‘The Perverted Graduates of Oxford'

On 10 July 1852 the Belfast-born writer, parliamentarian and sometime colonial administrator Sir James Emerson Tennent delivered a speech to the electors of the County Antrim constituency of Lisburn. Ranging widely, he addressed a variety of themes, including protection and free trade, agricultural taxation, tenant rights and education. But it was religion that received the bulk of his attention. Alarmed by the Tractarian Movement’s flirtation with Catholicism, and tapping into the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment that had spread following the restoration of a Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in Britain, he launched a blistering attack on ‘the perverted graduates of Oxford’ and their ‘besotted followers’, those ‘deceived and infatuated’ individuals who had ‘handled too familiarly the discarded vestments and trappings of Catholicism … abjured the principles of the Reformation, and gone back to the delusions of Rome’. The end result of this drift towards Rome was not, he believed, in doubt: ‘it must eventually and miserably fail, and vindicate, by its discomfiture, the ascendancy of Gospel truth and the irreversable [sic] victory of the Reformation.’ Nevertheless, in the short term it ought to be viewed for what it was: nothing less than ‘a struggle of ignorance against enlightenment, of error against truth, of superstition against the strong sound sense of the people of these countries’. ¹