There was a time when the Catholic party of the Church of England was not consumed by the latest ecclesiastical millinery. Its driving force then was a passion for social righteousness. It was also fun in the hands of perhaps the most flamboyant of Christian Socialists, Stuart Headlam. Headlam is still sometimes remembered for standing bail for Oscar Wilde. But there is much more to him than this characteristic act of bravery.
Headlam was born into a Liverpool stockbroking family. It was at Eton where his father, an evangelical, noticed what was to him his son’s worrying liking for High Church ritual. But it was in the marrying of F. D. Maurice’s theology to beautiful ceremonial that Headlam made his unique contribution to public life. A tradition was formed which for 75 years lifted hearts and minds, beautified the worshipping life of countless ordinary people, taught them a Catholic interpretation of the world and gave a political creed based simply on the social teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Headlam did not achieve this extraordinary feat without willingly stepping on the corns of many of his elders. He accused the High Church party of never fully understanding the love of God. The lives of swathes of people were thereby consigned, he believed, to a fearful self-reproach, if they were lucky, or madness, if not. He made the clearest of distinctions between an arid religion and a living god. Not for him were those notions about the high powers of the soul and the meanness of the body. God’s nature and ours were inextricably bound in this world just as they were assuredly in the next.
Headlam took every opportunity also to echo Maurice’s denouncing of the idolatrous elevation of competition over co-operation. Yet ironically it was not his highly political views which dished Headlam’s official career. That feat was achieved by his defence of the ballet, of all things. Ballet, it was believed, opened the way to lust. Headlam saw God everywhere in the beauty of His creation. The eternal fathomlessness of beauty, which some wished gated to the art gallery, Headlam declared to be the common inheritance of the people, be they purists or secularists, poets or prostitutes, Bethnal Green schoolchildren or musical artists. From such comprehensiveness Headlam attacked the Church’s obsession with sins personal to the exclusion of corporate injustice.
Orens attractively presents the sweep of Headlam’s views and character even to the extent of hinting just how impossible Headlam was to many of his allies. But we also see from the inside some of the earliest socialist organisations as they appeared to those members who were Christian. Headlam, for example, was active in the Fabians where he crossed swords with the Webbs over their passion for nationalising civic life and much else besides.
Headlam was able always to be his own man partly because of his private income — which, needless to say, he condemned others for having. Freedom can be enhanced by people not having to be accountable to a paymaster. The one failure of this book is that it gives only half a line on why Headlam never had to work for his bread. But it is a small blemish in a miniature masterpiece recalling Headlam’s battles to restore the Church to the poor, only to see them walk the other way into secular politics. What, I wonder, would the old firebrand make now of the almost equally worrying trend of that march being continued out of politics altogether and back into the private ghetto?