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Coronets and Altars: Aristocratic Women’s and Men’s Support for the Oxford Movement in Scotland during the 1840s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The Oxford Movement has been portrayed in its classic historiography as both clericalist and, in so far as all nineteenth-century Anglican clergy were male, a movement of masculine leadership and initiatives. This is not to deny that the movement was largely priest-led and therefore male in its leadership but ‘largely’ does not mean ‘exclusively’. By looking at the introduction of the Oxford Movement into Scotland, a neglected aspect of its dissemination can be restored, that is, the importance of the laity and of women in the spread of Tractarianism. In Scotland the initial impetus given to Oxford Movement ideals and projects lay not with the clergy but with the aristocratic laity. It also was not the preserve of men, for among its first great supporters in Scotland was a woman, Cecil Chetwynd, widow of John William Robert Kerr, seventh Marquess of Lothian. She would become one of the leading Scottish Tractarians during the 1840s until her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1851 as a consequence of the Gorham judgement.
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References
1 The classic account of the movement, Church, R. W., The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (London, 1891)Google Scholar, was by a priest and largely about priests, because it recalled the university phase of the movement from 1833 to 1845. This exclusive masculine treatment of the Oxford Movement continues in recent history, as in Rowell, Geoffrey, The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar, a series of studies of Oxford Movement leaders, all clergy and therefore males.
2 Edinburgh, Scottish Record Office [hereafter SRO], GD 40/15/70(3), Journal of the 7th Marquess of Lothian, 28 June 1838 to 23 Nov. 1840, for Sunday, 20 Jan. 1841. After family prayers the Lothians went off to the local kirk of the Church of Scotland.
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