Pugin, A(ugustus) Welby
A letter on the proposed Protestant memorial to Cranmer, Ridley, & Latymer, addressed to the subscribers to and promoters of that undertaking.
London, Booker & Dolman 1839.
Full Description
8vo. 30pp. Recent cloth.
A rare pamphlet by the younger Pugin, written as a reaction to plans to erect a Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford (eventually built in the 1840s to designs by George Gilbert Scott), in which Pugin denounces what seem to him to be “the villanies of your pretended martyrs – your Cranmers, your Ridleys, your Latymers, and all those apostatizing, church-plundering, and crafty men, whom you have long held up to the admiration of the deluded people”. As to that, opinions may differ, but Pugin does more properly point out, in a passage of prose praising Oxford’s “lofty spires and pinnacled towers” that “Catholic is indelibly stamped on the very face of your ancient city”. Rather cheekily, Pugin describes himself on the pamphlet’s title leaf not as an architect but as “Professor of Ecclesiastical Antiquities at St.Mary’s College, Oscott”. Not in BAL Cat. Belcher A24.