TRINITY: Pitt Society lunch, 2015

Here I am at Trinity College, Oxford for the William Pitt
Society Lunch today. The College's chapel is behind me.
Photo: Alice Tepper Marlin.

OXFORD, U.K., Feb. 7, 2015 - Today I attended with Alice the William Pitt Society lunch, honoring William Pitt "the Elder", 1st Earl of Chatham.

Pitt is one of three British Prime Ministers who studied at Trinity, the other two being Lords Wilmington (Spencer Compton, the second Prime Minister after Robert Walpole) and North. Pitt's portrait hangs over high table; Lord North's portrait is less prominently positioned.

Pitt is the visionary who assembled the British Empire. He is "remembered as the architect of the victories of the Seven Years War, in which  Canada and parts of India and Africa were conquered", says the Pitt Society program.

In the Trinity chapel, at an excellent
music recital (piano, choir, cellos) by
students. Photo: Alice Tepper Marlin.

In the 13 American colonies, Pitt's troops chased away the French and hostile Indians, under the leadership of Scotsman General Edward Braddock, George Washington's military mentor. Braddock died in the assault on Fort Duquesne, near what is now named (after Pitt) Pittsburgh. On his deathbed, Braddock gave then-Colonel Washington his battle sash. Washington wore it the rest of his life and some of his best-remembered portraits show him wearing it.

Alice and Paul Gunn. Photo by JT Marlin

Pitt the Elder made possible the independence of the 13 colonies. Lord North, Trinity's third Prime Minister, made it, shall we say,  inevitable.

The Pitt Society lunch was created in 2007 to thank, during their lifetimes, those Trinity alumni who have included a legacy to Trinity in their wills. Sir Ivor Roberts, President of Trinity, kindly noted that a letter I wrote launched the Pitt Society in 2006.

In the first year, the Society had 21 members. It now has more than 100.

Chris and John at the former Red Lion. Photo by Alice
Tepper Marlin.

Some of the alumni that Alice and I spoke with at the lunch were:

Ian Senior (1958)
Nigel Armstrong-Flemming (1958)
Mark Pellew (1961)
Arthur Thorning (1962)
Mike Baldwin (1963)
Paul Gunn (1963)
Roger Baresel (1966)

Postscript 1: I was curious why William Pitt the Younger, the 2nd Lord Chatham, was not Trinity's fourth Prime Minister. Not only did he attend a different college, he migrated all the way to Cambridge, where he took up residence at Pembroke College. The hike over the fens must have worn him out. Because he was so thin, he was called "the bottomless Pitt".

Postscript 2: That evening Paul Gunn joined Alice, Chris and me at what used to be called the Red Lion in Wolvercote, just outside Oxford. Paul lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. Back in 1962-64, Paul was on the same staircase as me at Trinity - Staircase 5 on the  front quad. (Staircase 6 is the one, I understand, where Bill Clinton attended a party at which he did not inhale.)

The late Bede Rundle, a philosophy Fellow, was also on the same staircase. I just heard that his wife has sadly also died.

The name of the Red Lion was changed - the establishment is under new management. I will some day finish this postscript 2 when I have found out the new name.

FEAST DAY: Oct. 9 - John Henry Newman

Blessed John Henry
Cardinal Newman

Today is the Feast Day of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890). Newman's birthday was February 21 and he died in August. October 9 was the date, after two years of instruction, when Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, in Littlemore.

Oxonians brought many gifts to America, including independence, with Pitt the Elder kicking the French out of the colonies and Lord North trying to make the colonials pay for the cost of British troops, thereby precipitating the Revolution. Newman's gift was not just to Catholics in America, but to Christians everywhere, especially those speaking English.

He was born in London and at 16 years of age went up to Trinity College, Oxford. He then served as a tutor at Oriel College, which was a center of Oxford University's religious revival.

For 17 years from 1828, he was vicar of the Anglican St. Mary's (The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin) close to Oriel at the center of the University on High Street. Five years into Newman's vicarage, John Keble gave his famous sermon at St. Mary's that won over Newman to the Oxford Movement to regenerate Catholicism. The Movement went back to the early Church for inspiration.

In 1845,  based on his search for continuity in the history of Christianity and his belief in objective truth, Newman then became a Roman Catholic. He published eight volumes of Parochial and Plain Sermons as well as two novels. He is celebrated as both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic theologian. His poem, "Dream of Gerontius," was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar.

In 1847, Newman was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome and joined the Congregation of the Oratory, founded three centuries earlier by St. Philip Neri. Returning to England, Newman founded Oratory houses in Birmingham and London. In 1854 he went to Dublin to serve as rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, which he helped found. While in Dublin he wrote The Idea of a University, in which he sets out his ideas on the purpose of education. Newman promotes the idea that the lived experience of believers is a key part of formation of theology.

Newman accepted Vatican I's teaching on papal infallibility while noting its limits, which at that time few proponents of infallibility were eager to do.

Newman was named a cardinal in 1879, and he took as his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"), which he adapted from a 17th century dictum. His crest includes three hearts, which are interpreted as being the Trinity. Pope Benedict XVI used the Cor ad cor loquitur motto to headline Newman's long-awaited beatification.

Newman was buried near Birmingham but his grave was exhumed in 2008 and a new tomb was prepared at the Oratory church in Birmingham. Three years after Newman died, a Newman Club for Catholic students began at the University of Pittsburgh, and similar centers for students were set up in many universities. Newman Centers had been created earlier but until Newman himself was beatified they lacked ecclesiastical blessing.

Pope Benedict beatified Newman in September 2010, at a ceremony outside of Birmingham. The pope noted Newman's balanced emphasis on both his religious beliefs as part of civilized society and on his pastoral energy to attend to the needs of the sick, poor, bereaved or incarcerated.

Newman's views were a key reference point for Vatican II under Pope John XXIII. He was called the "absent Father" of this conference of bishops 70 years after his death, especially on issues of conscience and religious liberty, the vocation of lay people, and relations between Church and State.

BORNEMAN: How War Shaped North America

Borneman's "The French and
Indian War" shows Pitt's
brilliance and success in
pushing out French forces.

Walter Borneman's The French and Indian War (HarperCollins, 2006) shows how the British drove the French out of North America - and, eventually, the Spanish and the Native Americans whom they called Indians.

This was the first step in the creation of the United States as we know it. Without the British Army to clear out the French, the French language would today be more commonly spoken on the upper Hudson, and possibly all the way down to New York City.

William Pitt the Elder (the "Great Commoner" as he was called with veneration most of his life, but then later with disappointment when he became Earl of Chatham) championed the cause of the colonies and sent over British forces despite a need for them in Europe.

Pitt's campaign was immensely popular in the American colonies. But in a true Hegelian dialectic, the cost of the war created animosities that hardened the attitude of the colonists to their mother country.

King George III before the American Revolution controlled virtually of North America. (In time the British Crown kept all of Canada as a colony until the country's independence was asserted with irregularity and a low profile, during the 1919-1938 period).

Just as one Oxford graduate, Pitt the Elder, created the policies as Prime Minister that chased the French out of the colonies and made possible their independence, Frederick North (2nd earl of Guilford) made this independence inevitable by trying to impose on the colonists the cost of the war.

These two Oxonians have their names attached to many places in the United States, even though neither one ever set foot on the American Continent. Pittsburgh, Penn., for example, and Pittsfield, Mass. In the case of Lord North, there is Guilford, Conn. and North Dakota (just kidding about North Dakota).

Both Pitt and North attended Trinity College, Oxford. Pitt had gout as an undergraduate (as he had at Eton) and did not remember his time at Oxford with nostalgia, any more than his time at Eton. Pitt and North are judged very differently by history, the first as an empire-builder and the second as the source of the loss of a large part of the empire.. Pitt was a passionate strategist for the successful creation of the British Empire during the period that was called the Seven Years War in Europe. Later, Lord North was a passionate ally of George III in trying to put the American colonies in their place and make them pay their fair share of the burdens of war - his determination to distribute the burden played a great part in precipitating the American Revolution,

The eventual outcome of the independence of the colonies might not have bothered Pitt himself. He was a fierce devotee of the colonies and vigorously opposed the Stamp Act in 1766 ("The Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England.). He argued for removing British troops from Boston and deplored the punitive campaign of Lord North.

Not long before his death, Pitt said that the colonies had given the most brilliant proofs of their independent spirit. (Borneman, p. 305, referencing comment in J. C. Long's 1940 book on Pitt.)

Borneman lives in Colorado. He has previously written about the War of 1812. He shows that George II was wrapped up in keeping his "prized possession," Hanover. The king sent his "most treasured son", the duke of Cumberland, to defend Hanover, but the duke was surrounded by the French at Hastenbeck in Germany, and was forced to surrender Hanover to the French. Cumberland escaped with the help of Colonel Jeffrey Amherst, and on his return to Britain "resigned his military offices in disgrace".

The b ook includes highly readable summaries of the different battles in North American, showing how the outcome of these battles hinged on the strategic sense of commanders, and the importance of sometimes small numbers of savvy soldiers. He portrays Pontiac as an able military commander but questions how important he was as a leader of the Iroquois or other tribes. At numerous points he suggests that the early allegiance of different tribes to the British was based on lavish gifts, and to the French was based on the comfortable laissez-faire relationship that the French had with their Indian allies.

What the British had going for them is that they brought their women with them and built families. They increased and multiplied. The French came as traders and went home. The imbalance of population meant that the British were favored in the contest between British and French.

In the end, the French and Indian wars - the Seven Years War - left Europe pretty much the way it started. But it made Britain lord of North America, established the British Navy as preeminent, and created bases for the British - for example, in India - that became the cornerstones of the British Empire. Pitt, and not George II, understood what was going to be important in the decades ahead.

The British public was behind making the colonies pay for their own defense.  The Stamp Act imposed duties on imported goods. To which Benjamin Franklin suggested that the new fashion in the colonies would be "to wear their old clothes over again." Pitt in 1766 succeeded in having it repealed. The Quartering Act billeted British soldiers on the homes of American colonists and the New York legislature voted to nullify it. The British were "aghast".

George III was "contemptuous" of the colonials. Pitt's chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townsend, seeing Pitt ailing, moved ahead to do the king's bidding and imposed new taxes on imports into the colonies of glass, lead, paints, paper and... tea.

The last straw were the "Intolerable Acts", of which the Quebec Act of 1774 appears to Borneman as the most significant. It granted territory north of the Ohio river to the British colony at Quebec. George Washington had claimed these lands for Virginia in 1753 and in 1763 they were nominally marked as an Indian reserve, while several states had their eye on them for purposes of westward expansion.  The Acts also enacted reprisals for the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor.

Which led to the moment on April 18, 1775, when two lanterns were hung ("one if by land, two if by sea") in the steeple of Boston's Old North Church, sending the signal that the Revolutionary War was on.