It’s been a slow week for blogging; I was attending a conference at Oxford on religion and foreign policy. As always, I feel a little bit like Rip Van Winkle when I visit Britain. I lived there for a year almost half a century ago and my relatively brief visits since haven’t effaced the impression England made on me when I was eleven, Winston Churchill was still in parliament, and my school celebrated Guy Fawkes Day with a bonfire in the crater left by a V-2 rocket in the school grounds in World War Two.
Some things are still the same; the plumbing by and large is as unpredictable as ever. Both the cold and hot taps in the sink in my hotel room ran resolutely hot; the shower shifted randomly and suddenly from hot to cold and back. The English for some unfathomable reason still put toast in those little racks to cool; they are still eating baked beans and fried bread for breakfast. They are also still sentimental about animals; the menu proudly informs guests that the eggs are free range.
Climate change hasn’t had much impact on the English weather, at least during this particular week in May. It is as changeable as ever; there is nothing as glorious as the light of a long English twilight falling across the lush lawns and gardens of Oxford; a walk around the grounds of Worcester College was as English as a Merchant Ivory costume drama. Yet the weather in late May could be chilly and cold; you can still have all four seasons in one English afternoon, and the default setting of the English climate remains firmly fixed on ‘rain’.
Americans are crazy about Oxford: it sums up what we often think England is: cricket, crew, dons in tweed, emerald lawns that put suburban America to shame (“Seed and roll for four hundred years” is the English recipe for the perfect lawn), pubs, bizarre snobberies and quaint customs. Inimitable, eccentric, appealing, inconsequential: Mole and Otter are boating in the river, Alice is playing croquet, the boys’ choir is singing evensong and Cook is fussing at the kitchen maid while the porter is having a little too much cider in the lodge.
Oxford reeks with tradition and history; at Christ Church, the graduate students use Einstein’s old bedroom as their common room.
But if Americans love Oxford, the feeling on the Oxford side is a little more mixed. Of the two great English universities, Oxford was always the more High Church and royalist. While Puritan New England was praying for Cromwell and the republican cause, Oxford rallied to King Charles; this is the city to which he withdrew from rebellious London and where his parliament of lapdogs sat during the English Civil War. Oxford also loved George III, and Abraham Lincoln was less popular than Robert E. Lee here during our own Civil War. Yankee America – sprawling, brash, democratic, future-focused – is everything traditional Oxford instinctively loathes.
I don’t think it helps much that academics at Oxford get paid so much less than their American counterparts. ‘Over-paid, over-sexed and over here’ is what many Brits said were their chief complaints about American GIs during the Second World War. That’s pretty much what they think about the Rhodes Scholars and other Americans on campus today.
Worse, a lot of what Americans love most about Oxford (and England) is exactly the side of their past that makes many English skins crawl. Our guileless fondness for the quaint and twee aspects of Olde England makes the Brits squirm; they have a complicated and tangled relationship with this heritage and to have brash, insensitive cousins poking their fingers into all the tender spots makes them very unhappy.
Religion is one of these sore spots. That J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have had a more profound influence on American life than all the other dons who lived and worked at Oxford in the last century is, for any serious British intellectual, horrible beyond words. The American tourists in search of Ye Olde English Cooking and Atmosphere who throng to the Eagle and Child, the pub where Lewis, Tolkien and the other ‘Inklings’ used to hang out, are just the kind of interlopers that any serious Oxonian would want kept on the far side of the moat.
My own relationship to England – liking contemporary England and enjoying my visits there yet sometimes feeling closely connected to an England that doesn’t exist anymore and whose memory makes today’s English people uncomfortable – is not just a reflection of my own biography. Americans generally, whatever their ethnic origins, are somehow more closely connected to Britain’s past than to its present. We love their twee past because it’s aesthetically appealing and poses no threat to us – we aren’t worried about being ruled by toffee-nosed Eton inbreds and we think their class system and their monarchy are kind of cute and endearing. We want to pinch their ruddy little cheeks. Their home is a museum that we like to drop in on. Worse, we have a hard time concealing our belief that we think their ancestors were somehow bigger, more important, even more real than the shadowy Britain of today.
This trip to Oxford found me even more nostalgic than in the past. Partly because I’ve been so depressed about the decline of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and partly because my daily route to and from the conference took me past so many of the markers of Oxford’s staunchly Anglican past, I spent an unusual amount of time searching out various traces of Oxford’s enormous role in the history of the Anglican Communion.
What might be called the foundation stone of the Church of England is at Oxford: the spot on Broad Street where three of the early Anglican leaders were burned at the stake under “Bloody” Mary. “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man” said Bishop Latimer as they were led to the place of execution. “We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
The Church of St. Mary the Virgin is where Archbishop Cranmer was tried for heresy, degraded from the episcopacy and where he made a humiliating confession of error, recanting his Protestant faith. When it came time to be led to the stake, he recovered his courage, and announced that the right hand that signed the confession of error would suffer first. When the flame was lit he held his right hand into it as the flesh was burned away.
Three hundred years later religion convulsed Oxford once again; the Oxford Movement swept through the university. Led by charismatic young men – John Keble, Edward Pusey, John Henry Newman – the Oxford Movement revived many of the ideas and liturgical practices of the medieval church. The Reformation was a mistake, said the young hotheads, and set about proving that there was little or no difference between Anglican and Roman Catholic doctrine even as they began to call Holy Communion the Mass, revived the practice of oral confession, gussied themselves up in elaborate liturgical gowns, fasted, and did all kinds of other un-British, un-Reformed things.
Today’s controversies on gay marriage and the ordination of women had nothing on this. The entire country was convulsed with controversy. Horrified at the insidious Catholic revival, the Protestant people of England raised money by public subscription to place a huge and conspicuous memorial to the martyred Protestant bishops right under the snooty noses of the Romanizing dons. It still stands today near St. Giles.
Reformation monument in Oxford to Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer: erected in 1841 by public subscription to demonstrate hostility to the Oxford Movement led by Newman, Pusey and Keble.
But the Oxford Movement has left its traces too. Just beyond the Reformation Monument is Pusey House on Pusey Street; Keble Road lies just beyond. The parish church closest to the memorial, and a stone’s throw from the spot where Latimer and Ridley lit their candle, has a sign advertising the celebration of High Mass every Sunday.
These days the Anglo-Catholics and the evangelicals in the Church of England mostly get along pretty well – just as in the US conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants are often allies on both cultural and doctrinal issues. In Oxford today, indifference is more powerful than any wing of Anglicanism or of any other denomination for that matter. The religious ideas and controversies that built and shaped the university have largely faded away, as forgotten as the political passions that led one Oxonian to express his opposition to Sir Robert Peel’s controversial policies more than 150 years ago.
By the end of the trip, I was wondering more about the future than about the past. Will Oxford — and Britain — continue to move away from its traditional ideas and concerns, or will the pendulum somehow swing back? Will names like Latimer and Ridley and Pusey sink even deeper into obscurity or will the ideals and visions that drove them become vivid to new generations?
One thing is sure: the Brits won’t live in a theme park wearing quaint costumes and thinking quaint thoughts just to amuse their American cousins.
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