The Life of Thomas William Allies 1813-1903: “A soul temper’d with fire”
Michael Trott
Gracewing, £25, 480 pages
Thomas Allies died aged 90 in 1903, a survivor of the first generation of Tractarians and a Catholic convert of the same vintage as Manning, but as a married man ineligible for the Catholic priesthood, destined to spend the rest of his life running the Catholic Poor School Committee and engaging in ecclesiastical polemics. His daughter wrote an appealing and candid short biography of him in 1907, but both he and his writings disappeared into almost immediate obscurity, from which Michael Trott ventures to rescue them.
The author’s interest in Allies arose by chance: he purchased his diary and commonplace book from a bookseller’s catalogue, which led to the research now incorporated into this biography. Even so, Trott makes no great revisionist claims for Allies’ relative importance in the scheme of Victorian religious prosopography; he tells us: “I find it difficult to form a judgement on Allies, a rather prickly and unsympathetic character, whose disagreement with Newman perhaps put him on the wrong side of later developments in the Church.”
Allies emerged from the heart of the English Regency Establishment: educated at Eton, he was a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, at 20 and spent much of the time before his ordination in 1838 holidaying on the Continent. Appointed examining chaplain to the go-ahead Bishop Blomfield of London, he lost this position for berating his superior “with more sincerity than prudence” about the King of Prussia standing as godfather to the Prince of Wales – although the bitter pill was sweetened by the living of Launton in Oxfordshire, worth £600 a year and with a “capital” parsonage. Here he stayed until 1850, in close touch with the Rome-ward movement of many of the leading Tractarians and a provocative opponent of Dissent in his parish. Bluntness appears to have been a quality he shared with his formidable wife Eliza: when she became a Catholic in May 1850 the first thing she said to him after her reception into the Church was: “Now you are a heretic, and I am not.”
When Allies became a Catholic himself later that year, he had to contend with the loss of status, income and employment that was the lot of married clerical converts, and find some new purpose in his life. After some uncertainties, particularly in relation to Newman’s Catholic University in Dublin, he settled into a predictable groove of administrative work for Catholic school extension, and the writing of the massive project that came to be published as The Formation of Christendom.
Allies’ conversion was one particularly prompted by the papal claims and his rejection of the Royal Supremacy: his increasing Ultramontanism alienated him from old friends, in particular Newman. Trott quotes Newman as saying that Allies “always seems in the same place, prancing like a cavalry soldier’s horse without advancing, in the face of a mob. He has a noble subject, but I have not gained two ideas from his book – but I must not say so.” No one has since come away from the reading of the eight volumes of Allies’ magnum opus with a more favourable opinion.
Trott deals in detail with Allies’ departure from the Church of England – and in particular the concern about jurisdiction which was particularly characteristic of Allies’ Anglican difficulties. He became convinced that even if Anglican orders might be valid, they nevertheless lacked the juridical power to administer absolution, because the ultimate source of authority in the Church of England was a usurped supremacy claimed by the Crown.
It is interesting to see the way in which Newman had hoped to work more closely with Allies, encouraging him to work out a “‘philosophy of history” and including him in the failed Dublin University project to that end. But it is equally apparent that by the time of the infallibility debates of the First Vatican Council, Newman had given up on Allies as a constructive ally: “among clever men … the least clear headed that I know”.
In the end the reader comes away – as I suspect does the diligent author – with some sense of frustrated potential; frustration to which Allies’ own testiness testifies, that humanly speaking so much energy and industry left so little of enduring value.
The Revd Dr Robin Ward is Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford
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