Butterfield and the Anglo-Catholic Compromise

THE DIVIDED VICTORIAN CHURCH: BUTTERFIELD AND THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC COMPROMISE TOM ZANIELLO Northern Kentucky University I DIVIDED BY STYLE ne of the most influential evaluations of the achievements of the OVictorian architect William Butterfield (until Paul Thompson’s work came along) was the essay, “William Butterfield, or the Glory of Ugliness,” (reprinted in Heavenly Mansions ) by John Summerson, former curator of Soane’s Museum, whose opinions about Butterfield and his era should give us all pause when we formulate our own: (1) “For the whole of his life [Butterfield] was a devout adherent of the narrowest Anglicanism” ( 160); (2) “Butterfield was hardly a medievalist at all” (161); (3) “[A.W.] Pugin became a Roman Catholic, so his personal contribution to Anglican church-building was nil” (163). That such a misassessment of Butterfield and Pugin, two of the leading proponents of High Victorian Gothic architecture, could persist until the 1960s indicates how ephemeral the Anglo- Catholic party seemed: they were the literal and spiritual descendants of the Tractarians who remained within the Anglican fold, while they dreamt of a medieval Catholic facade on an Anglican foundation. By attempting to reduce the hostility to Catholic ideas within the Anglican church, they set out to win the Roman Catholic masses (the Irish and other poor folk) away from “the Papists” and to reestablish the church building as an aesthetic (virtually a Pre-Raphaelite) object in itself. Butterfield was the architect Anglo-Catholics championed – and often hired – for their campaign. What the Victorians called “constructional col- oration” was Butterfield’s polychromatic obsession and flaunting of Italian Gothic elements, an approach which, to take the line of least contention, paralleled Ruskin’s theories. In practice Butterfield (using different colored bricks, variegated marble and stone courses, stained-glass windows, Puginesque encaustic floor tiles, and saints’ images) almost dared observers to call him a follower of Rome. Nonetheless Butterfield dissociated himself from any identification with Roman Catholicism, despite the close ties his chief patron, Lord Chief Justice John Duke Coleridge, maintained with his own brother, Henry James Coleridge (a prominent Jesuit priest), and John RELIGION and the ARTS 5:1/2 (2001): 172-182. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden Tom Zaniello Henry Cardinal Newman. For his signature style of alternating horizontal striping, Butterfield’s models were usually Italian Roman Catholic – mas- terpieces such as the cathedrals of Sienna or Monza with their horizontal striping of bricks. Butterfield also supported the Puginesque revival of sis- terhoods, monastic poorhouses and hospitals, and even designed two Anglican convents for free (Thompson 31), all the institutions that smacked of Popery. Although Butterfield dissociated himself from any connection with Anglo-Catholic ritualism, it is reasonably clear that consciously or not his churches attempted a unique third way, an unlikely compromise between the conspicuous Gothicising of Pugin’s work and the Romanesque architecture of a number of Roman Catholic projects. Butterfield’s strategy was to present geometrical and other variegated patterns on his exteriors and European Roman Catholic excess in his interiors. He would never consciously admit to an admiration of excess, of course, but he seems to have appreciated at least some of the most daring Italian frescoes, such as those at Assisi and Orvieto (Thompson 235). His first major breakthrough in what came to be his distinctive style was Balliol Chapel (1856-57), with its horizontal bands of colored brick, labeled by critics as “Butterfield’s pink obscenity.” But a High Church poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins (soon to be a Roman Catholic and an enthusias- tic admirer of Butterfield’s work) would love it for its “inscape,” its unique patterning which proclaimed it part of the same impulse he celebrated in his poems about nature – “All things counter, original, spare, strange;/Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” (“ Pied Beauty,” Poems 70). Hopkins also wrote an enigmatic poem about Butterfield’s restored Balliol Chapel, extollining its “vigorous horizontals” and allowing its “visual compulsion” (optical illusion) to lead him to a unique experience (which he called “instress”): “None besides this bye-ways beauty try./Or if they try it, I am happier then” (“ To Oxford,” Poems 22). Hopkins, on a number of visits to other chapels and churches Butterfield built in Oxford, Devon, and London, called attention to the cusps, five-spoked wheels, rosettes, quatrefoils, and other distinctive design elements that signal a Butterfield interior. Hopkins was also aware of Butterfield’s sumptuous use of varieties of marble, but perhaps his newly- developed Roman Catholic sensibility kept him from commenting on just how rich and showy Butterfield’s pulpits, baptismal fonts, side chapels, and screens were. Hopkins’s appreciation of Butterfield’s architecture was comfortably in step with the Anglo-Catholic establishment. In 1851 The Ecclesiologist , the 173.

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