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Citation: Faught, C. Brad. "The Oxford Movement: Still Interesting After All 
These Years." Historically Speaking 5, no. 2 (2003): 22-23.

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Faught, C. Brad. "The Oxford Movement: Still Interesting After All These Years."
Historically Speaking 5, no. 2 (2003): 22-23.



22

The Oxford Movement: Still Interesting after All These Years

C. Brad Faught

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement 
remains enduring in its fascination
for historians largely because of the
appeal of its central characters and the impor-
tance of its defining issues. The movement’s
formal inception may have come back in
1833, but its various themes—religion, poli-
tics, friendship, to name a few—are timeless.
The movement’s main leaders—especially
John Henry Newman, whose later life as a
Roman Catholic would consolidate his posi-
tion as perhaps the greatest Christian apolo-
gist of the 19th century—are major figures
in the history of modem Christianity, while
its heirs continue to shape Anglican modes
of faith and worship today.

	The Oxford Movement has generated a
long and distinguished historiographical pedi-
gree. From R.W. Church’s classic account
published in 1891, The Oxford Movement:
Twelve Years, 1833-1845, to Owen Chadwick’s
collection of essays published in 1990, The
Spirit of the Oxford Movement, the story of the
men of Oxford’s stand against the “spirit of
the age” has been told often, and told well.
According to the bibliographer Lawrence
Crumb, there are some 7,500 essays, reviews,
and books on the subject.1 Therefore, the
challenge for the historian whose interests lie
in early Victorian British political and reli-
gious history—and who wishes to make a sig-
nificant contribution to what is an enormous
body of work—is to look for untried points of
entry. One of these, it seemed to me when I
first began contemplating writing a book on
the Oxford Movement, was to examine it the-
matically and synthetically. In taking this
approach I was indebted to Linda Colley’s
superb thematic study of the development of
“Britishness” in the 18th and 19th centuries,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837(1992).
As I continued to probe the movement’s his-
tory—and its historiography—my growing
idea that a broad based and thematic study
was both necessary and sustainable was borne
out by what I found. Nowhere in the corpus
of work on the Oxford Movement was there
a prolonged attempt to place it squarely
within the context of late Regency and early

Victorian society. Having examined the wider
impact of the Oxford Movement in five dif-
ferent but interrelated ways—politics, reli-
gion and theology, friendship, society, and
missions—I contend that it had an identifi-
able, important, and varied influence on Vic-
torian society. Restricting the movement to
its overtly religious features—as most past
studies of it had done in one form or
another—limits a full understanding of its
place in 19th-century British history and in
that of the wider English-speaking world.

[ Picture of ] Cardinal John Henry Newman.© Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/CORBIS

	“A shake to men’s minds” is how Wendy
Hinde describes Catholic Emancipation, a
central issue in British politics in the late
1820s, and of generative—if obviously
ironic—importance to the Oxford Move-
ment.2 For young and stalwart Church of
England Oxford dons such as John Henry
Newman, John Keble, Richard Hurrell
Froude, and later Edward Bouverie Pusey,
Catholic Emancipation posed a real threat to
the nature of the Anglican confessional state
and would be—as it turned out—a significant
step in what they saw as an attack on the pre-
rogatives of the established church. A few
years later in 1833 John Keble, provoked by
the Grey Whig government’s introduction
of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill,
preached his later to be famous National
Apostasy sermon at the University Church
of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Keble’s ser-
mon signaled the formal beginning of the
Oxford Movement, and soon Newman and
Froude joined him in preaching, writing, and
cajoling their clerical colleagues in an attempt
to reclaim the Church of England from the
slough of erastianism into which they
believed it had fallen.

	At the outset of the movement, the Trac-
tarians’ (as they came to be called in light of
their regular publication of the Tracts for the
Times) fight was essentially political. They
despised the Whigs for sponsoring legisla-
tion such as the Irish Church Bill, which was
designed to economize the cost of the Church
of England’s operations in Ireland and
denounced by the Tractarians as a wholly
unjustifiable intervention by the state in the
sacred affairs of the church. Over the years
that followed the Tractarians laid bare the
cardinal features of the British establishment
with a view to restoring the church’s proper
position in the face of a state that had, in their
view, gone apostate.

	The degree to which the Tractarians’ fight
was political is something that recent scholar-
ship-such as Peter Nockles’ book The Oxford
Movement in Context: Anglican High Church-
manship, 1160-1851 (1994)—has done much
to consolidate. Indeed, any other approach, it
may be argued, makes it impossible to grasp
the underlying motivations of the Tractarians.
In this regard, politics—understood as the
totality of church-state relations—was of equal
importance to the Oxford Movement as its
manifest religious and theological features.
Motivation and impact are conjoined in the
history of the Oxford Movement, which is
what makes it so rich and varied. From tracing
its political roots—entwined as they are with
the internecine politics of Oriel College where
all the leading Tractarians were sometime fel-



23

lows—to the impact of political economy,
Romanticism, the rise of Gothic architecture,
the resurgence of Anglican women’s orders,
and participation in the 19th-century mis-
sionary imperative, the Oxford Movement
repays a broad-based penetration of its history.
Each of these areas reveals an engagement with
society—even if sometimes an unplanned
one—that thrust the Tractarians into the midst
of many of the most important issues in Vic-
torian society at home, throughout the British
Empire, and in the United States. For this rea-
son, a study of the Tractarian-inspired Uni-
versities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA),
for example, throws much light on the pun-
gent party struggles of the Victorian Church of
England. In the story of the UMCA’s first
bishop, Charles Mackenzie, who died a for-
lorn death on the banks of a remote African
river in 1861 while waiting to meet up with
David Livingstone, some of the great themes
of Victorian Christian missionary sacrifice are
played out. At the same time, the UMCA’s
early years were marked by scandal over its use
of violence against Arab slave traders and its
sharp intolerance of Evangelical and para-
church missionary bodies.

	Elsewhere, such as in the settler societies
of the empire and in the U.S., the lines of
division between Tractarian sympathizers and
adherents of the Broad and Evangelical par-
ties within the Church of England replayed
many of the same struggles that had marked
the mother country during the early years of
the Oxford Movement. The titanic contest
between John Strachan, Bishop of Toronto,
for instance, and Evangelical Anglicans,
Methodists, and others in Upper Canada
marked colonial society there for at least two
generations and resulted in the firm estab-
lishment of the principle of non-denomina-
tionalism in the province. Much the same sit-
uation prevailed in Australia as well.

	At home in Britain, the Tractarians’ ability
to engender an intense and often angry reac-
tion from both church and governmental
opponents did not wane greatly, even after the
high-water mark of the movement had been
reached in the late 1830s. Through ecclesias-
tical disputes such as the Gorham Judgment
in the 1850s and political ones such as the Pub-
lic Worship Regulation Act in the 1870s—
brought in to curb what were seen to be the
excesses of “ritualism” by the government of
Benjamin Disraeli, whose early novels showed
a clear Tractarian sympathy—the Oxford
Movement retained a special capacity to out-
rage English (Protestant) opinion. Not for
nothing were the Anglican nuns and assorted
church worthies at one of Edward Pusey’s first
convents bombarded by townspeople with rot-
ten vegetables and plates at its opening.

	Even though such big themes as theol-
ogy, church-state relations, and party politics
fuel much of the continuing interest in the
Oxford Movement, smaller themes such as
fraternity and the late 1820s controversy over
the method of tuition at Oriel College are
important in gaining a more complete pic-
ture of the shared motivational base of the
Tractarians. For Newman and Froude, whose
friendship intensified in the early 1830s, the
Oxford Movement became an all-consuming
crusade. Certainly for Froude, whose life was
cut short by consumption in 1836, the years
from 1833 until his death were ones in which
he pushed the movement to become pro-
gressively more radical in its apprehension of
the catholic nature of the Church of England
and how far it had slipped—in his view—from
the universal ideal. The full extent of Froude’s
views was made public only after the posthu-
mous publication of his private journals.
Newman and Keble together made the risky
decision to publish the journals as the Remains
in 1838-39, knowing that they would cause a
firestorm of protest from Protestant church-
men whose ire was easily roused by various
of Froude’s statements such as, “the Refor-
mation was a limb badly set—it must be bro-
ken again in order to be righted.”

	Froude’s passing, not long after he had
returned to England from Barbados where he
had been seeking relief for his ill health, was a
body blow for Newman. His friend’s death left
him feeling utterly bereft. They had shared
much during the previous three years espe-
cially, including an illuminating journey to the
Mediterranean in the spring and early sum-
mer of 1833 from which both men returned
ready for “a work” in England, as Newman
put it. This “work” had been in prospect for
some time, and not just because of macro-
political events such as Catholic Emancipa-
tion, the Great Reform Act of 1832, and the
Irish Church Bill of the following year. New-
man and Froude, as Oriel College fellows and
tutors, had earlier taken on the provost,
Edward Hawkins, and the group of college
dons known as the “Noetics” over the issue of
private tuition. Newman and Froude were
staunch in their belief in the pastoral role of
the college tutor, and held that the striving for
moral excellence by undergraduates was equal
to, if not more important, than that for intel-
lectual excellence. The Noetics, who prided
themselves on intelligence, rationality, and
cleverness in debate, thought Newman and
Keble both tiresome and wrongheaded on this
point. In the battle that ensued—one which
the nascent Tractarians eventually lost—some
of the themes of the Oxford Movement were
rehearsed and, revealingly, personal friend-
ship counted for much.

	Close friendships defined the early years
of the movement when the Tracts for the Tinies
and the British Critic were being published.
Undergirding the range of topics contained in
both publications—the position of the clergy,
the Royal Supremacy, the legacy of the High
Churchmen, the poor and dispossessed in
society, and so on—was a clear fraternal devo-
tion that, in the view of some later commen-
tators and historians, verged on the homo-
erotic. Indeed, one of the few largely
untrodden paths of Tractarian historiogra-
phy is a thorough and modem assessment of
the Oxford Movement and sexuality.

	2003 marks the 170th anniversary of the
beginning of the Oxford Movement. The
power it has to retain the interest of histori-
ans, theologians, and others is a testament to
the importance of its many themes and to the
magnetic literary (and oratorical) power of
some of its leaders, especially John Henry
Newman. As an event in Victorian history,
the Oxford Movement serves to throw into
sharp relief various features of the society of
which it was an important part. But its
longevity as a thing of historical interest and
as a demonstration of religion in action no
doubt lies in its transcendence; the search for
the church’s place in the modern world is
what greatly animated the Tractarians, and
that is a search which continues in earnest in
our own day.

C. Brad Faught is assistant professor of his-
tory at Tyndale University College in Toronto
and author of The Oxford Movement: A
Thematic History of the Tractarians and
Their Times (Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 2003).
_____________________________________________

1 Lawrence N. Crumb, The Oxford Movement and
Its Leaders: A Bibliography of Secondary and Lesser
Primary Sources (Scarecrow Press, 1988). A sup-
plement was published m 1993.

2 Wendy Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to
Men’s Minds (Blackwell, 1992).


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