Edward Elgar and His World (5 page)

Ultramontanism has been defined frequently over the last century. The term literally means “beyond the mountains” (similar to the Italian
oltremontano
). From 1829 forward, English-language sources used it to mean strong support of papal authority. A mid-nineteenth-century definition comes close to the contemporary, almost militant spirit of the movement:

The essence, then, of Ultramontanism of English Catholics we take to be this; that by divine institution no branch of the Church has any rights whatsoever against the supreme authority of the Pope, and that the “national” principle of action, on which all human affairs must be conducted in the secular order, is totally inapplicable to the affairs of religion. As a practical corollary to this doctrine, we hold that it is of primary importance to the well-being of Catholicism in any country that no hindrance whatsoever should exist between the See of Rome and the clergy and laity of that country, or to the direct action of the Pope upon his spiritual subjects in all spiritual things.
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With their fervent belief in the supremacy of the Pope in all things spiritual, Ultramontane Catholics were in direct conflict with the English Protestant majority, who saw this at least partially as an issue of national sovereignty. They feared that English Catholics would be loyal to the Pope instead of being loyal to the Crown. Most of the nineteenth-century Catholic converts fell into the Ultramontane camp, as this was the most public face of nineteenth-century English Catholicism. With the publication of Newman's sermon “The Second Spring,” Ultramontane Catholics considered themselves part of a renewal of English Catholicism, and “Second Springers” considered themselves to be more intellectually inclined and more in league with the primary aspects of the Catholic faith than their Old English Catholic brethren.
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In other words, to the Ultramontanes, “its own brand of Catholicism was Catholicism itself, and any deviation an inadequate rather than an alternate expression of the same essential faith.”
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Ultramontanism won the historiographical war. The discussions of nineteenth-century English Catholicism describe triumphant Second Springers imposing a mystical, Rome-loving doctrine throughout England, and the Old English Catholics disappearing.
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Yet as Mary Heimann noted in 1995, Old English Catholic ideals and traditions survived long into the nineteenth century. Indeed, many of the factors traditionally associated with Ultramontanism, including the popularization of extraliturgical devotions and the increase in personal devotional books had their roots in pre-nineteenth-century English practices, especially the Old English Catholic's extraliturgical prayer book of choice,
The Garden of the Soul
.
²⁶
Moreover, while Ultramontane ideals were gradually accepted as the public face of English Catholicism, Old English Catholic practices still existed throughout the entire century, and many Catholics resisted change. The impact of Ultramontane elements was limited by timing and geography. In Yorkshire English-Catholic parishes, syllabi from the 1860s still held to eighteenth-century Garden-of-the-Soul English-Catholic tenets; the first Ultramontane “knottier points of dogma” were not introduced in Yorkshire parish schools until 1868 and were not fully integrated into the religious syllabi until 1876.
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Thus, for the Catholics living in these tumultuous times, everything was new, and everything was up for debate. Throughout the century a series of journals argued over the elements of the reconstituted religion: its physical fabric, how it should present itself publicly to the larger Protestant majority around it, what elements of new rituals it should accept, and how to promote such elements within its systems of education.

The “Faithful Child” Avatar: 1857–1889, or “In What Manner Must Baptism Be Administered, So As To Be Valid?”

The “Faithful Child” avatar has two facets: Elgar's religious education against the backdrop of events in Catholic history and how biographers discuss his religious education. From Elgar's birth in 1857 until he left Worcester for London in 1889, Catholicism was the major spiritual and cultural fact of his life: he attended a Catholic church and three Catholic schools, had Catholic friends, and received his first major musical employment as an organist at a Catholic church. Whether or not Elgar had a strong faith during this period is inconsequential, because the ritual identifiers that marked him as Catholic were always present and easily apparent to those around him.

Readers of the many Elgar biographies will find Catholic education mentioned, even placed prominently within the context of the composer's early life. Percy Young's
Elgar, Newman, and
The Dream of Gerontius:
In the Tradition of English Catholicism
provides a typical example of how scholars use Elgar's education. Note that in the following passage, Young employs Elgar's Catholic education as an example illustrating the composer's lifelong sense of alienation from the rest of society:

There is no reason to believe that the education provided for Edward Elgar here was in any way inferior to that of any other school in Worcester. He was at school altogether ten years, benefiting from a longer period of education than many of his contemporaries. Attendance at a Catholic School in England, however, could lead to a sense of alienation. As was the case within living memory in the early years of this century, boys at such schools were regarded by their contemporaries—under parental influence—with a degree of suspicion. Elgar—not only in youth—was sensitive, subject to moods of withdrawal, and often misunderstood.
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In this and other passages, Young views English Catholicism from one lens only, that of a unified, monolithic religion. But such presentation of Catholicism is really just lip service, because the same Catholic facts are mentioned in passing and then easily forgotten for the more compelling narrative of Elgar's personal and complicated history. Every biographer who dwells at any length on Elgar's youth mentions at least one of the three Catholic schools he attended: a Dame school run by Miss Caroline Walsh at 11 Britannia Square, Worcester; St. Anne's School at Spetchley Park; and Francis Reeve's school at Littleton House in Lower Wick.
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Most of the biographers mention these institutions only in combination with something from Elgar's future rather than dwelling for any length of time on Elgar's childhood. Within the narratives of their examinations, Walsh's school is where Elgar received his first formal piano lessons; the woods surrounding St. Anne's supposedly gave Elgar one of his inspirations for
The Dream of Gerontius;
and a stray comment by Reeve may have inspired part or all of
The Apostles
and
The Kingdom.
³⁰

But a Catholic school in 1860s England was more than just a place to receive inspiration for the musical future. During Elgar's years in these three schools he was trained in Catholic theology above all other subjects, which a series of articles in the Catholic journal
The Rambler
makes clear. Besides being theologically desirable, some saw teaching Catholic religion as a political necessity, since outside the confines of the church or the classroom Catholics would still have to live within a larger Protestant world:

Mixed up as all classes of Catholics are with Protestants, it is the height of cruelty not to arm them with fit weapons to fight the battle of faith against its enemies. We must recollect that religious controversy is not confined to the pulpit, the platform, and the periodical. It is not the especial privilege of the noble and the wealthy. Its sounds are heard as loudly in the workshop, the kitchen, and the field, as in the halls of a university. Boys and girls begin the intellectual struggle.
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Catholic education, then, was an integral part of the struggle. And that battle extended beyond merely preserving elements of pride. The articles in
The Rambler
divide Catholic education from that of their Protestant counterparts, viewing it as elemental to the preservation of the soul

because Protestantism, though it may instruct the mind, yet is utterly powerless to train the soul; it may store the memory with knowledge, and even enforce a certain outward decency of conduct in morals, but it cannot penetrate man's nature in the inmost recesses of his heart; and without this, education is but a dream.
³²

Consequently, education that “armed” Catholics with a generous religious and theological underpinning was viewed as necessary to the moral, cultural, and political survival of English Catholics. Other subjects were possible, but anything for the young Catholic had to be grounded in religion first and religion foremost.
³³

Elgar began his education in 1863 and over the course of the next few years attended three distinctly different types of schools: a Dame school primarily for girls; a mixed school at Spetchley Park; and, from about 1869 to 1872, a school for young gentlemen at Littleton House. All three schools were Catholic, and all three emphasized elements of religion over all other subjects—at least according to the evidence that has survived.

Caroline Walsh, who ran the Dame school, was, like Elgar's mother, a convert to Catholicism.
³⁴
Her calling to the Church stretched into the more fervent “Second Spring” variety and her conversion around 1846 was only a first step. She quickly joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary (taking their threefold vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience) and attended their Charing Cross school for about four months in 1851 as preparation for religious education work in Worcester. When not teaching the students, she ministered to Worcester's spiritual welfare by walking “round among the poor Catholics of the town. She obliged the sluggards to leave their beds and prevented them from missing Mass.”
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Her rooms at Britannia Square were in what was evidently considered a convent by the Catholic hierarchy since she was given the title of Superior in 1852. The school was supported by the small tuition payments made by students like Elgar and his sisters, as well as a grant of £245 made by Henry Foley.
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St. Anne's, the school at Spetchley Park, is a bit more difficult to pin down. A charity school, it existed from 1842 until 1986. Initially, the Berkeley family, members of the local Catholic gentry, created the school for all children of the community—Catholic or Protestant.
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It is likely (though currently not known) that by the time Elgar attended St. Anne's in the mid–1860s, it was entirely a Catholic foundation. Between 1857 and 1863 (before Elgar arrived at the school), the Sisters of St. Paul ran the institution.
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As an order, they were influenced by their continental roots (the Sisters of St. Paul were founded in the eighteenth century in Chartres and arrived in England from France in 1847; the order did not become independent in England until 1864) and by their growing numbers, who were both Old English Catholics and converts. According to the Berkeley family, Elgar attended the school for two terms, so it is likely he arrived in 1867 or 1868, because he began attending his next school in 1869.
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Littleton House, Francis Reeve's school, unlike Walsh's or St. Anne's, was a for-profit enterprise. It tailored “Young gentlemen … for Commercial pursuits” and was a fixture of the Worcester Roman Catholic world.
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Reeve, according to Jerrold Northrop Moore, initially wanted to be a priest, but after a childhood fall he was banned from that ambition since nineteenthcentury Catholicism required the purported guise of both spiritual and material perfection: any bodily injury or chronic ailment destroyed the opportunity for a young man or woman to take holy orders.
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Instead, Reeve followed a different path: he married, had a number of children, and taught Catholic boys. According to the Census of 1871 (the year Elgar and his friend Hubert Leicester neared the completion of their attendance of Reeve's school), Reeve and his wife, Lucy (listed as “Assistant to Schoolmaster”), maintained twenty-two boarding students aged six to sixteen (four of them their oldest sons) in addition to their four other children younger than age six.
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Reeve also took day students from the town, such as Elgar and Leicester. Basil Maine stated that when Elgar attended Reeve's school there were about thirty students there.
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Advertisements for Reeve's school note that besides engaging in subject studies, “students attend Mass daily.”
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This agrees with the general discussions of midcentury English-Catholic education. Perhaps the most striking element of such descriptions is how much time was spent conforming to ideas of Catholic ritual and prayer:

The pattern of the school was fitted to the Church year. On Holidays of Obligation the children attended Mass in the morning and then had the afternoon off. This happened for the Feasts of the Ascension, Whitsun, Corpus Christi, Saints Peter and Paul and All Saints; also Epiphany and the Assumption if they fell during term. This was of course in addition to attendances at Sunday Mass, Benediction, and catechism, which were also the responsibility of the schools. Children were questioned on Monday morning and those who had not been to Mass were punished… . The regular [school] routine included daily prayers each morning and hymn singing.
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The round of required mass attendance, continual professions of faith, and submission to the Catholic calendar would have created a further sense of community for Catholic children and held them apart from their Protestant neighbors.

Part of the Faithful Child avatar intersects with Elgar's attempt to mythologize his past, to create a serviceable and romantic history for himself. His schooling was part of this, and when later recalling it for biographers and friends he used Reeve as a touchstone for his religious oratorios. Elgar gave Reeve credit for planting the seed of the plot and purpose of
The Apostles
in a well-known anecdote which was published in most Elgar biographies after it appeared in 1905 in Robert J. Buckley's early interview-based study: