John Witheridge
James Clarke & Co Cambridge
John Witheridge’s book provides an opportunity to revisit the Victorian phase of the long and continuing history of England’s ancient, intersecting and problematical institutions: the public schools, the University of Oxford, the Church of England and Parliament. His research in the archives at Lambeth Palace and Balliol College underpins a major reappraisal of his subject.
This foray into the longest monarchy (bar one) in the English constitutional saga encompasses the rise to its height and early premonitions of the decline of the British Empire, as well as marriages, ambitions and preferments among ecclesiastical and political families and the disruptive encroachment of change, imposed upon or initiated by its principal actors. Allthis confects a triple-focus of politics, church, state and university, against a zoom-lense foreground of domestic intimacy. In following the life of a Fellow of Balliol, Headmaster of Rugby School and Archbishop of Canterbury, we are drawn into the interstices of Victorian political, ecclesiastical and social life.
Archibald Campbell Tait (1811-1882) was an outsider, a Scot who made it to the top of three establishment institutions. He was born with a club foot reconstructed by brutal and painful correction, suffered early in life the death of his mother and brother, yet through the agency and encouragement of a devoted father, progressed successfully through the Edinburgh Academy and Glasgow University to win a scholarship to Balliol College Oxford. While he never forsook the discipline and rectitude of the Scottish Presbyterianism of his early childhood, he absorbed the influence of Scottish Episcopalian relatives, orienting him to take up the liberal Anglicanism nourished by the arrival at Balliol of a clutch of the celebratedThomas Arnold’s pupils from Rugby School. This was the early 1830s, when Oxford was plunged into a concoction of intellectual exhilaration and turmoil by emerging religious factions, high church and low, and by strong personalities agitating for college and university reform.
Oriel College was at the centre of it all, with brilliant and opinionated young dons, the most famous of whom was John Henry Newman, pressing to make Oxford less a place of upper-class frolic and more one of devout and serious study. When Tait was elected to a Balliol fellowship, he joined the quest for academic reform and helped lay the foundations that would over time make Balliol the academic powerhouse of Oxford. These reforms were co-incidental with the religious agitations fuelled by John Keble’s Assize Sermon preached in the university church in1833 and the progress of the Oxford Movement that reached its climax in 1841 with the publication of Newman’s Tract XC, pitted against the Arnoldian liberal Anglicanism to which Tait always adhered.
When the great Dr Arnold died unexpectedly in 1842, leaving the headship of Rugby vacant, it was Tait’s precocious application, supported by forty-two referees, many of them Arnold’s former pupils, that was successful. He was thirty-one and in need of a wife. He married Catherine Spooner who proved an admirable partner and bore him many children. Although Tait lacked the charisma and teaching genius of Arnold, he nevertheless sustained Rugby’s development as the example of a modern public school, winning respect among all as a sound teacher and able administrator of equable temperament. While no-one was likely to match Arnold’s glamour, Witheridge rescues Tait from a lingering slur that his seven years at Rugby were totally in Arnold’s shadow .
In the nineteenth century young headmasters could be rescued from the exhausting demands of running under-staffed and under-funded schools by seeking ecclesiastical preferment. Tait was openly ambitious in this regard. He was also uxorious, so when the deanery of Carlisle was offered him in 1849, with its promise of a capacious house for his expanding family and further scope for career progression, he accepted. Carlisle would also take him nearer home to Scotland. Both the cathedral and the city of Carlisle were in a dilapidated state, and here Tait was able to show his capacity to address social ills, identify with the hardships of the poor and offer them the Gospel tonic of hope. He was also intelligent about the architectural challenge of rehabilitating the cathedral. But in 1856 disaster struck his large and happy family, when five of his children in quick succession succumbed to scarlet fever. Tait’s own always-fragile health took a hard blow and, understandably, so did his commitment to Carlisle. The five little girls were buried together in a single grave in the village of Stanwix, just outside Carlisle, within sight of the cathedral. The grave is marked by a plain stone cross, on it inscribed (recorded on p74 of In the Shadow of Death), the words
‘Here lie the mortal bodies of five little sisters, the much loved children of A.C. Tait, Dean of Carlisle, and Catherine his wife, who were all cut off within five weeks.’
Witheridge gives Tait the sobriquet of “Queen Victoria’s favourite Archbishop of Canterbury”. From now on, moved by the heart-rending sadness of the loss of his children, the Queen steps in as Tait’s guardian angel. She insists on his appointment as Bishop of London in 1856 and later, in 1868, resisting Disraeli’s intentions, as Archbishop of Canterbury. In one more instalment of “the shadow of death”, in 1878, Tait was to suffer the loss of his adult son Crauford, and then soon after, Catherine, broken-hearted by the death of the boy who had somehow compensated for the earlier tragedy of 1856.
Witheridge recounts succinctly the myriad issues, ecclesiastical, social and political, that beset Tait from 1856 on, from delinquent clergy to controversies about liturgy, theology, and the relationship between Parliament and the national Church. The drawn-out machinations that led to the Public Worship Act of 1874 and the fall-out caused by the publication of the liberalist approach to biblical interpretation espoused in Essays and Reviews gave Tait plenty of headache and more than ample scope for his diplomatic and administrative skills. Projects he put in place to address social deprivation in the parishes while he was Bishop of London show him as effective and innovative. While Witheridge is not uncritical of Tait’s tendency in some matters to make up his mind without due regard to the obstacles towards its achievement, the overwhelming impression he projects is of a devout, calm, fair-minded, competent leader prepared to moderate his views in the light of mature experience. Tait is an ecclesiastical civil servant of the kind that can more-or-less make a state Church work. The book is a study of principled leadership ready to compromise and weather the brickbats that visit the eirenic.
John Witheridge has already established his authority in this field in his study of Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster and Tait’s contemporary. He has a natural sympathy with his subject, having been himself a chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Headmaster of Charterhouse. He knows the territory. Eminent ecclesiastical historians such as Owen Chadwick have provided him with much of the material that is the necessary background to any assessment of a Victorian archbishop. What is both particularly valuable and engaging about this book is its setting of the family story of Tait as child and parent within his wider duties as dean and bishop.
There are moments when Witheridge’s picturing comes close to that of the master recorder of Victorian sadness , David Newsome, who tells with unforgettable pathos the story in Godliness and Good Learning of the death at school of Martin Benson, son of Tait’s successor as archbishop. Infant, adolescent and young adult, the shadow of death was a frequently encountered experience among the Victorians, including Newman, Gladstone and the Queen herself.
And the establishment institutions, the public schools, the University of Oxford, the Church of England and Parliament continue as problematical now as they were then!
Reading Hour 