To die for the Pope - Edmund Campion

George Collingridge

Once upon a time, the pope had his own army. It went with being the ruler of large tracts of the Italian peninsula, known as the Patrimony of St Peter, a legacy of the Middle Ages. Since he was the head of this territory he had to have an army because the first duty of a ruler is to protect the sovereignty of his state.

But not everyone agreed that the pope should be a temporal ruler. In particular, those who wanted to unite all Italy into one kingdom thought the pope should get out of their way. If he would not give up his temporal power, they would take it from him. For a time their plans were frustrated by the French, who protected Rome and the lands around it. By the later 1860s , however, the pope’s hold on power was looking slippery and it became clear that soon France might withdraw its troops.

Recognising the danger, men from around the Catholic world rallied to the pope’s cause. They came to Rome and joined an auxiliary fighting force called the Zouaves (pron. zwarves) a name the French had given to military auxiliaries recruited from their colonial empire. The papal Zouaves were notable for their religious devotion – people said they were happier in a church than in a tavern – and their courage in battle. Outnumbered, they could not resist defeat forever, but their prowess delayed by several years the loss of the papal states.

You get an insight into their spirit from Alfred Collingridge, a young Englishman who left a Roman seminary to join the Zouaves. Bayonetted four times, he was captured by the enemy, who took away his rosary beads. When the Zouaves recovered him, he told them of his loss and Mrs Kathleen Stone, a London society hostess, who was nursing the wounded, gave him her beads.

But Collingridge knew he was dying. ‘The Lord has given me the favour I asked—to die for the Holy Father’, he said. So the chaplain heard his confession and gave him extreme unction. His last words were recorded: ‘My Jesus! My dear Jesus! I offer to you my life for the Roman church, the pope, and my parents …’ Many Zouaves believed that if they died fighting for the pope, they would go straight to heaven. Theirs was a ‘holy war’.

Alfred’s brother George was nearby when he died. George Collingridge had joined his elder brother in the Zouaves from Paris, where his parents lived and where he was an art student. He survived the seventeen skirmishes he was engaged in, winning three medals, and went back to Paris after Rome fell. His reputation grew as a wood engraver for popular magazines and books.

A younger brother, also an artist, had emigrated to Sydney and he now wrote to say there was plenty of work there, so George joined him in 1879. Magazines were eager to feature him so that he gained recognition quickly. In the art world the Collingridge brothers were a team, founding an art society together, publishing the first art magazine in Australia and teaching in schools and technical colleges.

The former Zouave maintained his passionate interest in Catholicism. In 1882 he married Lucy Monica Makinson in her parish church at Hunters Hill, built by the Marist Fathers in French provincial style. His father-in-law, Thomas Cooper Makinson, a former Anglican clergyman, had been Archbishop Polding’s secretary and confidant for the last two decades of the archbishop’s life. Polding was now dead but Makinson shared with his son-in-law his memories of the glory days of the English Benedictines in Australia.

Not that Collingridge was a narrow ‘churchy’ personality. He spoke six European languages and pursued an interest in Esperanto, founding the first Esperanto club in Australia. His knowledge of antique maps brought his election as the first honorary member of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Living on the northern rim of Sydney, he was able to explore the bush there and so he corrected mistakes in official maps.

He is best remembered for a book he published in 1895, The Discovery of Australia. Close examination of 16th century maps convinced him that the Portuguese had been the first to chart the entire Australian coastline, except for the south, before 1530. He went too far in discrediting Dutch discoverers, which weakened his case, but modern scholars salute his expertise in analysing old maps.

A book he wrote on the Zouaves was never published but he passed on his experiences to his family. Today their descendants remain proud that lively Zouave blood is still running in their veins.
(For further information, see www.georgecollingridge.org.au)