The problem of securing convenient yet affordable accommodation has confronted visitors to Rome since at least the 14th century, when pilgrims flooded in during the Jubilee Year of 1350. After weeks of travel, they were beholden to Roman innkeepers attentive to the possibility of extortion in the provision of foetid dormitories; the collapse of a temporary bridge across the Tiber, which killed several people, precipitated a solution that was permanent and practical – and distinctly English.
The English College’s name denotes a connection, enshrined in a strange and ancient sanctity, between Rome and England – affirmed in the tradition of priestly formation on the present site for nearly 650 years. The “English presence” in Rome, in built form, goes back to the time of King Alfred.
The Hospice of St Thomas, established in 1362, had been going for over a century by the time “the King’s Hospice” received its royal patronage from Henry VII, who assumed personal delegation of its wardens and finances. However, its circumstances were seriously reduced by the sack of Rome in 1527 under Charles V, Henry VIII’s severance of the ancient bond between England and the Holy See and the accession of Elizabeth I in 1588 – under whose reign 150 Catholic priests were executed.
This all changed at the summons of Gregory XIII for William Allen, a visionary Catholic priest, to convert the ruinous hospice for those deemed “the wretched persons from England” into a seminary, modelled on his previous success at the <em>Collège des Grands Anglais</em> at Douai. Under the wardenship of a Welshman, Maurice Clenock, many of the College’s students shared the missionary principles of the Society of Jesus: “the heathen jungles of South America had their counterpart in the forests of Protestant England”.
Clenock viewed the College as a home for exiles whilst Catholic England awaited inevitable reversion to the One True Church. That reversion never arrived in the way it was prayed for, and thus the students demanded a concerted mission to England.
The College has subsequently been termed the “nursery of martyrs”, such is the extent of the martyrdom lived out by its former students: dozens died for their faith and well over a hundred were imprisoned or exiled.
“The Martyrs’ Picture” above the altar in the college church, by Durante Alberti, depicts the Holy Trinity flanked by St Thomas of Canterbury and St Edmund, King of East Anglia. A flow of blood from the lance wound to Christ’s torso spatters a map of England below. “I have come to bring fire to the earth,” the College motto translates.
After the last martyr’s <em>Te Deum</em> had been sung under the picture – for St John Wall in 1679, tried at the height of the “Popish Plot” after his successful mission from Rome to Worcestershire – opposing tides lapped against the college walls. James II’s heir became “the King over the Water” after the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688;
Pope Clement XI offered him residence and annuity in Rome, sufficient enough to establish the Jacobite court-in-exile, bearing his arms, at the Palazzo Muti. With the Church, the College prayed for the return of the Stuart ascendancy.
A visit to the college by Bonnie Prince Charlie for Mass in the month after his father’s death spawned anti-Jacobite rumours that he had been solemnly crowned there; they were effective enough to see the then-rector exiled from the Papal States.
Napoleon I arrived under different circumstances when he invaded Italy in 1796; Rome was occupied less than two years later. The college roof was pillaged for timber; coffins were exhumed and stripped of lead for musket balls; the bedrooms were emptied and reconstituted as barrack dormitories.
It was not until 1818 that the College was reconstituted with the appointment of a new English rector and the church rebuilt; its desks and stalls repopulated by a small group of students which included the subsequent rector and first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman.
Another period of exile came after Italy joined the Axis powers in 1939. Students dressed in plain clothes left Italy for the Lake District; the College was placed in the care of the Order of Malta. In the vision of Allen and the tradition of Augustine, the College still sits on its shifted axis – turned from Rome’s stones and seven hills saturated in the blood of the millennia – to the distinctive backstreets and rural churchyards of England.
Today’s students eat under a fresco of St George still slaying the dragon. The college’s mission retains its continuity; meanwhile, in its courtyard garden a lonely capital, the jagged tracery of a 14th-century window and the indication of an arch’s keystone sit like gestures to an antique time.
