Pugin Lecture

In the first part of this talk, I’ll give a short sketch of the historical predicament of Catholicism in England in the era in which the Church of St Peter the Apostle was built, in the eighteen forties…

The authorities had feared trouble when the foundation stone of St George’s, Southwark, was laid in 1841. The ceremony took place quietly, in the early morning with minimal publicity, for fear of Anti-Catholic riots. The building wasn’t completed till 1848. In 1852 it would be elevated to become the Cathedral of the new Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark.

Henry VIII had rejected the authority of the Pope in the Act of Supremacy in 1534, making himself head of the English Church. For most of the time since then, the practice of the Roman Catholic religion had been illegal here. Whilst there had been some aristocrats, even some queens, who’d been Catholic, the mass was rarely said, and that privately, if not secretly. Few people in the Protestant majority here had ever seen a Catholic service. There was a fragile tolerance of the Roman religion. As long as it was attracting no attention, there was usually little active hostility to it.

Nevertheless, the English thought the Catholic religion superstitious, verging on pagan idolatry. It had a reputation for cruel persecution, especially because of the Bloody Mary’s burnings in England, and those of the Spanish Inquisition, and because of many other savage acts of mutual intolerance between Catholics and Protestants over the intervening centuries. The Church of Rome was still thought to be a threat to English sovereignty. Catholic Spain had sent its navy to invade the country, in the sixteenth century, seeking to restore Popery. The Stuart King James II had tried to re-impose Catholicism on his country, a century after the Spanish Armada, and had been deposed. The Papist Guy Fawkes had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1603, and his effigy had been burned here on November 5th ever since. In the mid eighteenth century James Stuart’s grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had led an armed Catholic revolt. These historic matters made the Roman Catholic religion loom nasty in the English mentality whenever the exotic faith came into focus – even to the extent of becoming a little more tolerated. In 1780 the mere removal of some of the laws preventing Catholics gaining promotion in the services had provoked the atrocious Gordon Riots.

More recently in the nineteenth century, although priests had been able to conduct the mass, this had taken place almost furtively, in secular buildings, or by special arrangement in Protestant churches. English Catholic religion was roughly organized into large ‘districts’ in which there were a small number of makeshift chapels, or other meeting rooms, sometimes rented from Protestants, to which priests, ‘missioners’ as they were sometimes called, often travelled long distances to say mass.

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In 1829, Parliament had passed the Catholic Emancipation Act, which recognized the right of Catholics to practise their religion. New Catholic churches had been built in some parts of the country. Wherever this happened there was a danger of violent demonstrations. No hierarchy of Catholic dioceses had yet been set up, to obtain distinctly from the Anglican religious geography. Three hundred years before, under Henry VIII, all places of worship, from Canterbury Cathedral downwards, had ceased to be Catholic churches. The Roman religion couldn’t re-appear in the nineteenth century in the great medieval cathedrals, which of course remained Anglican. The thinly spread Catholic Church had faced a huge task of building and re-organization.

There was a large Catholic population in the Woolwich area, because of the many Irishmen who had come here to help build the Woolwich Dockyard and Woolwich Arsenal, and to work in them; and because there were many Irish Catholic soldiers garrisoned in the Royal Artillery regiment in Woolwich. There were also foreign prisoners of war housed in the hulks of ships on the Thames here. They too were often Catholic. The provision of religious services for all these people was inadequate. The military were keen to build a Catholic church in Woolwich.

It was only in the twentieth century that the English got used to the idea of a ‘standing army’ – that is, of a big national army existing while there was no war on. Civilians suspected that such an army was employed to shoot people the government didn’t like – and viewed one almost like an army of occupation. So it was unusual to have a big garrison so close to a town as the Royal Artillery barracks was to Woolwich. Bad relations with civilians were expected by the military. It was hoped it would encourage decent behaviour in the soldiers if they could practise their religion.

When Fr Cornelius Coles came as ‘missioner’ to Woolwich in 1839, the local faithful were numbered in thousands, but there was room for only a few hundred in the little chapel where mass was celebrated. Fr Coles collected money for a new church, and the ‘Board of Ordnance’ (the then MoD) provided a plot of land in New Road. The land given for the church was the site of the Marquis of Anglesea public house – which was moved down Woolwich New Road to where it now stands as the Anglesea Arms. The new church was designed by the famous architect, Augustus Pugin.

The foundation stone for St Peter the Apostle was laid on October 26th 1842 by Dr Griffiths, the Bishop of the Catholic ‘London District’. Unlike the similar ceremony at St George’s Southwark the year before, this was a fully public occasion. Some observers said that many of the Protestants who attended were impressed by the curiously beautiful Catholic rituals. In any case, the presence of hundreds of the Queen’s Catholic men from the Royal Artillery made unorganised Anti-Papist violence unlikely in New Road that day. Exactly one year later, a retired bishop, Dr Morris, opened the church.

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When the Church of St Peter the Apostle was opened in 1843, it was the first Catholic Church to be completed in London for hundreds of years.Not enough money had been collected to pay for the completion of Augustus Pugin’s design. The church lacked the great tower that the architect wanted to see on the south side of the façade. It was smaller in other ways too: the building ended at the top of the nave. The chancel, where the altar now stands, wasn’t there; nor the northern aisle leading to where the Lady Chapel was eventually to stand. The builders’ account of £4 033 for what had been completed was settled a year later.

To an extent that seems unreasonable now, Protestants would be furious when a Catholic Hierarchy was set up in 1850. The change only meant that there was an official Catholic geography of archdioceses, dioceses etc – rather scantly staffed – without pretension to any authority over Protestants; yet it gave offence. Queen Victoria joked grimly that she wondered whether she was still the Queen of England. The prime minister, Lord John Russell, wrote to the Times about this ‘aggression of the Pope’ which was ‘insolent and insidious’. Newspapers and magazines carried anti-Catholic articles and cartoons. On Nov 5th, effigies of the Pope and the new archbishops were burned on bonfires alongside Guy Fawkes. The priests in the Brompton Oratory might have been lynched without a police presence surrounding their home.

I’ll now say something about the life and work of Augustus Pugin

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was born in London on March 1st 1812. His father, Auguste Charles Pugin, was French, and Augustus grew up bilingual. Auguste had fled Paris during the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution, to work in England as an artist and drawing master. Seven years after he arrived, he married Catherine Welby, a woman of a wealthy Lincolnshire family. Not a rich man, he’d hardly been a 'catch’ for Catherine. Auguste let the rumour spread that he was from an aristocratic French family, but that is less than true. A flamboyant character, the elder Pugin no doubt thought that it would do a struggling French artist no harm to have people here believe he was a distressed nobleman.

His son Augustus showed a flair for design from an early age. His father taught him to draw, and he proved a precocious artist. While he was still in his teens, furniture he had designed had appeared in Windsor Castle. His father instilled in him a love of medieval architecture. Auguste was an expert on the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. He visited them on continental tours, and published art books about them. Travelling with his father on explorative visits to medieval buildings, sketching them with him, young Augustus came to admire the Catholic religion itself, as well as its great buildings. The elder Pugin was a very lapsed Catholic. His wife was a member of a Presbyterian sect, and Augustus was made to attend services of her faith in Bloomsbury, where he grew up. He didn’t like the plain style of Presbyterian worship, nor the long sermons of his mother’s charismatic mentor the Rev. Edward Irving. In 1835, soon after reaching his majority, Augustus was received into the Roman Catholic faith.

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Augustus never underwent much formal education apart from four years at Christ’s Hospital School. A lot of what he knew about architecture was picked up by studying the structure and style of old buildings. He was always touring continental Europe, gaining understanding of the ways in which their builders made sure old churches support their own weight. At the same time his thoughts about the relation between religion and architecture were developing.

As a young man he worked as ‘flyman’ in the theatres of Covent Garden, rigging up scenery high in the roofs of theatres, with rough seamen for mates who knew the ropes of tall ships. He also made a name for himself as a creator of theatrical spectacles – including even volcanic eruptions and collapsing castles. He expressed himself attractively in successful books, illustrating his arguments with skilful drawings - both of architecture he thought admirable, and of that he which he deplored - with human figures drawn in caricature. His books Contrasts (1836) and True Principles of Pointed (or Christian Architecture (1841) created a great deal of interest and controversy. He also published a series of pictorial books he called ‘schemes’ – portraying scenes from medieval religious life. Both in his own country and overseas, the nineteenth century public listened to him. He was widely looked upon as a great man for nearly half his short life - the leader of the Gothic Revival in Victorian taste.

Rather than coming over as a scholar, Augustus had the manner of a rough sailor man. He was one, among other things. He commanded his own vessel, taking cargo, trading successfully in antiques in France and Belgium, helped by his fluent French and his experience collecting beautiful objects on his tours of medieval places. Even in polite society, he habitually dressed like a common seaman, in an eccentric outfit of his own design. He had the rolling gait of a man with ‘sea-legs’. Of middle height for his own day - short by today’s standards - he was burly and looked powerful. Although his political views were right wing, he was never snobbish – always getting on easily with working people. His manner of talking didn’t vary much, whether he was addressing aristocrats or carpenters, bishops, or scene-shifters. Living in Ramsgate, he managed his own lifeboat service, which often attended wrecks on the notorious Goodwin Sands nearby. The work wasn’t purely charitable, as those who saved a ship could profit well from its cargo. Within the maritime community there was no shame in this.

His lack of educational polish often shows in his letters. He makes frequent slips of grammar and spelling. Murmuring to himself while he was working, he often swore like a sailor. Although he was an inspiration to many contemporary scholars, Augustus was never quite an intellectual himself. Although he was the most influential architect of his generation, he wasn’t the engineer a contemporary of Isambard Kingdom Brunel might be expected to be. A nineteenth century architect with mathematical training had the means to calculate precisely how the weight of a building would exert stress on its supporting structures. While medieval master builders had developed a working understanding of how a cathedral’s weight could be

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directed down columns, walls, and spread into flying buttresses, their judgment hadn’t been perfect, and important buildings could suffer collapse, or need reinforcing. Pugin’s detractors claimed that his lack of scientific training allowed him to make unnecessary ‘medieval’ mistakes in designing his Gothic churches. It was true that sometimes he relied on the practical judgement of his friend Myers, a master builder. But not all mid-nineteenth century architects were engineers; and Pugin wasn’t sentimental about medieval technology. He used modern steel to help support his buildings, rather than use wooden beams. He remarked that any medieval architect would have done the same, given the chance.

Pugin married three times. At nineteen he was briefly married to Anne Garnet, who may have been a Covent Garden showgirl, who died in 1832 giving birth to a daughter. He wed Louisa Button in 1833, and they had five children, including Edward Pugin, who became a famous architect like his father. Louisa died in 1844. Augustus was very keen to remarry but didn’t succeed in finding a new wife as quickly as he’d hoped. In 1848 Jane Knill married him and bore a daughter, Margaret, and a son, Peter Paul Pugin, who was to be another architect. Edward and Peter Paul continued to run their father’s architectural firm after his death with some success, under the name of Pugin and Pugin. As late as 1933, a new north-west chapel was added to St Chad’s by Sebastian Pugin Powell, Augustus Pugin’s grandson.

Augustus was a loving husband and father and hated to be single; yet he persistently spent weeks away from home, in Britain or abroad. It wasn’t just business that took him away - the supervising of constructions, buying of materials, sea voyages, etc. As part of his mission to improve the architectural taste and religious life of Britain, he felt driven to tour the continent again and again, insatiably studying and drawing medieval buildings - when it might have been better to be at home, looking after his affairs and, as the politicians say, ‘spending more time with his family’.

Although he is most famous as a church architect and author of world-changing books, Pugin, especially later in his career, was an equally successful designer and manufacturer of furnishings, fabrics, ceramic tiles, ritual ware like chalices, and stained glass. Moreover, he effectively transformed the design of domestic housing – especially in the new suburban areas that were developing outside the towns, now that commuting had become possible for the first time, with the coming of the railways.

Whenever he was financially ahead, Augustus Pugin was generous. One of the most important Pugin architectural sites is the one in Ramsgate, where the manor house, the Grange, which he built for his family, stands beside the lovely Church of St Augustine, which he both built and paid for as a gift to the Faith in England. Augustus wasn’t good with money, either his own earnings or funds for projects he was working on for other people.

Among Pugin’s greatest achievements was his famous work at the new Palace of Westminster, which was required when the previous buildings were destroyed in a fire in 1834. The senior architect for this huge project

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was Charles Barrie, but he depended heavily on Augustus’s skill as an artist, designer, and master of Gothic architecture. Barrie treated his assistant badly. He often asked Pugin to modify his, that is, Pugin’s, designs this way or that; and it almost seemed as though Barrie thought such alterations diminished Pugin’s right to call any of the work his own. It’s clear that Pugin was the main designer of the iconic Big Ben clock tower, of the décor of the interior of the House of Lords, and of a great deal of the detail of the main buildings of the Palace of Westminster; yet Barrie wouldn’t acknowledge this work. Barrie earned a fortune from his many years of work on the Houses of Parliament. Pugin was employed on a salary of £200 a year, which Barrie contrived to cut to £100. Even at the final opening of the Palace, years after poor Augustus had died, when Barry was giving a speech of thanks to all the people who had played a part in the building of this great national institution, he didn’t mention Augustus Pugin.

As a result of bad management, bad health, and bad luck, Pugin’s affairs seemed in a parlous state toward the end of his life. By June 1852 he’d become critically ill, with a disease never perfectly diagnosed. Morbid melancholy eventually turned fully into psychotic madness and he was admitted to Bedlam (Bethlem) Hospital, close to his own St George’s Cathedral in Southwark. The hospital was still notorious from the days in the eighteenth century when the public went there to laugh at the antics of the lunatics. In fact, although it was still a free hospital for mentally ill paupers, Bedlam no longer deserved its bad name in 1852. Insofar as any effective treatment for mental illness was available in the mid-nineteenth century, the treatment offered there was of a good standard.

In one way, the fact that Bedlam remained notorious proved a good thing for Augustus and his family. Hearing that the great man was in Bedlam, Lord John Russell started a fund for his support, and part of the considerable response was that Queen Victoria granted Pugin a pension, on behalf of a grateful nation. After a few months in the hospital Pugin returned to his senses enough to be discharged, but he was still hardly sure who he was, and terminally ill. He died aged forty in Ramsgate later the same year - in his manor house, beside the splendid church he’d presented to the English Roman Catholic Church in happier days.

I’ll now say something about Pugin’s views about cultural history. I want to explain how it came about that people during the last four centuries have spoken of Western history in terms of the Ancient, Classical, Age, and the Modern Age, with the ‘Middle Ages’, between them. Please remember that from here on until I say otherwise, I’m mainly presenting a view that prevailed among many cultural historians in the nineteenth century. It’s not necessarily my own view; I recount it now mainly because Pugin did his best throughout his adult life to get people to think otherwise.

The finest phase of European civilization started in Greece around the eighth century BC, reaching a peak in the fifth century BC in Athens. Greek culture was preserved by the Romans when they started to take over the lands round the Mediterranean in the first

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century BC, proceeding to build up their great empire, whose territories came to extend through Europe, North Africa, and large parts of Western Asia. In the early fourth century AD the Emperor Constantine set up the ancient Greek city of Byzantium as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, re-naming it ‘Constantinople’. He left Rome itself as the capital of only the Western Empire henceforward. Constantine also ended the persecution of Christianity, making it the main religion of the Roman Empire, eventually getting baptised himself. During the fifth century, Rome became increasingly decadent. The Romans came to depend more and more upon barbarian Germanic warriors for protection, and these rough tribesmen began to see no reason to obey the emperors they were employed to protect.

At the end of the fifth century (476 AD) Rome fell, in an invasion of the ‘Gothic’ Germanic tribesmen. The last Roman Emperor, Romulus, was deposed by an Ostrogoth, Odoacer, who became the Emperor. The Eastern Empire was not overrun by barbarians when the Western Empire fell. Christian Graeco-Roman civilization carried on much as before, with people mainly speaking Greek – which had been the language of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa for centuries. In the province of Judea in Biblical times, many of the first converts to Christianity spoke Greek. Our Lord may sometimes have preached in Greek.

During the seventh and eight centuries, the new religion of Islam began to spread rapidly and widely round the lands east and south of the Mediterranean. While at first the Caliphs of Islamic territories persecuted the Christian and Jewish minorities, they quite soon became more tolerant. They felt an affinity for all religions that traced their origins to Abraham in the Old Testament, calling all their members the ‘People of the Book’ – including Jews and Christians – both of whom the Moslems distinguished from Pagans.

During their conquests of Christian countries the Moslems took possession of libraries full of Greek literature, including that of Alexandria – the intellectual centre of the Mediterranean world. The books they assimilated included scientific, medical, and philosophical works. Some Moslem clerics were suspicious of any texts written by pagan authors. However, Islamic scholars persuaded them that if the teachings of Islam were true and the teachings of scientists were true, they could never contradict each another, when things were seen in the right perspective. They were especially interested in the works of the philosopher Aristotle (384 BC- 322 BC). Arab, Persian, and Jewish scholars living in Moslem territories studied Aristotle devotedly and wrote treatises about his teachings. As some of them said, you could hardly blame a Greek born over a thousand years before the Prophet for not being a Moslem. You couldn’t blame him for not being a Christian, either. In the thirteenth century Latin translations of some of these Islamic commentaries on

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Aristotle began to reach Europe, often through Spain, which was still under Moslem control in those days. Medieval thinkers like St Thomas Aquinas were delighted to read them, as very little literature like that had survived in ‘Gothic’ Europe.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Moslem armies never succeeded in taking the great fortified city of Constantinople, which commanded the Bosphorus - the narrow sea lane that divides Asia and Europe, and the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. At last, in 1453 the army of the Turkish Emperor Mahommet II conquered Constantinople. Now, in the late fifteenth century, scholars from the Eastern Empire fled into Europe, bearing Ancient Greek texts and other works not seen in the West since Rome fell to the Gothic hordes.

The language of the Eastern Empire was still Greek. While churchmen like Aquinas had studied the works of Aristotle in Latin translation, they’d enjoyed little access to most ancient classical literature, and knew no Greek. In fifteenth century Italy, especially because of the special relation between Venice with the Eastern Empire, the study of the classics had already been flourishing, encouraged by the great Italian author Petrarch. Now in the sixteenth century Northern European scholars like Erasmus and Thomas More not only read classical books but wrote literature of their own in Ancient Greek – knowledge of which now revived in the West. They also wrote beautiful classical Latin – emulating ancient authors like Cicero and Virgil. They came to despise what they called the ‘dog Latin’ of medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, and Duns Scotus. They came to think of the European culture of the previous centuries as barbaric and ignorant. They called it ‘Gothic’ in contempt.

The Renaissance had begun. The name indicates the ‘Re-Birth’ of Western Civilization – the resuming of the great culture of Greece and Rome that had lasted in the West from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD, and then been lost there with the fall of the Rome. The Renaissance completely changed the mood of Western culture. Architects, sculptors, and other artists started to imitate the style of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. Churches were built that looked like classical temples. It was now, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the history of Europe came to be viewed as having two good phases and one bad one. There was the ‘Ancient’ era that ended in the fifth century AD – and the ‘Modern’ one that had begun in the late fifteenth century, though earlier than that in Italy. Between them were ‘Middle Ages’ – the ‘Medieval’, ‘Gothic’ era.

The Renaissance was the beginning of a great widening in scope of Western thought. European scholars no longer concentrated on Aristotle, but studied all manner of ancient authors, of various differing opinions. The culture was especially inspired by the

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achievements of the Greeks during the golden age of Athens, when the philosopher Socrates was teaching Plato, while Pericles was building the Parthenon; but European intellectuals were open-minded now. Any text was eagerly studied, whether Greek, Roman, Egyptian, African, or Asian, as long as it was written long ago.

The ‘Renaissance’ was followed in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment – still inspired by the classics, but more disciplined by Modern Reason. There was one way in which the Modern phase of Western Civilization was now seen to be superior to the Ancient. That was in the physics produced by Galileo and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This too reflected badly on the ‘Gothic’ Middle Ages. Medieval scholars had believed that Aristotle had been right about all scientific matters. To her subsequent shame, Catholic Church had persecuted Galileo for disagreeing with Aristotle about physics and astronomy.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people had become better and better at applying Modern physics to engineering. This had brought about the present age of Modern Progress – an era of great new discoveries. Astounding new technology was improving transport and other forms of communication, creating splendid improvements in production and in the use of natural resources, offering wonderful new possibilities of human achievement.

That is the end of my account of how people in the mid-nineteenth century spoke of the ‘Middle Ages’ and of the barbaric inferiority of its ‘Gothic’ culture. I’ll now say what Augustus Pugin thought about these same matters.

He saw things more like this:

Europeans are members of the ‘Christian Civilization’. Our Lord was born in the Roman Province of Judea, where His earthly mission culminated in His Crucifixion, which was carried out under Roman Law, and fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. Many Christians were martyred during the early era. But the Church, centred in Rome, survived. It was beginning to prevail during the fourth century, when Constantine made it the favoured religion of the Empire. Many of the Germanic tribes of Europe, including some beyond the imperial borders, were Christian by the fifth century. Some of them impressed Romans travellers by their decency – in comparison the dissolute behaviour of the Roman upper classes; for life in metropolitan Rome was getting increasingly depraved. Weak Roman Emperors came to depend more and more on Germanic warriors for their personal protection, and on alliances with various German kings to defend the Empire from invaders like the Huns and other ferocious Eastern or Northern peoples. Eventually, in 475 AD the Ostrogoths took over the Empire. That didn’t mean the end of Christianity,

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because the new masters of Rome were Christians, although many of them were not fully orthodox. Their predecessors hadn’t all been either.

The Christian Roman Empire continued, still often under attack, but no more ‘destroyed’ by its new Germanic rulers than the Roman Catholic Church had been. The successors to the Ostrogothic conqueror Odoacer over many centuries were the rulers later identified as the ‘Holy Roman Emperors’. Many of them would be great men. There was the famous Charlemagne, who did much to turn Europe into a united Christendom in the ninth century. Frederick Barbarossa was the brilliant twelfth century German king who was the first have the word ‘Holy’ formally prefixed to his name, after his coronation by Pope Adrian IV. As the civilization of European Christendom advanced, wonderful architecture was created. Christian builders discovered wonderfully artful ways to spread the weight of high buildings by pointed arches and by buttresses on the outer walls. It became possible for a large church to have a high vaulted roof with walls that no longer needed to be massively thick; so they could have great stained glass windows set in them. The columns of the beautifully sweeping arches could be quite slender and could be kept to the far sides of the building for the most part, so that the high, beautifully lit space within a cathedral was at the core of its splendour. Compare such ‘pointed’, Christian architecture to the façade of a classical pagan temple like the Parthenon. Because the pagan columns are at right angles to the horizontal stone lintels they support, they bear the weight of the great mass of stone straight down, so that the thick columns cannot be too far apart. The Christians discovered the wonderful truth that the more practically perfect the form of a building is, the more beautiful the building tends to be.

Since the so-called ‘Renaissance’, major European buildings had been mainly neo-classical. St Martin in the Fields by Trafalgar Square - an eighteenth century building - looks rather like a Greek temple. This adulation of heathen architecture had been a mistake. Christian Civilization was superior to the classical Greek in religion, with an architecture more advanced, both in terms of engineering and beauty. Nineteenth century culture should return to it Christian roots.

What Pugin called the ‘Ancient’ phase of Christian Civilization had been achieving wonderful things in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was overtaken by this regressive re-birth of paganism, with people copying the arts and attitudes of Greeks and Romans, and espousing all manner of old superstitions, like astrology, magic, and witchcraft - all of which became more popular in the sixteenth century. Christians were coming to their senses now, after a dark era of three or four centuries, during

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which their culture had been declining. What most people had called the ‘Middle Ages’ should now be viewed as the great phase of our Ancient Christian heritage. What had been regarded as the ‘Renaissance’ should now be understood as a dark, mistaken, intermission in the progress of Christian Civilization, which was now being re-born. Now in the nineteenth century the ‘Modern’ phase of Christian Civilization was coming…

I’ll now give an overview of Pugin’s aspirations, frustrations and achievements.

Of course, Pugin didn’t succeed in changing English usage about the ‘Ancient Era’, the ‘Middle Ages’, and ‘Modern Era’. His hopes about the imminent dawn of a new Catholic Christian era in England were mistaken. He’d believed that the Anglican Church was on the point of returning to obedience to the Holy See in Rome, which, of course, it never did.

Despite his detailed knowledge of some aspects of medieval culture he lacked a clear perspective on the religious movements that concerned him so much. He failed to appreciate the following broad facts of history:

The Reformation was the religious upheaval in Christendom that was caused by the theologian Martin Luther’s rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church, launched in 1517 when he challenged the doctors of the Church to refute his ‘ninety-five theses’ – in which he criticized the practice of indulgences. Out of this controversy grew the great Protestant challenge to papal authority and the whole of Catholic religion.

The Renaissance was the attempt to revive classical arts and literature that was happening at very roughly the same time.

When, as a young man, he wrote Contrasts, Pugin had only a cloudy awareness of the Counter-Reformation, in which the Catholic Church responded to the criticisms of the Protestants, improving the discipline of the clergy and clarifying liturgy and doctrine. This was most noticeably achieved by the Council of Trent in the mid- sixteenth century. The Council yielded, among much else, the liturgy of the ‘Tridentine Mass’ – used throughout the Catholic Church, and superseding any liturgy peculiar to this or that country in those days.

Augustus deplored both the Reformation and the Renaissance, and, with queer ignorance, blamed the former for causing the latter – as if Martin Luther had started the Renaissance. He did so in print in 1836 in Contrasts. His critics were quick to point out, that his account of the Reformation was indefensible. Protestant religion hadn’t started the Renaissance. The Catholic Church herself had already embraced the styles of the Renaissance long before Luther issued his challenge

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in 1517. The greatest of all Renaissance buildings, St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was commissioned by Pope Julius II, a Renaissance man, as early as 1505 and was built over a long period of time by a series of architects that included Michelangelo. Nevertheless, Contrasts was highly successful book, whose sales were only increased by criticism.

It was a largely pictorial book in which Pugin contrasted happy scenes from medieval life with horrid ones from life during the Industrial Revolution. For instance, there was a picture of a group of beautiful medieval poorhouses, contrasted with one of the terrible nineteenth century workhouses. His brilliant drawings, showing how hollow all the current talk of ‘progress’ was, had a wide and deep appeal. Any writer in Pugin’s day who compared the Middle Ages favourably with the era of the Industrial Revolution was pushing on an open door. Writers like Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle – not to mention Karl Marx – were pointing out that while work was destroying the souls of nineteenth century factory hands, the work of medieval craftsmen had been spiritually fulfilling. Industrialists were treating human beings like a commodity to be bought at the lowest possible price – and used, just as they used coal, wool, or iron ore.

If not everyone thought that a return to medieval religion would help to restore the spiritual health of the people, there were articulate minorities who did. There were lovers of ‘Gothic’ literature and art who thought that the country needed a Catholic atmosphere. There were wealthy Catholics like Pugin’s admirer the Earl of Shrewsbury who felt that the time was ripe for English admirers of medieval culture to adopt the medieval faith, as Pugin had done, and who employed him as both an architect of both religious and domestic buildings. Moreover, as Pugin was pleased to find, there was a movement among Anglican clergy in Oxford, sympathetic to the idea that their Church might be re-united with Rome. They asserted that, despite what Henry VIII had done in the sixteenth century, their church was the same one that St Augustine of Canterbury had founded in 697. Many Anglicans today say their Church started then, not in 1534. These religious intellectuals included John Henry Newman, the main author of the influential Tracts for the Times – a series of influential essays about the state of the nation and of the life of its Established Church. Newman and his associates were known as the ‘Tractarians’. Some Tractarians had also been proponents of the Sarum Rite. This was the liturgy used in England in the late fifteenth century. ‘Sarum’ is the old name for Salisbury. Pugin too had made a study of the Sarum Rite, and he was hoping it would revive in English Catholic services.

When Newman and some other Tractarians eventually converted to Catholicism, things turned out completely contrary to what Pugin had hoped. The apostates were regarded as having committed an act of treason. They were hated by other Anglican clergy, and by other

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members of the laity who were more ardently bigoted than they were pious. Equally bad news, as far as Augustus Pugin was concerned, was the fact that the first Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, had no time for the Medieval English Sarum Rite and required Catholic priests to use the liturgy of the Tridentine Mass here, just like other ministers of the universal Roman Church elsewhere. Moreover, while the poorly structured English Church had previously been considerably influenced by wealthy Catholic benefactors like Pugin’s patron the Earl of Shrewsbury, Cardinal Archbishop Wiseman soon made it clear that he was in no awe of these philanthropists. He made the running of the English Catholic Church fit in entirely with the prescriptions of Rome. Worse still, the Tractarians who converted, like John Henry Newman and Wilfrid Faber, not only practised a very Roman form of Roman Catholicism, but favoured Neo-Classical styles of architecture - as, of course, the Catholic Church had mainly done for more than three hundred years, throughout the world.

Pugin’s optimism, both about the chances of this country’s conversion and of the Papacy realizing that Gothic styles of architecture were more spiritually fitting than Renaissance ones, was inextinguishable, however. Amazingly, when he went to the Vatican and had audiences with the Pope and the Curia, he apparently told them that they should pull down St Peter’s Basilica and let him design a Gothic building to replace it. The Roman clergy didn’t know what to make of this crazy Englishman.

Even if not all his dreams were realized, Augustus Pugin cannot be counted a failure. He is hailed as the leading light of the Gothic Revival in the arts in Victorian England, and an influential social critic. His designs, in architecture, in furniture, ceramics, glass, and textiles were to change the taste of two generations of British people – making them ready for the Arts and Crafts movement of the later nineteenth century. His influence isn’t always easy to detect, partly because it’s so extensive. This is peculiarly so with domestic architecture, because it was largely Pugin who formed the late nineteenth century and twentieth century idea of what an ordinary house was like – with one front entrance for all comers, giving onto a hall into which a staircase descends...

Pugin and champions of the Gothic like him may be given some of the credit for ending the contempt for the culture of what we still call the ‘Middle Ages’. Historians of Western Civilization no longer regard the era as one of crude ignorance. Not only the art and architecture, but the theology and the logic of the medieval era are highly regarded in academic circles now. The sixteenth century, the flowering of the Renaissance, is regarded as a period when Western philosophy declined – although it gained new strength in the seventeenth century. It’s possible to trace Pugin’s influence, and the

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wider idea of ‘the Gothic’, much further; but I haven’t the time for that.

I will close this talk by reverting to the theme of religious intolerance with which I began.

In the second half of the nineteenth century it remained easy to rouse Anti-Papist sentiment here in Woolwich. This happened, for instance, in 1882 when a certain Dr Potter, aided by a failed priest called Murphy, succeeded in causing riots in protest about the mere toleration of Catholic worship. It has taken a long while for Roman Catholicism to become assimilated into British society. I’m aware from older members of my own family that many Catholics born here in the early twentieth century felt themselves to be in a minority that still stood at a disadvantage, even if no longer under immediate threat of violent persecution.

We should bear such recent history in mind. Catholics today must never let ourselves fall into embracing the same sort of bigotry which has been directed against previous generations of us here. I’ve heard Fr Michael urge parishioners from the pulpit that we should never let ourselves start hating the Moslem minority because of the violent behaviour of a few Islamist fanatics. We should remember the many more familiar ‘facts’ about the behaviour of all the good-hearted Moslem women, men, and children with whom we are acquainted, and not think in terms of detested stereotypes. If there are nasty ‘facts’ about some Moslems, let us remember that there are many nasty ‘facts’ about Christians - indeed, about each of us, over two millennia, right back to St Peter the Apostle and St Paul.

One odious sentiment in which some Moslems and Christians have found common ground in the past is hatred of the Jews. Members of both our religions have been heard to use the epithet ‘Christ-killers’ for the Jews. People who talk like that implicitly believe as ridiculous a heresy as can be imagined. They let it sound as if the Crucifixion of Our Lord were a dirty rotten shame – as if it would never have happened but for a mob of vicious Jews in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. They forget that Christ’s mission on Earth was to offer Himself for sacrifice, in lieu of the sinfulness of all humanity, including, of course, everyone living today.

So we all kill Christ.

I killed Christ.

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