Statue of William Allen

Statue of William Allen

An unexpected statue

The façade of Oriel College’s New Building, opened in 1911, features a statue of the colonial entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes that has been the subject of national debate in recent years. The explanatory plaque about Rhodes was unveiled only in October 2021. Less well-known is another statue also designed by the sculptor Henry Alfred Pegram (1862 – 1937) and erected at the same time as that of Rhodes. This is a statue of Cardinal William Allen (1532-1594), a Catholic divine, educator, polemicist, and plotter. Allen studied and taught at Oxford during Mary I’s reign. Not long after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, he refused to support the Protestant reforms and went into exile in Europe. A fierce enemy of the new queen, William Allen spent his life trying to undo the Protestant Reformation in England. He set up schools and seminaries in Europe to train missionaries and encouraged English Catholics to support the Spanish Armada in 1588. The decision to depict this exceptionally controversial figure on Oxford’s High Street in the early twentieth century is surprising. One possible explanation is that Allen was, for a short time, head of St Mary’s Hall which was incorporated into Oriel in 1902; so, his statue signals continuity with the disappearing pre-Reformation past, especially as the college’s surviving medieval quadrangle was demolished to make room for the Rhodes Building. Yet the statue also evokes that other eminent Oxonian and English Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a major figure in the Oxford Movement which began at Oriel. The religious debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently looked to England’s previous Reformations for arguments and inspiration.

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Museum of Oxford

Photo credit: © Oriel College, Oxford

A stone statue in a niche. The statue depicts a man in the dress of a Catholic cardinal, holding a scroll.