The romance of Isabel Lady Burton

by Lady Isabel Burton; W. H. Wilkins

If this charge did not involve a suggestion of bad faith on the part of Lady Burton, I should have ignored it; for I hold most strongly that a man’s religion is a matter for himself alone, a matter between himself and his God, one in which no outsider has any concern. Burton himself took this view, for he once said: “My religious opinion is of no importance to anybody but myself. No one knows what my religious views are. I object to confession, and I will not confess. My standpoint is, and I hope ever will be, the Truth, as far as it is in me, known only to myself.”[47] This attitude he maintained to the world to the day of his death; but to his wife he was different. Let me make my meaning quite clear. I do not say Burton was a Catholic or that he was not; I offer no opinion. But what I do assert with all emphasis is that he gave his wife reason to believe that he had become a Catholic; and in this matter she acted in all good faith, in accordance with the highest dictates of her conscience and her duty. Burton knew how strongly his wife felt on this subject, and how earnest were her convictions. He knew that his conversion to Catholicism was her daily and nightly prayer. These considerations probably weighed with him when he signed the following paper (reproduced in facsimile on the opposite page). He signed it on the understanding that she was to keep it secret till he was a dying man:

Gorizia 15^th—February 1877

Should my husband Richard Burton be on his death-bed unable to speak—I perhaps already dead and that he may wish and have the Grace to retract & recant his former errors and to join the Catholic Church and also receive the Sacraments of Penance Extreme Unction & Holy Eucharist he might perhaps be able to sign this paper or make the Sign of the Cross to show his need

Richard F. Burton

“Gorizia, February 15, 1877.

“Should my husband, Richard Burton, be on his death-bed unable to speak—I perhaps already dead—and that he may wish to have the grace to retract and recant his former errors, and to join the Catholic Church, and also to receive the Sacraments of Penance, Extreme Unction, and Holy Eucharist, he might perhaps be able to sign this paper, or make the sign of the cross to show his need.

(Signed) “Richard F. Burton.”

I do not analyse the motives which led Burton to sign this paper. He may have done it merely to satisfy his wife (for, from the Agnostic point of view, the Sacraments would not have mattered much either way), or he may have done it from honest conviction, or from a variety of causes, for human motives are strangely commingled; but that he did sign it there is no doubt. Lady Burton, at any rate, took it all in good faith, and acted accordingly in sending for the priest; the priest, on receiving her assurance, acted in good faith in administering to Sir Richard Burton the last rites of the Church; and the Bishop of Trieste also acted in good faith in conceding to him a Catholic funeral. It is difficult to see how any of them could have acted otherwise.

Lastly, it has been asserted that Sir Richard Burton “loathed” the Roman Catholic Church; and though he was indifferent to most religions, he entertained a “positive aversion” to this one, and therefore to “kidnap” him on his death-bed was peculiarly cruel. I have read most of Burton’s writings, and it is true, especially in his earlier books, that he girds against what he conceives to be certain abuses in the Roman Catholic Church and her priesthood in out-of-the-way countries; but then he attacks other forms of Christianity and other religions too. He had a great hatred of cant and humbug under the cloak of religion, and denounced them accordingly. There is nothing remarkable in this. We all denounce cant and humbug in the abstract, often most loudly when we are humbugs ourselves. If Burton attacked Christianity more than other religions, and Catholicism more than other forms of Christianity, he probably did so because they came more in his way. His religious acts generally appear to have been guided by the principle of “When one is at Rome, do as Rome does.” He was a Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a Sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among the Catholics. One thing he certainly was not in his later years—a member of the Church of England. He was baptized and brought up in the Anglican Communion. He entered at Trinity College, Oxford, and he joined the Indian army as a member of the Church of England; but when he was at Goa in 1847 he left off “sitting under” the garrison chaplain and betook himself to the Roman Catholic chapel, and availed himself of the ministrations of the Goanese priest. From that time, except officially, he never seems to have availed himself of the services of the Church of England. I do not unduly press the point of his attendance at the Roman Catholic chapel at Goa, for it may simply have meant that Burton merely went to the chapel and worshipped as a Catholic among Catholics, just as when he was at Mecca he worshipped as a Mohammedan among Mohammedans; but it tells against the theory that he “loathed” Catholicism, as the same necessity did not exist at Goa as at Mecca. It was a purely voluntary act on his part. Henceforward it would seem that, so far from being prejudiced against Catholicism, Burton was always coquetting with it; and if he took any religion seriously at all, he may be said to have taken this one seriously. The following facts also go to prove this theory. He married a Catholic wife, of whose strong religious views he was well aware. Before the marriage he signed a paper to the effect that his children, if any, should be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. He obtained and used the following letter from Cardinal Wiseman, with whom he was on friendly terms: