Abstract
Reviewed by: Oliver Logan, University of East Anglia, UK
There is now a growing historiography of transnational educational movements and a smaller one of transnational temporary migrations of pupils for studying. O’Neill’s book examines the latter phenomenon from the perspective of elite formation. He identifies something like a Catholic ‘Ascendancy’, rivalling and, to some extent, aping the Anglican one. It was principally based in Dublin and Leinster (the extreme south of Ireland) and was mainly composed of families which had managed to retain their land over the centuries and new ones enriched by production and trade in such centres as Dublin, Waterford and Cork. More plebeian and nationalist Irish were liable to refer to such families as ‘West Britons’, ‘Castle Catholics’ or ‘Seonìns’. The education favoured by this elite was one modelled on the English public boarding school, with a traditional, primarily classical education and a strong stress on character-building and sport, an education for gentlemen, in short. For the purposes of this study, ‘transnational’ migration includes study at English schools; indeed the two Continental Anglophone colleges run by clergy for boys (St Edmund’s College Douai and the Irish College in Paris) and the numerous French and Belgian schools run by francophone female religious for girls seem to have appealed to the same elite. In Ireland, the colleges of Clongowes Wood and Tullabeg (Jesuit), Castleknock (Vincentian) and Blackrock (French Holy Ghost Fathers) were relatively exclusive, but the preferences of the cream of the Catholic elite went to certain English schools: Stonyhurst (Jesuit) and Oscott (a foundation of the Catholic laity), the two most prestigious initially, and then also the increasingly prestigious Benedictine foundations of Ampleforth and Downside. This group was later joined by the new Jesuit foundation of Beaumont and the Benedictine Douai College. The communities of Ampleforth, Downside and Douai had migrated from France at the time of the French Revolution (the latter via the Belgian Netherlands); the complex antecedents of the English Jesuit community that founded Stonyhurst were again in the latter area. The odysseys of these schools are significant; the pattern of Irish boys attending English Catholic public schools was built upon a historic one of attendance at Jesuit and Benedictine colleges on the Continent. There is a shortage of statistics on the education of Catholic girls ‘abroad’. The Irish Catholic girls’ schools with the highest reputations, those run by the Loreto, Ursuline and Sacred Heart orders, were less socially exclusive than the top boys’ colleges. Evidently more prestigious were the Bar Convent in York, established by Mary Ward, foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (later commonly known as ‘Loreto Sisters’) in 1686, and the progressive Holy Child Convent, run by the order of that name, at St Leonards-on-Sea. The picture of convent education on the continent is fragmentary. French schools predominated and evidently a French convent education was regarded as bestowing a peculiar cachet. Outstanding was the Parisian mother-house of the Society of the Sacred Heart (sometimes referred to as ‘female Jesuits’), founded by the cultivated Marie-Sophie Barat, which was to be so important in English Catholic education. There was a massive Irish contingent in all of these elite convent schools.
About half of the Irish alumni from English Catholic public schools gained commissions in the British armed forces, mainly in the army. This was in line with the general pattern of landed elites in the British Isles and notably of the Anglican Ascendancy in Ireland. The Irish Catholic tradition of mercenary service abroad, going back at least to the seventeenth century, was the outcome of constraint rather than choice; after the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, which removed the bar on Catholics obtaining commissions, Irish ones piled into the British army. Thirteen per cent of alumni of English Catholic public schools gained legal qualifications. Some of these just remained ‘gentlemen’, while the actual practising barristers made careers in the English as well as the Irish courts. Some 6 per cent of alumni gained medical qualifications. Many became Justices of the Peace or Resident (i.e. stipendiary) Magistrates. Few entered the domestic or colonial civil services, but there were some distinguished careers there. There were important Catholic business magnates, most notably of brewing and distilling dynasties. About 10 per cent of the alumni of boys’ schools became priests, while a far higher proportion of the alumnae of convent schools apparently entered religion. The ‘Castle Catholics’ were a substantially endogamous caste and marriages tended to be between families of the same locality, although schooling did prepare for some alliances between Irish and English families. The world of the ‘Castle Catholic’ was a cliquey one, but it was also one with cosmopolitan horizons.