BUTLER, CHARLES. - Born on 14 Aug. 1750 in London, died there on 2 June 1832; B. attended a Catholic school at Hammersmith, and then went on to the English college at Douai. Having finished his studies, he returned from France to England, and in 1769 began the study of law under the guidance of a Catholic lawyer. Of ultragallican tendencies, B. became in 1782 secretary of the Catholic Committee, which, having reconstituted itself in 1788 with members who were also ecclesiastics, among them the bishop Charles Berington, entrusted B. precisely with drafting a "bill" for the repeal of the laws against Catholics. On this occasion B. also drafted a professio fidei, further maintaining the necessity of taking the oath of allegiance demanded by the government of Catholics, and the expediency of removing the English episcopate from the direct authority of the Holy See, claiming for the clergy and the laity of the island the appointment of the English bishops, and taking it away from the Pope. Having failed, this attempt of the Catholic Committee to come to an agreement with the government on such bases of discussion, and the Committee itself having been dissolved, B. formed the Cisalpine Club "to resist any ecclesiastical interference that might oppose the freedom of English Catholics." To these gallican ideas of his, B. always remained faithful, but he always had as his intransigent antagonist the bishop Milner. Only toward the last years of his life did B. become, as an intimate friend of his wrote, "a gallican within the limits of orthodoxy."
Bibliography
Silvio Furlani