities. This is the way he expressed himself to a member of the Darwin family when he felt unable to attend a funeral:

But whatever theological objections Cornford might have had, his political objections were even stronger. He drafted ‘An appeal to undergraduates on behalf of religion liberty and intellectual independence’. On them, he said, rested ‘our chief hope of purging our Republic of bigotry and intolerance’. The university legislation of 1871 had made it impossible to compel members to attend acts of worship of sects or denominations to which they did not belong. But what of the agnostic or those who were indifferent? Nothing could ‘degrade a free man more’ than that he should have ‘to fabricate excuses for not attending a religious service which he dislikes or despises’. Cornford asked Trinity undergraduates to ‘free themselves from a burden of discipline’ and, in so doing, ‘strengthen the cause of religious liberty in the last English stronghold of religious intolerance’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Unlike its French counterpart, British secularism was not some Voltairean protest against the Church in alliance with an authoritarian monarchy. Nor was it a popular protest against a Church intent on regulating social and moral life.Footnote ⁶⁹ British secularism and religion were multiple, lay and intellectual.

This was the mental environment in which members of the university debated the recognition of St Edmund's House and the place of Roman Catholicism in the university. Guarded and careful, anxieties remained on all sides and the landscape was littered with uncertainties and fears. When Rome and the English bishops agreed in 1895 to allow Catholics to attend the ancient universities they insisted on a council which would safeguard the faith of these young men. However, that council was partially lay: seven of its members were to be laymen, along with six priests and two bishops.Footnote ⁷⁰ (The seven laymen included the duke of Norfolk, James Fitzalan Hope, the marquess of Bute, Wilfrid Ward and Anatole von Hügel.Footnote ⁷¹) Henry Jackson was alarmed at the slow pace of things. He had thought ‘there was an advance in such matter everywhere & especially in Cambridge’: ‘Thirty years ago we learned toleration perforce. We took theological differences hardly, and, anyhow we learnt consideration for others. It appears that the militant agnostics of the present day have not learnt the lesson. Their intellectual arrogance distresses and dismays me. I had not foreseen it.’Footnote ⁷² Wilfrid Ward remained hopeful: the growth of a ‘temper of fairness and sympathy on all sides’ would lead to reunion (‘if it is ever to be attained’) by ‘mutual co-operation against our common foes, irreligion, vice, anarchy, infidelity’.Footnote ⁷³ His uncle Norfolk did not share his optimism, remarking in a speech to the London Municipal Society in 1906 that secular education must ‘inevitably result in destroying all that is best in the English character today, and all by which Englishmen have been accustomed to set most prize in the past’.Footnote ⁷⁴ And, as an outsider, the lapsed Roman Catholic Arthur Conan Doyle viewed ‘with that interest and sympathy which so venerable and historical an institution must command. But looking at it from outside it is very clear that it is cracking in all directions & in danger of total destruction because it cannot adapt itself to an environment, which is the first condition of life’.Footnote ⁷⁵

The university was a site for contesting concepts of liberty and religion. Following the defeat of the grace on St Edmund's Montagu Butler wrote what he called ‘a hearty line of sympathy’ to Anatole von Hügel. Realising that the baron would ‘be tempted to be “bitter” – in thought if not tongue’, Butler presumed to tell him to utter ‘our almost sacred monosyllable “don't”’. Butler urged him to read the lines from Macaulay's elegy in 1847 shortly after Macaulay lost the seat at Edinburgh on the Maynooth question.

The arguments would rage on because they were arguments about core issues: the role of religion in the modern world and the ways in which Roman Catholicism could be incorporated into the world of deliberative liberalism that the university represented.Footnote ⁷⁷

This paper has described some chapters in the history of liberalism, in the history of Roman Catholicism, the history of education and the history of secularism which reveal the dissonances in the narratives of liberalism, Roman Catholicism, university education and secularism which arise from the fact that these narratives are all multiple. Far from homogeneous, they were internally divided and self-contradictory enterprises. None of them constituted a uniform body of experience which can be represented on a single dimension of behaviour. This is what makes the controversy over the university's recognition (or failure to recognise) St Edmund's in 1898 and the place of Roman Catholicism in the university so absorbing.