A British envoy to the Vatican

The British chronology of the war records under 7 December 1914 the appointment of a British envoy to the Vatican. The post went to Sir Henry Howard, an experienced diplomat, who was given the title of Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary on a Special Mission to His Holiness the Pope. The decision itself had already been announced on 24 November, and in December Howard left for Rome. For the first time in more than two hundred years Britain had an official representative to the Holy See.

Three centuries of interruption

England’s relations with the papacy were broken off by Henry VIII in 1536. The Catholic Queen Mary I briefly restored them, but under Elizabeth I they were broken off again. After that, contacts were unofficial and sporadic. The exception was the reign of the Catholic King James II, who in 1686 sent the Earl of Castlemaine to Rome. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the overthrow of James II, relations ceased once more.

In the second half of the 19th century relations gradually warmed. Pope Leo XIII hoped to establish diplomatic relations with London, and the two sides exchanged special missions on the occasion of the jubilees of Queen Victoria and of the Pope. In 1903 King Edward VII paid Leo XIII a visit in the Vatican. There was still no permanent representation, however, and every step in that direction provoked protests from British Protestant organisations.

The war changes the calculation

It was the war that brought about the change. Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Bavaria had representatives at the Holy See, while Britain had no one in the Vatican who could present its case. The English curial cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet urged the government to send a mission. The official reason was to offer congratulations on the election of Benedict XV. In his instructions to Howard, however, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, told him above all to set out to the Pope the motives that had compelled Britain to take part in the war after every effort for peace had been exhausted, and to keep him informed of events. The aim was that in the Vatican, where the Central Powers had strong influence, London’s voice should also be heard.

Howard, born in 1843, came from the Catholic branch of the Howard family. Behind him lay a long career in Washington, Athens, Copenhagen, Peking, St Petersburg and Paris. He had been minister at The Hague and British delegate to the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. To stress that this was an exceptional step, his post was not called a legation but a “special mission”.

An appeal for a truce

The new envoy arrived in Rome at a time when the Pope was seeking ways to soften the war. On 7 December itself Benedict XV called on the belligerents to suspend hostilities for Christmas. The governments of the warring states rejected his appeal, just as a month earlier Belgium had rejected papal mediation. On Christmas Eve, however, on parts of the Western Front a spontaneous Christmas truce took place, made by the soldiers themselves.

The mission was meant to be temporary, but it outlasted the war. Howard held the post until August 1916, and his successor was Count John de Salis. In 1923 the mission was renamed the Legation to the Holy See, and in the 1920s it became a permanent post of British diplomacy. Howard died in Rome in 1921. Britain and the Holy See established full diplomatic relations at ambassadorial level only in 1982.