Mandell Creighton - Legacy

Legacy

On Thursday, 17 January 1901, after an elaborate funeral in St Paul's Cathedral attended by royalty, politicians, academics, and ordinary people, Creighton's body was interred in the crypt by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the first time in 280 years that a Bishop of London had been buried in St Paul's. Obituaries in contemporary newspapers and scholarly journals hailed him as one of England's great historians and a prelate of remarkable integrity. The Quarterly Review remarked, "It is certainly rare to find so much intellectual force and so high a standard of conduct combined in one man."

A memorial to Creighton can also be found in Peterborough Cathedral just north of the sanctuary in the form of a substantial mosaic depicting his effigy, details of his life and the mottos "I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ" and "He tried to write true history."

"Few men, I imagine, who become great started on their career with the intention of becoming so. The intention generally accompanies the unsuccessful. The secret of real greatness seems to be a happy knack of doing things as they come in your way; and they rarely present themselves in the form which careful preparation would enable you to deal with."

— Mandell Creighton, "Heroes." Address given to the Social and Political Education League, 4 November 1898.

Today, Creighton is better known as a historian than as a church official. Creighton's work is seen as part of an era in British historiography. Many of the milestones of Creighton's academic life, such as founding of the English Historical Review in 1886, with himself as the first editor, are those of the era as well. According to historian Philippa Levine:

The Review was the culmination of a series of related developments central to the asserting of the primacy of the professional historian. In 1884 a highly distinguished trio of men had all been rewarded with academic preferment: Mandell Creighton became the first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, E. A. Freeman succeeded his friend Stubbs in the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford and the legal historian Frederick Maitland became reader in English Law at Cambridge. The following year the reform of the Historical Tripos in Cambridge and the division of Oxford's arts faculty into the three areas of literae humaniores, oriental languages and modern history declared that history had finally won academic respect as an autonomous area of study.

Creighton is considered to be one of the first British historians with a distinctly European outlook. Of his magnum opus, History of the Papacy in the Period of the Reformation, R. J. W. Evans writes, "(It) constitutes one of the first great attempts to introduce the British to explicitly modern and European history." Overall, Creighton and his peers, left a heterogeneous legacy. On the one hand, Creighton was a painstakingly balanced scholar; even his critic Lord Acton would use "sovereign impartiality" to describe Creighton's strength. Creighton saw himself as someone interested in actions, in contrast to Acton, whom he considered to be interested in ideas. Although Creighton did not personally consider the popes to be guiltless (for example, amidst writing the third papacy volume, he wrote, in a letter to a friend, that working on the Borgias was like "spending one's day in a low police court"), Creighton was emphatic that public men be judged for their public and not private actions. In an essay, "Historical ethics", published after his death, he wrote, "I like to stand upon clear grounds which can be proved and estimated. I do not like to wrap myself in the garb of outraged dignity because men in the past did things contrary to the principles which I think soundest in the present." On the other hand, Creighton's historical outlook, as well as that of his historian peers, bore the cultural and social stamp of their position. According to historians Robert Harrison, Aled Jones, and Peter Lambert, "Their emphasis on the Englishness of Britain's key institutions, for instance, effectively excluded non-English ethnic groups from the 'chief part,' as Creighton had put it, of history's subject."

The emphasis on concreteness and reality would remain a feature of his career as a prelate. Creighton saw the Church of England not as an abstract entity existing independently in space and time, but as rooted in England, its people, and their history. In the words of Kenneth Robbins, "It was an unashamed acknowledgment on (Creighton's) part that the form, structure, ethos and doctrine of that church had been fashioned in the circumstances of English history." Similarly, Creighton saw the living church as an embodiment of the present-day yearnings of the English people. "(The) general trend of the Church", he wrote, "must be regulated by (the English people's) wishes. The Church cannot go too far from them." Consequently, Creighton could imbue the church with Victorian self-assessments and aspirations. "The function of the Church of England", he was comfortable saying, "was to be a church of free men. The Church of Rome was the church of decadent peoples: it lives only in the past, and has no future ... The Church of England has before it the conquest of the world." As a natural corollary of this outlook, Creighton was explicitly against the separation of church and state. In his way of thinking, church and state were two aspects of the nation as seen from two vantage points. Any attempt at legislating a separation would, in addition, have caused social disruptions in late-Victorian Britain: many higher clergy had ties of education and friendship with prominent public men.

During his lifetime Creighton received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions, among them Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Trinity College, Dublin. A few years after his death, the Creighton lecture was established at King's College, London. The lecture series celebrated its centenary in 2007.