In 1846 the Hon Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt, MP for Lambeth and uncle of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote to all the daily papers to deny a truly scandalous rumour which had just reached him: that his family had converted en masse to Roman Catholicism.
His letter was reproduced in the Tablet, and is revealed in a wealth of letters exposing the depth of anti-Catholic prejudice in Victorian England as the newspaper opens its archives to celebrate its 175th year of unbroken publication.
The source of the shocking allegation was apparently the Irish newspapers – and it would particularly have pained Tennyson d’Eyncourt, whose social pretensions were legendary. He had expanded his name from plain Tennyson by adding an old name from his wife’s family – though he failed to revive the d’Eyncourt peerage and acquire a title – and his home by turning it into a Victorian imitation of a medieval castle. He had aspirations towards poetry himself, and described his nephew’s work, some of the best loved in the English language, as “horrid rubbish”.
In fact the story was partly true: his eldest daughter had indeed become a Catholic, which he wrote “pains me deeply”. However, “for myself and every other member of the family … we remain unshaken in our firm attachment to the Protestant religion”.
Other letters in the Tablet archives give a sad glimpse of the lives of poor working-class Catholics, often from an Irish background.
On Ash Wednesday 1842, a priest called William Hunt tried to get to the deathbed of a teenage servant called Mary. He was turned from the door by her employer: “After stigmatizing the Catholic religion as devilish and idolatrous, the curse of the nation, absolutely refused to let me see the poor girl.”
One CF Kershaw wrote in 1843 that many were immediately rejected by Protestant families if they disclosed that they were Catholics and, if they were accepted, told they must go to regular Protestant services. “One was told … as to the Catholic Chapel, she must not even look towards it.”
The extent of the prejudice shocked many Protestants. In 1908 an Anglican deacon wrote after a Catholic procession was banned: “To every sane man it must appear intolerable that, while rowdy mobs of unemployed are allowed to parade the length and breadth of the country, rousing in many places fear and dislike, an orderly procession of Catholics, including ecclesiastics of the highest rank, should be forbidden at the behest of a handful of intolerant and intolerable fanatics.”
Despite the evidence of abundant prejudice, the Tablet carried many reports of conversions to Catholicism. In February 1846 those converted after a retreat at Mount St Bernard, a Cistercian monastery in Leicestershire, included “an honest Protestant”, “a woman who was a sinner”, “a Greek schismatic from Russia”, along with an Orangeman, a modern philosopher and “one socialist”.