Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The topics are: critical, textual, and historical scholarship; literary and book history; biography; cultural and comparative studies; critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life; popular culture; and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses, or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is research professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures, and history of science. PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE MACMILLAN: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd i

8/22/2011 8:28:11 PM

British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, edited by Larry H. Peer Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi Romanticism and Pleasure, edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger Samuelian Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S. J. The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David Dowling Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton Nichols The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson Romanticism and the City, by Larry H. Peer Coleridge and the Demonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter Dante and Italy in British Romanticism, edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840, by Michael Scrivener Robert Southey, by Stuart Andrews

FORTHCOMING TITLES: Playing to the Crowd, by Frederick Burwick The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd ii

8/22/2011 8:28:11 PM

Robe rt S ou t h e y His tory, Polit i c s, R e l i g i on

Stuart Andrews

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd iii

8/22/2011 8:28:11 PM

ROBERT SOUTHEY

Copyright © Stuart Andrews, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11513–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andrews, Stuart, 1932– Robert Southey : history, politics, religion / Stuart Andrews. p. cm. — (Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–11513–2 1. Southey, Robert, 1774–843—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR5467.A53 2011 8219.7—dc22 2011009869 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd iv

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

To the memory of John McKeown, who introduced me to the Friends of Coleridge and so to Southey

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd v

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

A Dialogue between Poet and Friend POET Milner made up of impudence and trick, With cloven tongue prepared to hiss and lick, Rome’s Brazen Serpent—boldly dares discuss The roasting of thy heart, O brave John Huss! And with grim triumph and a truculent glee Absolves anew the Pope-wrought perfidy, That made an empire’s plighted faith a lie, And fix’d a broad stare on the Devil’s eye— (Pleas’d with the guilt, yet-envy-stung at heart To stand outmaster’d in his own black art!) Yet Milner . . . FRIEND Enough of Milner! We’re agreed Who now defends would then have done the deed. But who not feels persuasion’s gentle sway, Who but must meet the proffered hand half way When courteous Butler . . . POET (aside) Rome’s smooth go-between! FRIEND Laments the advice that soured a milky queen— (For ‘bloody’ all enlightened men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who rapt by zeal beyond her sex’s bounds, With actual cautery staunched the Church’s wounds! And tho’ he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both— and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field? . . . Extract from Coleridge’s “Sancti Dominici Pallium” [1826?]

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd vi

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

C on t e n ts

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xiii

Robert Southey: Life and Times

xv

Abbreviations

xix

1.

The Shadow of 1798: Rebellion and Union

2.

Poet as Traveler: Lisbon, Madrid, Dublin

21

3.

Poet as Journalist: Dailies, Monthlies, Quarterlies

39

4.

Jacobins and Jesuits: Wat Tyler and Other Ghosts

59

5.

End of Controversy? Monks, Friars, Methodists

79

6.

Laureate Historian: Southey and “smooth Butler”

101

7.

“Rome’s Brazen Serpent”: Milner as Merlin

121

8.

Supporting Batteries: Southey Defended

141

9.

Eve of Emancipation: The Quarterly and Ireland

161

After the Act: Southey, Coleridge, and Anglican Englishness

181

10.

1

Works Cited

201

Index

215

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd vii

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd viii

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

P r e fac e

This book is about Southey the poet laureate, rather than Southey

the poet. Born at Bristol in 1774, Robert Southey married a Bristol girl and is commemorated by a portrait bust in Bristol Cathedral. Yet he lived for 40 years in the Lake District. The youngest of the Lake Poets, Southey held the laureateship for 30 years before Wordsworth succeeded him. In 1817 a spiteful journalist described Southey as “a gentleman of credit and renown, and, until he became Poet Laureate, a Poet.” Southey himself told Walter Savage Landor: “I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and that my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.” That was in 1810, when the first volume of his three-volume History of Brazil appeared and three years before he became poet laureate. Southey’s interest in Portugal and her South American territories was kindled when his clergyman uncle took him to spend the winter of 1795–6 in Lisbon. The Rev. Herbert Hill had intended his nephew for the Anglican ministry, but in the mid-1790s Southey shared with his brother-in-law, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the radical politics, Unitarian theology, and fashionable utopian faith in the infant United States of America that made both the young poets sympathetic to the French Revolution. The trip to Lisbon finally extricated Southey from the Pantisocratic scheme (which he and Coleridge had hatched together) of building a model community in Pennsylvania. Those months in Lisbon exposed Southey to Catholicism in all its Portuguese and Spanish extravagance. The experience was undoubtedly formative, as he later acknowledged. His first gut-reaction to Catholicism—before the Irish Rebellion and the Irish Act of Union revived the hostility of the English ruling classes toward “Popery”— was reinforced by a second visit to Lisbon in 1800–1. From his earliest account (1797) of his first visit to Spain and Portugal (and its republication in 1808), through his History of Brazil (1810–19) and the opening pages of his Peninsular War (1823), through five Quarterly Review articles (1811, 1819, 1825, 1826, and 1828), to the

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd ix

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

x

P r eface

Colloquies 1829 and the anonymous Doctor (1834–8), he castigates global Catholicism. In tracing the consistency and growing coherence of Southey’s campaign against the presumed political threat posed by Catholicism, this study illustrates the rhetorical richness of his polemical prose at a time when his main poetic achievement was behind him. Southey denied that his Book of the Church (1824) was intended as a contribution to the Catholic Emancipation debate— though as early as 1807 he told his former school-friend, Charles Wynn, that he favored the removal of religious tests “with regard to every other sect—Jews and all—but not to the Catholics.” His reason was that “they will not tolerate: the proof is in their practice all over Catholic Europe, and it is in the nature of their principles now.” Southey already believed that the British constitution was under a double threat: from reformers seeking to change the social complexion of the House of Commons by extending the electoral franchise, and from so-called Emancipationists campaigning for Catholics to be allowed to sit in Parliament. Inevitably, his published accounts of his personal encounters with Catholicism, and his more concerted polemical attacks on the Catholic Church, entangled him in the Emancipation debate, and won him plaudits from the bench of bishops. Southey’s historical perspective convinced him that there would be no change in the attitudes and teaching of the Catholic hierarchy until “the Ethiopian changes his skin, and the leopard her spots.” So, like the most extreme Protestant propagandists of the day, Southey traced papal policy back to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215— summoned to suppress the Albigensian heretics of Languedoc. He claimed that the Council’s decrees showed how the Catholic Church behaved when it was able to deploy its persecuting power. The coincidence that 1215 is also the date of the Magna Carta does nothing to blunt the force of Southey’s rhetoric. Even Coleridge, who had also disliked what he saw of Mediterranean Catholicism in Malta, Sicily, and Italy, hints in his late poem, “Sancti Pallium Dominici: a Dialogue between Poet and Friend,” that the poet laureate’s vehemence had overreached itself. Coleridge’s verses feature Southey’s two main Catholic antagonists: the lawyer, Charles Butler (“Rome’s smooth go-between”), and Bishop John Milner (“Rome’s brazen serpent”), whose End of Religious Controversy (1818) reached a fifth edition in 1824 when Southey’s Book of the Church appeared. Southey’s demonization of the Dominican order is a thread that not only links the History of Brazil with the Book of the Church, but also runs through three of his review articles in the Quarterly Review.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd x

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

P r eface

xi

For Southey, Dominic was “the only saint in whom no solitary speck of goodness can be discovered.” Yet the poet laureate was no mean historian, and was approached about filling the chair of history at Durham University. His History of Brazil, though monumental and overdetailed, is balanced in its verdict on the Jesuit missionaries; his Life of Wesley and the rise and progress of Methodism (1820), though disliked by Methodists at the time, now seems almost to achieve the “perfect fairness” that Southey claimed. And Sir Henry Newbolt could still call Southey’s biography of Nelson (1813) “the best life of Nelson,” more than a century later. By contrast, Southey’s treatment of Catholicism is propagandist, sometimes unhistorical and always impassioned. Yet, although expressed in anti-Catholic rhetoric, Southey’s main concern was to defend the moral and social benefits of the Established Church— irrespective of Unitarian or Trinitarian theology. Coleridge had begun to think, even before he went to Malta, that there might be something to be said for an established church. In On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), Coleridge made his own contribution by attempting to define a “national” church, as opposed to the invisible worldwide church of Christ. And, if we can believe Wordsworth, the eldest of the Lake Poets, he himself wrote his Ecclesiastical Sketches without realizing that Southey was simultaneously working on his Book of the Church. The parallelism is striking. So the final chapter focuses on the Lake Poets’ defense of the Anglican Church as a social institution, and— in the decades before Forster’s Education Act—the only widespread provider of primary education. Twentieth-century critics were embarrassed by Southey’s religious preoccupations and by his defense of Anglicanism, looking back as they did from a century when most of the external markers of Anglicanism’s establishment status had been removed, when an ecumenical spirit led to the founding of the World Council of Churches, and when the European Declaration Rights guaranteed workers the “right” to holidays with pay. More recent scholarship has recognized that Southey’s seeming religious paranoia has both a literary and a historical importance. The terror-torn twenty-first century is perhaps better able to sympathize with Southey’s fears about the erosion of national identity. Just as in Southey’s day, there is again in England the prospect of an imperium in imperio as sharia law threatens to challenge customary and statute law. Our fears may be as exaggerated as Southey’s, but the analogy may help us to understand Southey. Like David Craig’s recent examination of Southey’s alleged apostasy, my study challenges the easy assumption that support for the

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xi

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

xii

P r eface

Established Church damns its advocates as High Tories. It was admittedly Peel, a Conservative prime minister (though hardly a typical Tory), who offered Southey a baronetcy and gave him an additional pension. But Southey’s concern for the poor of the industrial towns, and of rural Ireland, was genuine enough, as was his justified conviction that giving parliamentary seats to Catholics or the electoral franchise to the middle classes was unlikely to improve the condition of the lower classes, whether English or Irish. And it was his first published collection of poems in 1797, depicting the lower orders as casualties of war, that drew the fire of the weekly Antijacobin. As Craig mildly remarks, “It should now be clear that Southey’s conservatism seems more unusual than some commentators have suggested, and that his intellectual development was more complex than his opponents implied.” Southey claimed in 1812 that he could never have subscribed to the 39 Articles, but he championed the constitutionally established Anglican Church as the only buttress against what he saw as the social deprivation and degenerating public morality of the age. The 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, which abolished the Irish Parliament, transformed the question of Catholic representation in the House of Commons from a Dublin problem into a Westminster one. Coleridge’s hope that Catholic Emancipation might bring tranquillity to Ireland was not fulfilled, and one of Gladstone’s first acts as prime minister was to disestablish the Irish part of the Anglican Church. Despite Southey’s hostility to the institutions of medieval monasticism, he was willing to contemplate the establishment of “Protestant nunneries” for widows and single women left unsupported and unregarded by the Napoleonic Wars. He placed his faith in education— provided it was under Anglican control— and the idea of his Book of the Church began as a school textbook. Southey’s was indeed a compassionate conservatism.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xii

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

Ac k now l e dgm e n ts

I have been helped by two recent publications: W. A. Speck’s Robert

Southey: entire man of letters (Yale 2006)— described by Lynda Pratt as “clearly the best biography of Southey ever written”— and David Craig’s Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: political argument in Britain, 1780–1840 (Royal Historical Society 2007). I am pleased to endorse Craig’s challenge to conventional critiques of the Lake Poets’ so-called apostasy. Sheridan Gilley’s 1982 article on Southey and national identity in Studies in Church History 18, like Craig’s chapter on Southey’s defense of church and state, succinctly places the Book of the Church in its contemporary context. My debt to other scholars is made clear in the text, though I must here mention Jeffrey Barbeau, who pointed me to Coleridge’s comment on the Life of Wesley. And I must record my particular thanks to two other Southey scholars. Lynda Pratt of Nottingham University, who has played a major role in the rehabilitation of Southey, and has put us all in her debt through the panel of contributors she assembled for her collection of essays, Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (2006), and through her editing of the online edition of the Collected Letters. But I owe her a personal debt for the encouragement and advice she gave me when this book was at an early stage. And I owe an even greater personal debt to Tim Fulford of Nottingham Trent University, one of Lynda’s fellow-editors of the Collected Letters. He not only introduced me to previously unpublished letters, but heroically read most of my manuscript and made valuable suggestions for sharpening its focus. Any flaws that remain are probably instances of failure to follow his advice. Closer to home, I record particular thanks to the warden and scholars of Winchester College for giving me access to the letters of warden George Isaac Huntingford’s, and to Bristol Reference Library for permission to use the Bristol street scene for the cover design. It was in Bristol Reference Library (where the Boult bequest contains volumes from Southey’s private library) that a hitherto unpublished letter dated January 1826, and in the unmistakeable hand of warden

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xiii

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

xiv

Acknow ledgments

Huntingford, fell from a copy of the Book of the Church. The letter (post-marked January 22, 1826 and addressed to “Robert Southey, Esqr, Keswick, Cumberland”) is published for the first time in my final chapter. For that happy chance and for long years of patient assistance, I am pleased to record my gratitude to the staff and resources of the Bristol Reference Library. And also for the forbearance of my wife during two decades of “retirement.”

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xiv

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

Robe r t S ou t h e y : L i f e a n d Ti m es

1774 1788 1789 1793 1794

1795 1796 1797 1798

1800 1801

1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808

Born in Bristol. Enters Westminster School. Begins prose version of Madoc. Storming of the Bastille. Leaves Westminster for Balliol College, Oxford. Britain declares war on France. Begins verse version of Madoc. Meets Coleridge who is passing through Oxford: together they write the Fall of Robespierre and make plans for their model settlement (Pantisocracy) in Pennsylvania. Pantisocracy abandoned. Southey’s uncle takes him to Lisbon. Returns from Lisbon. Letters from Spain and Portugal and Bristol edition of Poems. Irish Rebellion. French capture pope and invade Switzerland. Lyrical Ballads published anonymously. Nelson wins Battle of the Nile. Second Lisbon visit. Irish Act of Union: doubts over coronation oath. Back from Lisbon. To Dublin as Irish chancellor of the exchequer’s secretary. Pitt resigns as prime minister. Thalaba the Destroyer published. Southey family moves to Keswick. Peace of Amiens. Papal concordat with Bonaparte’s France. Begins writing for Annual Review. Milner appointed vicar apostolic. Coleridge in Malta. War resumes. Pitt returns as prime minister. Madoc published. Nelson wins at Trafalgar. Grenville ministry. Deaths of Pitt and Fox. Letters from England. Portland wins “No Popery” election. Letters from Spain and Portugal (new edition). Peninsular War begins.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xv

8/22/2011 8:28:12 PM

xvi

1809

1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1819

1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828

1829 1830

1832 1833–7

Robe r t S ou t h e y : L i f e a n d Ti m e s

Leaves Annual Review for newly founded Quarterly Review. Begins writing for Edinburgh Annual Register. Perceval now prime minister. Curse of Kehama. First volume of History of Brazil. Regency begins. Writes on the Inquisition in Quarterly. National Society founded. Prime minister Perceval assassinated. Napoleon invades Russia. Appointed poet laureate. Life of Nelson. Catholic Relief Bill fails. Roderick, the last of the Goths. Jesuit Order restored. Battle of Waterloo ends Napoleonic Wars. The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo. Spa Fields Riot. Wat Tyler, Letter to William Smith, 2nd volume of History of Brazil. “British Monachism” in Quarterly Review. “Peterloo” massacre. Castlereagh’s six Acts. 3rd volume of History of Brazil. Life of Wesley. Death of George III. Prince Regent now George IV. Poet Laureate’s A Vision of Judgment. Wordsworth writes Ecclesiastical Sketches. First volume of History of the Peninsular War published. Book of the Church. Milner’s Strictures on the Poet Laureate. “History of the Vaudois” in Quarterly Review. Canning’s Catholic Relief Bill fails. Disraeli’s Vivian Grey. Southey’s Vindiciæ. Butler’s Vindication. Canning dies. “The Catholic Question,” in Quarterly Review. Test & Corporation Acts repealed. Wellington decides on Catholic Emancipation. Catholic Emancipation Act. Colloquies published. Macaulay attacks Colloquies in Edinburgh Review. Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State. Death of George IV. Reform Act gives vote to middle classes. Durham University founded. Lives of the British Admirals in 4 volumes.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xvi

8/22/2011 8:28:13 PM

Robe r t S ou t h e y : L i f e a n d Ti m e s

1834 1835 1836–7 1838 1841 1843

xvii

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Doctor published anonymously. Pension augmented. Peel’s offer of a baronetcy declined. Commutation of tithes. Volumes 3 and 4 of The Doctor. Volume 5 of The Doctor. Young England group visits Keswick. John Henry Newman’s Tract 90 defines the Oxford Movement. Southey dies at Keswick. Newman resigns living of St. Mary’s, Oxford.

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xvii

8/22/2011 8:28:13 PM

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xviii

8/22/2011 8:28:13 PM

A bbr e v i at ions

For full bibliographical details see Works Cited AR AJW AJR BC BEM BoC BoRCC C&S CL CM CN CR CW ER HB L&C LE LSP MR NL Ramos SL Warter

Annual Review Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner Antijacobin Review and Magazine British Critic Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Robert Southey, Book of the Church. 2 vols. 1824 Charles Butler, Book of the Roman Catholic Church 1825 S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State 1830 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E. L. Griggs. 6 vols. 1956 Marginalia. Ed. H. J. Jackson and G. Whalley. CW 12 vol. 5. 2000 Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. K. Coburn. 5 vols. 1957–2002 Critical Review Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen series Edinburgh Review History of Brazil Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Ed. C. C. Southey. 6 vols. 2nd edition. 1849–50 Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella translated from the Spanish Letters from Spain and Portugal Monthly Review New Letters of Robert Southey. Ed. K. Curry. 2 vols. 1965 Letters of Robert Southey to John May. Ed. C. Ramos. 1976 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Ed. J. W. W. Warter. 4 vols. 1849 Southey’s Common Place Book. Ed. J. W. Warter. 4 vols. 1876

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xix

8/22/2011 8:28:13 PM

9780230115132_01_prexx.indd xx

8/22/2011 8:28:13 PM

1

Th e Sh a dow of 179 8: R e be l l ion a n d Un ion

The year 1798, which saw the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, also saw the launch of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine that would campaign so vigorously against what it saw as Catholic attempts to subvert the constitution. Yet in that same year, General Berthier removed the 81-year-old pope by an “Act of the Sovereign People.” When Pius VI asked to be allowed to die in Rome, Berthier replied, “One can die anywhere.” The pope kept the “fisherman’s ring” to pass it on to his successor, though Berthier evidently believed that there would not be another pope. Pius VI died the following year, a prisoner at Valence (Hales 114–15). Before hearing the news, Dr. John Sturges, Prebendary of Winchester and a champion of the Protestant Reformation, wrote in his Reflections on Popery: No time can seem more unfavourable than the present for the success of the Roman Catholic Religion in every part of the world, or more discouraging to the hopes of its zealous partisans. We see it abolished as a national Religion in one vast country of Europe [France] . . . its Pontiff, a venerable old man, degraded, insulted, expelled from his capital, harassed with removals from place to place, treated with every kind of indignity and brutality . . . (Sturges 252)

Dr. Sturges does not suggest that the pope’s spiritual power depends on his residing in Rome, or that, with the death of Pius VI, the papacy “must necessarily become extinct.” But it was clear that the Catholic Church “since the time of its greatness was never in such a

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 1

8/22/2011 6:31:21 PM

2

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

state of humiliation as at present, and never so little likely to extend its influence” (253). Even in Ireland, where the 1798 Rebellion, belatedly supported by an attempted French invasion, was directed against the ruling Anglican ascendancy, the Catholic Theobald McKenna could argue in his Memoire (1799) on the proposed Anglo-Irish Union, that “the supremacy of the Pope is practically little more than reverential” (AJR 8: 177–9). The Act of Union of 1800 was Pitt’s response to the 1798 Irish Rebellion. The Union of Great Britain and Ireland, effective from January 1, 1801, was a union of churches as well as of legislatures. The Act’s fifth article provides that “the Continuance and Preservation of the said United Church, as the established Church of England and Ireland, shall be deemed and taken to be an essential part of the Union” (Costin and Watson 2: 25–6). Three decades later, Coleridge would succinctly state the contradictory situation created by the Union: “Three-fourths of His Majesty’s Irish subjects are Roman Catholics, with a papal priesthood, while three-fourths of the sum total of His Majesty’s subjects are Protestants” (C&S 150). Both Southey and Coleridge would play key roles in the ensuing debate, and would join in defending the Established Church against the presumed danger of admitting Catholics to the Westminster Parliament. Yet in the 1790s, both poets ranged themselves against the Established Church. In 1795, Coleridge, son of the vicar of Ottery St. Mary, would assert: “He who sees any real difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England possesses optics which I do not possess—the mark of antichrist is on both of them” (CW 1: 210). Coleridge’s Unitarian views, acquired at Cambridge, would lead him to consider becoming a Unitarian minister— a career choice made unnecessary by the Wedgwood family’s generous annuity that enabled him to write poetry instead. By May 1798, Coleridge was already admitting the insufficiencies of the Unitarian faith. As he wrote to John Prior Estlin, Unitarian minister of Lewin’s Mead Presbyterian Church, Bristol: “Thanksgiving is pleasant in the performance; but prayer and direct confession I find most serviceable to my spiritual health when I can do it. But tho’ all my doubts are done away, tho’ Christianity is my Passion, it is too much my intellectual Passion; and therefore will do me little good in the hour of temptation and calamity” (CL 1: 407). It would still be another 29 years before Coleridge again received the Anglican sacrament. In the mid-1790s, Southey shared Coleridge’s Unitarian theology, his radical politics, and his dream of settling on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. But he also shared Wordsworth’s

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 2

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

3

concern for the victims of commercial greed and for the civilian casualties of war. Southey’s sympathy for the disadvantaged in society would stay with him throughout his life— accusations of political apostasy notwithstanding. His own first volume of poems, published by Cottle in 1797, included such targets as the slave trade— attacked by Coleridge in his 1795 Bristol lecture— and the transportation to Botany Bay of so-called Jacobins convicted of sedition. Yet such titles as “The Pauper’s Burial,” “The Soldier’s Wife,” and “The Widow” would not have seemed out of place in Lyrical Ballads. Topics such as Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling,” which in the 1798 version focused on a son dying in hospital from wounds sustained in a naval battle (Owen 105–6), could be seen as “war poetry.” To the weekly Anti-Jacobin and its successor, the monthly Antijacobin Review, such themes seemed subversive of the war effort, besides being below the dignity of poetry. It was Southey’s 1797 collection, not the anonymous first edition of Lyrical Ballads, which was subjected to devastating parodies (AJW 1: 35–6, 69–72; AJR 6: 115–18). The Pittite press had stronger reasons for attacking Southey. His epic poem Joan of Arc, published in Bristol in 1796, though medieval in theme was seen as giving aid and comfort to Britain’s enemies (MR 31: 362–3). But 1796 had another significance for Southey that is central to the argument of this book. He spent the winter of 1795–6 in Lisbon with his uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, who was chaplain to the British commercial community in the city. Hill had hoped that his nephew would take Anglican orders, but now recognized that the young radical’s theological views made that impossible. So in order to disentangle him from the folly of the collapsing Pantisocratic project on the Susquehanna, and to provide some worldly experience, Southey’s uncle took him to Lisbon. More than 30 years later, Southey would tell his clergyman son-in-law, John Warter: My voyage was to Portugal, and you know how much it has influenced the direction of my studies. My uncle advised me at that time to turn my thoughts towards the history of that country, when he saw how eagerly I was inquiring into its literature, and more especially its poetry. Then my mind was not ripe enough for historical pursuits; but the advice was not without effect; and when I went again to Portugal, after an absence of four years, I began to look for materials, and set to work. (L&C 6: 98)

Southey must have been thinking of his long-cherished ambition to write a history of Portugal, of which his three-volume History of Brazil was meant to be only a part. What was life-changing was that

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 3

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

4

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Southey’s Lisbon vacation of 1795–6 brought him face-to-face with the extravagances of Portuguese and Spanish Catholicism. On his return to England, Southey published in 1797 a hastily written account of his travels and impressions, thus predating the Irish Rebellion, Napoleon’s imprisonment of the pope, the Irish Act of Union, and George III’s scruples over whether admitting Catholics to the Westminster Parliament would contravene his coronation oath. Southey’s Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal shows that he had already embarked on his sustained criticism of Catholicism, which would generate more than 30 years of colorful rhetoric in his historical and polemical writing. In the 1797 edition of the Letters, he remarks: “The sight of a Monastery or a Monk always fills me with mingled emotions of pity and disgust: foul and filthy men without accomplishments or virtues, or affections, it is yet the system they are subject to that has made them what they are . . .” (1797: 271). And even more strikingly: “Almost I regret the Moors: what has this country gained by their expulsion? A solemn and cleanly superstition has been exchanged for the filth and ferocity of Monks, and the dogma of Mary’s immaculate conception has taken the place of the divine legation of Mohammed” (81). Both passages are omitted from the third edition of 1808, substantially rewritten after Southey’s second stay in Lisbon in 1800–1— this time to improve his health. When the new two-volume 1808 edition appeared, there was a British army in Portugal, a British government elected on a “no popery” ticket, and the debate on Catholic Emancipation raging in full flood. Yet in 1800, Unitarianism, rather than Catholicism, was seen to be the greater threat to the Established Church. During the first half of the year, the Antijacobin Review targets Priestley himself and his fellow-Unitarians Thomas Belsham, John Kentish, and Joshua Toulmin (AJR 5: 100). During those six months, the same journal quotes the bishop of Lincoln’s insistence that the early church regarded non-Trinitarians as heretics, commends a biography by William Jones (author of The Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity), censures Archdeacon William Paley for displaying “all the rancour with all the ignorance of a Priestley,” and advises Gilbert Wakefield to forsake republicanism and “devote his fine talents and learning to pure poetry and criticism” (AJR 5: 4, 123, 136, 141). The newly founded Monthly Magazine, under its Unitarian editor Richard Phillips, is denounced by one of the Anti-Jacobin’s correspondents as “that vile compendium of Jacobinism” (AJR 5: 338), while the long-established Monthly Review is reprimanded for its “panegyric” on the published poems of the

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 4

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

5

Unitarian Samuel Rogers, whose poetry fails to show “one trait of original genius” (AJR 5: 72). Dr. Andrew Kippis, Unitarian minister and founder of the New Annual Register, is rebuked for his “open hostility to the church” and for his part in turning the Monthly Review into “the established vehicle of Arianism and Presbyterianism” (AJR 6: 89). And noting that the Critical Review has joined the Monthly “in its hostility to orthodoxy and the established church,” the AntiJacobin characterizes the Critical as “still breathing out the old virus of Presbyterianism inflamed with the worser virus of new Arianism, or Socinianism, or new Deism” (AJR 6: 89). Such facetious virulence at the Unitarians’ expense contrasts with the serious tone of a prospectus appended to the British Critic for January 1801. Advertising a new publication to be called The Orthodox Churchman’s Magazine, the prospectus offers a “biography of eminent or pious Divines,” a review of new publications in Divinity, “sacred poetry, original and select,” obituaries, and “a regular list of Church Preferments.” But the main thrust of the promised publication is toward “the proceedings of the Religious Societies at home,” and in particular, “the State of Infidelity, Methodism and various Sectarians; with occasional Accounts of Religion upon the Continent and other parts of Christendom.” The four-page prospectus makes clear that the Orthodox Churchman will be fighting a war on two fronts. A Church of England magazine was now an “absolute necessity” at a time when what is called Catholic Emancipation, the policy of our enemies abroad, and the clamours of those of the Romish communion at home, with all the host of Atheists, Deists, Dissenters, and Schismatics of every description, are uniting their efforts to overthrow that mild, that venerable Establishment, which emanating like the dawn of a cloudless day from the dark and gloomy times of the Monkish superstition, shone with a bright and radiant lustre at the glorious Reformation . . . (prospectus of 4 pages follows BC 17: 100).

The prospectus also cautions against “the prevalent notion that the dangers of Popery have decreased, in consequence of the general improvement in the liberal sciences and the most enlightened politics of Europe.” Praise is lavished on George III’s “royal fortitude” for accepting the resignation of William Pitt and his ministers rather than violating his coronation oath. Catholic Emancipation “would have brought with it the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts, and consequently would have erected Popery, Socinianism or Atheism upon the ruins of the Orthodox Faith” (BC 17: prospectus 3). So in

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 5

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

6

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the very month in which the Act of Union came into effect, the ecclesiastical battleground of the next three decades was delineated. Pitt’s resignation had come only a matter of weeks before the appearance of the first issue of the Orthodox Churchman. In a letter dated January 31, 1801, Pitt assured the king that Catholic Emancipation “would be attended with no danger to the established church.” He argued that “those principles formerly held by Catholics, which made them considered as politically dangerous, have been for a course of time gradually declining, and, among the higher orders particularly, have ceased to prevail.” The days of foreign pretenders abetted by Catholic governments were over. What was now needed was “a distinct political test pointed against the doctrines of modern Jacobinism” (Hague 469–70). Historians have had difficulty in accepting that Pitt could really have resigned on the issue of Catholic relief— or that he could have considered Ireland worth the sacrifice of his premiership. Yet Castlereagh (chief secretary for Ireland, 1799– 1801) argued that union with Ireland made Catholic Emancipation necessary, while Cornwallis (viceroy and commander-in-chief in Ireland, 1798–1801) complained of the “folly” of describing the Irish Rebellion as a Catholic uprising, when it was really a Jacobin one (Whelan 148). Southey would soon be briefly in Ireland himself, based in Dublin as secretary to the Irish chancellor of the exchequer (see chapter 2). But he had been out of England, on his second visit to Portugal, from April 1800 to July 1801. So he missed the Orthodox Churchman’s declaration of war against “the dangers of Popery,” and the drama of Pitt’s resignation as prime minister at the end of January 1801, only weeks before the new journal’s first issue appeared. Yet Southey’s own views on the iniquities of the Catholic Church, first formed in 1795–6, had since been confirmed by his second stay in Lisbon. He had hardly arrived in the city in May 1800 before writing to his mother: “You would not like the Catholic religion half so well, if you saw it here in all its naked nonsense— could you but see the mummery, and smell the friars” (L&C 2: 76). George III’s insistence on standing by the terms of his coronation oath provoked an immediate pamphlet exchange. Probably the first to be written (though not the first to be published) was by the Rev. John Milner, “Rome’s brazen serpent” of Coleridge’s verse, and (from 1803) vicar apostolic to the Midland district of England, and bishop (in partibus infidelis) of Castabala. In the 1790s, as a priest ministering to the Catholics of Winchester, Milner had managed to get Parliament to tone down the oath of allegiance prescribed in the Catholic Relief Act of 1791. The Act opened various civil positions to

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 6

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

7

English Catholics, including the lower ranks of the armed forces—but not seats in Parliament. Thanks to newly formed links between Milner and the Anglican bishops of Salisbury and Hereford, and also to the persuasive speeches of Samuel Horsley (then bishop of St. David’s) in the House of Lords, the proposed oath was replaced by the lessoffensive wording of the 1774 Irish oath of allegiance. As Horsley explained to their lordships, Milner and his traditional or transalpine Catholics were ready to renounce the doctrine that faith need not be kept with heretics, and to disclaim as “impious and unchristian” the belief that princes excommunicated by the pope might justifiably be assassinated. But while denying that monarchs might be deposed, the transalpine clergy balked at describing the deposing power as “impious, unchristian and damnable.” In the 1820s, Milner would engage directly with Southey (see chapter 7). Meanwhile, somewhat ironically, the Catholic Milner had been introduced to the Anglican bishops by George Huntingford, warden of Winchester College, who would write as bishop of Hereford to congratulate Southey on his Book of the Church. But now, proof copies of Milner’s Case of Conscience Solved (1801) had been sent to “certain eminent personages then in power,” who advised him against agitating the question of the coronation oath. But John Reeves’s newly published Considerations on the Coronation Oath seemed to have been written with access to a copy of Milner’s unpublished work (Milner v–vi). In the mid-1790s, Reeves had been the moving spirit behind the Loyal Associations set up to counter the so-called Jacobin political societies demanding Parliamentary reform. The Rev. Robert Nares, cofounder and editor of the British Critic, was a committee member of the Loyal Association. Reeves now argued that the 1688 Revolution Settlement intended the coronation oath to be a brake on the sovereignty of Parliament. He recognized that, while the sovereignty of Parliament remains absolute, “fortunately for us,” the supreme power of the state was lodged not merely in Parliament but in the monarch, “whose political character gave a sort of individuality to the nation; and who, in all succession of time, might set himself against every attempt that should be made, even by his ministers and parliament, to repeal the Protestant constitution which they intended to fix for ever” (Reeves 21–2). The coronation oath administered to Charles II had required the king to maintain the laws and customs “according to the Laws of God, the true Profession of the Gospel Established in this Kingdom and agreeable to the Prerogative of the Kings thereof, and the Ancient Customs of the Realm.” The oath administered to William III and Mary in 1689, replaced the royal

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 7

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

8

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

prerogative with parliamentary sovereignty. And while the 1689 oath retained “Laws of God, the true Profession of the Gospel,” it added the crucial words: “and the Protestant reformed religion established by law” (Costin and Watson 1: 58–9; Reeves 25–6). Milner, in his Case of Conscience Solved, had noted that William III was the first English monarch who had to swear to maintain the Protestant establishment, yet who, “almost immediately afterwards,” promoted an act for altering the oaths of supremacy and allegiance in favor of Dissenters. The new monarch also agreed to the Presbyterian establishment in Scotland. Milner presumes that William was persuaded to agree to these changes, “on the ground that whatever measures were necessary for the security of the Church of England, were in the true spirit of his Coronation Oath” (Milner 1807: 17). He recalls that, when Corsica was briefly under the British crown from 1794 to 1796, its new constitution declared the Catholic religion to be “the sole religion of the country, and the Pope was even allowed a share in appointing to its bishoprics, as they became vacant” (1807: 22). As for the present, Milner asks whether it could have been foreseen, when the coronation oath was revised, that “Ireland, from being a dependency of Great Britain, would be associated in a legislative union with it, and that instead of ruling the Catholic inhabitants with the iron hand of power, it would become wise and necessary to cherish them in the bosom of paternal affection?” Was the French Revolution foreseen a century before? And unconsciously echoing Pitt, Milner asks whether it is “from the side of Popery, or from the opposite quarter of Jacobinism, that the Established Church is most in danger at the present day?” The obligation of “maintaining this Church to the utmost of the Sovereign’s power, requires a different line of conduct and politics from that which was pursued at his Majesty’s accession to the throne” (1807: 29). Milner argues, following Blackstone, that parliamentary sovereignty would be nullified if the king, as a branch of the legislature, were restrained (as Reeves implied) from giving his assent to the votes of both Houses of Parliament “in a matter of this nature.” If Catholic Emancipation were to be carried merely on the strength of the royal prerogative, Milner could have accepted the scruple of conscience. But, as the expediency of the measure is to be submitted to both Houses of Parliament, and His Majesty’s decision would be guided by their votes, Milner is “lost in astonishment” that such a scruple should be entertained “either by any lawyer, or by any divine.” He concludes that, if the coronation oath is not contrary to the indulgences granted to Dissenters in William III’s reign, “it does not now stand against the same favours being extended to Catholics”

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 8

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

9

(1807: 31–4). Reeves takes his stand on the events of the 1680s, when James II took Catholics into his Privy Council: “Who can doubt of the like consequences when the law shall directly authorize Papists to sit with Protestants in the national councils?” (Reeves: 44). When the first edition of the Case Solved was already in the press, there appeared a pamphlet from Charles Butler, who would later become Southey’s other principal Catholic antagonist— Coleridge’s “courteous Butler.” Milner appends an extract from Letter to a Nobleman (1801) in which Butler recalls that the words of the coronation oath require the sovereign not only to “maintain the Protestant religion established by law,” but also pledge him “to govern the people according to the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same.” Given those words, Butler argues, “it would be absurd in the extreme, unconstitutional and even treasonable, to contend that the expression in question precludes his Majesty from concurring with both houses of parliament in any legislation whatsoever.” Butler adds the reminder that the terms of the coronation oath were fixed in Ireland in the first year of William and Mary, when Catholic peers had seats and voting rights in the Irish House of Lords, and Catholic commoners in the Irish House of Commons. Irish civil and military offices were then open to Catholics, who lost those rights only by the Acts of 1692 and 1693, and in the first and second years of Queen Anne. Butler argues that the coronation oath can refer only to “the system of law, which was in force when the Act which prescribed it, was passed” (Milner 1807: 35–6, citing Butler). Both Butler and Milner may be guilty of scoring debating points, rather than meeting their opponents halfway. But at least the tone of controversy is reasoned, courteous, and respectful. Although the Case of Conscience Solved was written before publication of Reeves’s Considerations on the Coronation Oath, Milner was able to respond by doubling the length of his own pamphlet with the addition of the Butler excerpts and a “Supplement” dated March 15, 1801—the month in which a review of Reeves’s second edition appeared in the British Critic (17: 284–90). In the supplement, Milner’s previously emollient tone is not always maintained. In rebutting Reeves’s claim that the Act of Union was intended to close the debate with Rome, Milner argues that its terms imply no greater prohibition against Catholics “than there is against Presbyterianism, Mahometanism or any other religion that does not agree ‘in doctrine, worship, discipline and government with the Church of England.’” Both the Scottish and Irish Acts of Union merely undertook to maintain Anglican doctrine and discipline “in their primitive state, against

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 9

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

10

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

external violence and internal decay” (Milner 1807: 69). Milner had already countered much of Reeves’s argument regarding the immutability and irreversibility of the oath. He now reminds Reeves that “we live in times when new and extraordinary expedients must be resorted to, in order to counteract unexpected and unprecedented dangers. If a great deal is not done that our ancestors never thought of doing, we are all inevitably ruined” (Milner 1807: 47–8). Among the wartime expedients Milner thinks are needed is that of removing religious grievances, which divide the nation under the Union. And he quotes Butler on the effect of retaining the surviving penal laws against the Catholics: “It keeps them from falling into the general mass of the community, makes them a nation within a nation, and holds them out to their fellow-subjects as an inferior cast[e]” (Milner 1807: 41, citing Letter to a Nobleman 10). Reeves’s claim that “the concerns of the Church are stationary,” Milner argues, effectively exempts ecclesiastical matters from the cognizance of Parliament, and sets up “as bold and extensive a claim for their exemption from temporal jurisdiction, as ever was maintained by the ecclesiastics of the 12th century” (Milner 1807: 69). Finally, Milner denies that Catholic Emancipation is inconsistent with the safety of the Establishment. The imagined risks are, he considers, greatly exaggerated: “As to the present situation of the Church of Rome, once so powerful, I shall say no more of it now, after all the great events that we have lately witnessed on the Continent, than what Dr Johnson said of it twenty years ago, namely that those who cry out POPERY! POPERY! in these times, are like those who might have cried out FIRE! FIRE! in the general deluge.” Milner reckons that there are only six Catholic English peers who could claim a seat in the House of Lords, and thinks that “there is no probability of a greater number of [Catholic] commoners even aiming at the Lower House.” And he asks whether there can be any danger to the Established Church from “the infusion of these few drops of Catholicity into a Protestant senate, consisting of a hundred times their number?” (72). When the Catholic Emancipation Act finally passed Parliament in 1829, it was George IV, not George III, who had to give the royal assent. Even then he would claim that he had been tricked by his ministers (see chapter 10). If the pamphlet exchange between Milner and Reeves seems only tangential to Southey’s later writing, the same cannot be said of Milner’s confrontation with the prebendaries of the Cathedral chapter of Winchester. It is ironic that Milner was accused of waking sleeping religious passions by publishing the innocuously titled History,

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 10

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

11

civil and ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester. The two volumes appeared separately in 1798 and 1801, but Prebendary John Sturges, chancellor of Winchester Cathedral and a chaplain-inordinary to the king, did not wait to see the second volume before issuing his Reflections on Popery (1800). Sturges complained that Milner had introduced, into his work, “opinions and censures which he must know would be very offensive, not only to his readers [in Winchester], but also to the nation at large” (Sturges 1–2). It seemed to Sturges “particularly unseasonable to revive controversial subjects, which have in great measure slept,” at a time when “Christianity itself is attacked by an host of foes, not in this or that district or Country, but throughout Europe, with all the regularity of System and all the zeal of Fanaticism” (6). For Sturges, Milner’s history of Winchester is a covert attempt to promote Catholic practices and institutions. The work’s ostensibly antiquarian subject would attract “many readers, who would not relish a work professing Religious Controversy; and convey opinions into their minds which would not otherwise find admission” (14–15). But apart from seducing unwary readers, Milner risks reviving controversy and raising public alarm at a time when large numbers of French émigré Catholic clergy are in England and are “supported by the private and public bounty of the Nation” (8–9). The impact of these Catholic asylum-seekers on the city of Winchester will be highlighted by Southey, in Letters from England (1: 326–9). Milner responds in his Letters to a Prebendary by claiming that England’s native Catholics have a greater claim to Protestant sympathy than the émigrés: “We live in our own country, Englishmen by birth and principle, the descendants of men who founded the constitution of this kingdom.” And on the one point of difference— religion—“it is not we that have introduced a new system; on the contrary, we barely maintain that of our Saxon progenitors” (Milner 1800: 15). Milner’s emphasis on antiquity has the advantage of treating the Reformation as an aberration from the true faith, which he variously describes as “the religion of our ancestors” or “the ancient religion.” Milner nevertheless objects to Sturges’s mode of argument: “Instead of meeting me hand to hand, and foot to foot, like a fair and generous adversary, you turn your back on the field of battle, and, Parthian-like, shoot behind you the random shafts of declamation and calumny.” Sturges chooses to “bring forward every odious crime, or imputation of crime, that has been raked together from the general history of the church during a great number of centuries,” in answer to “a connected and authenticated history of this city and country”

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 11

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

12

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

(8–9). Milner claims that when Sturges opened his attack, “there was not the shadow of an existing controversy”; but such a controversy “in the existing circumstances” was now unavoidable (12). Sturges (says Milner) had challenged the History of Winchester, not by confuting its arguments, or questioning its authorities, but by misrepresenting his views, and by commonplace “misrepresentation and calumny against the religion of our ancestors under the illiberal and abusive term of Popery.” Such calumnies “have been a thousand times urged, and a thousand times refuted” (Milner 1800: 5–7). Milner observes in a footnote that not only common usage, but also the very title of the 1791 Catholic Relief Act had sanctioned the term “Roman Catholic” (Costin and Watson 2: 4–6). He therefore considers it “a mark of illiberality and bigotry to denote the religion in question by the term Popery, and the professors of it by those of Papists, Romanists &c.” In his advertisement to the second edition of Reflections on Popery, Sturges explains that his censures were directed against Popery and Papists “properly so called; not against the Roman Catholic Religion divested of those principles which make it dangerous to society.” If Milner’s Catholicism had “appeared to be of this mitigated kind,” he never would have had Sturges as an opponent. As it is, “Mr M. indeed and myself are hardly enough agreed in common principle to be qualified to reason together” (vi–vii). Coleridge in his Aids toward a right judgment of the late Catholic Bill, appended to his Constitution of the Church and State (1830), almost invariably prefers “Catholic” and “Roman Catholic” to “Romish,” though he does draw a distinction between “a Catholic and Apostolic Church in England” and the “Constitutional and Ancestral Church of England” (CW 4: 124–5). Southey has no inhibitions about using “Popish” and “Romish” as a matter of course, and pointedly uses “(Roman) Catholic” instead of “Catholic.” Milner agrees that English Catholics were indeed grateful for the relaxation of the penal laws in the 1791 Catholic Relief Act. But he questions the grounds on which the parliamentary relief of 1791 had been given: “Was it in the nature of a reprieve to convicted criminals or in that of a solemn declaration of the innocence of the men who had been long suffering under an unjust imputation?” (Milner 1800: 16). Sturges had implied that the repeal of the penal disabilities (short of permitting election to Parliament) had come with conditions, though Milner could find none that were expressed or implicit in the wording of the 1791 Act: Was it then said to us, you are free from the weight of the penal statutes, but it is on condition, that you do not bring your religion to the

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 12

8/22/2011 6:31:22 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

13

public notice by any work of controversy or even history that may be construed into a defence of it, or of its institutions? Everyone shall be free to publish whatever Reflections on Popery he pleases, charging you with every degree of absurdity, wickedness and sedition, but you shall not be at liberty to make any reply to them, or even to write at all upon the subject of ecclesiastical antiquities (Milner 1800: 17)?

Milner’s answer is a resounding denial that Parliament was “so intolerant or so illiberal.” The government had “received our pledges of fidelity to our king and country, and they left you and me to settle whatever points of history or theology we might differ about, by the best records and arguments we could discover for this purpose” (17). Much of what follows in the debate between Milner and Sturges provides a preview of what will appear in Milner’s End of Religious Controversy, written in 1801–2, but not published until 1818. Thus, Milner defends papal supremacy, the ideal of monastic celibacy, and the alleged downgrading of scripture as a source of revelation. Sturges (says Milner) has confused the pope’s “essential spiritual jurisdiction with his accidental temporal power,” and so jumbles together “the very distinct subjects of the supremacy and the infallibility.” Had Sturges derived his knowledge of Catholic doctrine “from the famous schoolman St. Thomas Aquinas, whom you boast of being unacquainted with, instead of his learned and edifying countrymen Dante and Petrarch,” he would have learned to state those doctrines “with more precision and accuracy” (Milner 1800: 20–2). More topically, Milner asks whether Sturges can discover in the imprisoned Pius VI “any of the marks of the beast, any of the characters of the man of sin, the Anti-christ of the Revelations, which your former colleague [Prebendary Thomas Rennell], and other controversialists and interpreters pretend to have found out” (31). Milner concedes that Sturges had himself “spoken with humanity that does you honour” of Pius VI’s sufferings, “as an insulted and persecuted old man,” and had written approvingly of “his good government and public spirit as a prince.” But the pope’s steadfast adherence to the duties of his spiritual office should also be celebrated. The claim to papal infallibility, and the boasted unchangeability of the Catholic Church, would both be points of attack from Protestant polemicists, including Southey. Yet such criticism usually ignores the strictly defined limits of infallibility and the flexibility provided by the Catholic doctrine of development, which recognizes new dogmas held to be implicit in scripture, but only gradually explicitly defined by the church. Anglicanism,

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 13

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

14

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

far from claiming unlimited flexibility, bases its faith on the scriptures and on the first four Councils of the early church, culminating in that of Chalcedon in 451. Papal infallibility would remain one of the key issues throughout the Emancipation debate, but it would not be formally defined as a dogma until 1870. Milner, presuming that “we can at least agree in acknowledging the truth of Revelation” (37), was quite willing to cite scripture. He does so in response to Sturges’s attack on “hermits, monks and the whole train of Ascetics,” and on “that pernicious retirement from the world and those useless austerities imposed on the different religious orders of the Roman Church; vows of poverty; prescribed abstinence and distinction of food; and notions of purity and merit attached to celibacy in preference to marriage” (Sturges 61–2). Milner responds to what he calls his opponent’s “just panegyrics, in prose and verse, upon matrimony” (Milner 1800: 48). Milner pretends to be shocked by “the scandalous theory of the impracticability of continence,” by which he means Sturges’s easy assumption that celibacy is contrary to nature (Sturges 100–3). Milner professes himself “astonished, and almost ashamed, to hear such language as this, and on this subject, from you, who are both a divine and a magistrate” (Milner 1800: 53). To such cynicism, Milner responds: “How great an obstacle the encumbrance of a family must be to a zealous clergyman of every degree in the discharge of their duties under many particular circumstances, particularly in times of persecution” (55). Both Southey and Coleridge shared the nineteenth-century suspicion of compulsory celibacy required by the Catholic Church, though in their day fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were forbidden to marry. Coleridge considered the Catholic acceptance of compulsory clerical celibacy commanded by “a foreign and extra-national head” as one of only two “absolute disqualifications” from enjoying “the full privileges of nationhood” (C&S 81). In his Book of the Church (1824), Southey links celibacy of the clergy with what he saw as the morally damaging effect of the Catholic confessional, which he thought explained why “the state of morals is generally so much more corrupt than in Protestant countries” (BoC 1: 313). Turning to the annals of persecution— a much traversed battleground in the decade before Emancipation— Milner complains of “the many foul caricatures of the religion of our ancestors,” depicting it as “a sanguinary system, supported by swords and muskets, and surrounded with racks, gibbets, and fires.” Foxe’s “lying”Acts and Monuments, illustrated with “large wooden faggots and flames” are, Milner observes, “chained to the desks of many country churches,

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 14

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

15

whilst abridgments of this inflammatory work are annually issued from the London presses, under the title of The Book of Martyrs.” According to Milner, “Catholics have suffered persecution in this country to a much greater degree than they ever inflicted it.” The defacement of Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s monument in Winchester Cathedral was prompted by “the numerous executions of Protestants under queen Mary,” and by the part “our prelate Gardiner had in those bloody scenes.” But Milner is certain that citizens of Winchester do not know that “their own streets had frequently flowed in the reign of Elizabeth with the blood of Catholic priests and laymen shed merely for their having practiced the religion of Alfred, St Swithun and William of Wykeham” (Milner 1800: 58–9). Sturges questions Milner’s insistence that persecution was not a tenet of the Catholic religion, pointing to the “horrors” of the Inquisition. Milner retorts that “the practices of the inquisition have as little to do with the Catholic religion as they have with my History of Winchester.” Nor was it true that St. Dominic was the founder of the Inquisition, or even a member of it, “for it did not even exist until after his death.” Milner agrees that Dominic “vigorously opposed the pernicious errors of the Albigenses, and that he converted an incredible number of them.” But he denies that Dominic “ever made use of any other arms for this purpose than preaching, prayer and the example of his virtues” (80–2). The vehement debate about the role of St. Dominic and the Dominicans in the suppression of the Albigensian heretics would re-echo throughout Southey’s writings, both in his Book of the Church and in the Quarterly Review. For evidence of the pernicious moral consequences of the Reformation, Milner cites the testimony of European Protestants, beginning with Luther: “The world grows every day worse and worse. It is plain that men are much more covetous, malicious, resentful, much more unruly, shameless and full of vice than they were in the time of Popery” (Milner 1800: 99–100). In England, Bishop Latimer, one of Foxe’s Protestant martyrs, announced to Edward VI in a sermon: “Lechery is used in England, and such lechery as is used in no other part of the world.” And Latimer calls for the reinstatement of the Church’s “right of excommunicating notable offenders.” Milner examines the characters of the Reformers—Luther, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper— on whom Sturges had lavished such praise. Luther, in the exchanges that earned Henry VIII the title of Defender of the Faith, called his royal antagonist, “a Thomistical pig, an ass, a jakes, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon disguised in a king’s robe, a mad fool with a frothy

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 15

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

16

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

mouth and a whorish face” (Milner 1800: 110). Sturges’s admission that he did not himself believe in “a real and corporeal presence of Christ in the sacrament” (231–5) would (says Milner) have led Luther “to pour out against you the same foul-mouthed epithets and curses which he employed against the pope” (Milner 1800: 111). Milner had acknowledged and reprobated the crimes of a Sergius, a John X, an Adrian VI, “and of every other bad pope,” recorded in “genuine history.” Why then could Sturges not be “equally liberal in abandoning as indefensible the characters of a Luther and a Cranmer” (125). Milner gives Elizabeth equally short shrift: Without speaking of the innocent blood of the queen of Scots and of the other Catholics shed at home, this unprincipled politician was the chief agent of promoting those rebellions and civil wars among the subjects of foreign powers, particularly in Scotland, France and Flanders, and those various acts of piracy in the West Indies, South America and our own seas, by which the government of Elizabeth was rendered so infamous in the eyes of the other powers of Europe (132).

Yet, he insists, Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects remained loyal. Defending the excommunication of the queen, he insists that excommunication is quite a different matter from the alleged right to depose princes, “which some pontiffs have asserted and exercised.” He quotes Philip II’s published motive to support his own claim that the Armada had aims “purely of a political nature, namely to repel the numerous acts of hostility which had been committed by Elizabeth upon his dominions, both in Europe and America.” The English Catholics, far from siding with the Spaniards, joined their fellow-Englishmen in opposing the attempted invasion, as Sturges had “very candidly” admitted (Milner 1800: 161–2). Similarly, Milner argues, the Gunpowder Plot cannot be blamed on the whole Catholic community: “Only 16 persons are so much as accused of it in the act of attainder,” and it seems that no more than seven “were acquainted with the worst part of it” (170). Foreshadowing the Catholic historian Antonia Fraser, Milner reckons that Robert Cecil knew of the plot in advance and was “the invisible manager of the whole business.” But were the conspirators acting “in conformity with the principles of their religion?” James I, speaking in Parliament, exonerated the main body of Catholics from the charge of having been involved in the conspiracy, and the leading Catholic clergy circulated a pastoral letter describing the gunpowder treason

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 16

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

17

as “detestable and damnable” (172–3). Confronted with facts instead of myths, “where is the charity,” Milner asks, “nay, where is the justice of those acrimonious sermons and services, and of those tumultuous rejoicings,” which have marked November 5 for almost 200 years? A footnote cites the phrases “Popish treachery” and “cruel and bloodthirsty enemies” from “A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving” in the Book of Common Prayer : “To be used yearly upon the Fifth Day of November; for the happy Deliverance of JAMES I, and the three Estates of ENGLAND, from the most traitorous and bloodyintended Massacre by Gunpowder; and also for the happy Arrival of His Majesty, King William on this day for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation” (179n). The prayer-book of the post-Union United Church of England and Ireland retained the same Guy Fawkes Day prayer, which was to be used instead of the first collect at Morning Prayer. Noting how, under Charles I, the Catholics were “ever described as the occasion of all public calamities,” Milner likens it to the way in which the primitive Christians were blamed by their pagan persecutors, and “their blood was considered as a remedy for all public grievances.” Among supposed Catholic plots, Milner lists a plan to murder the king and to excite the Presbyterian Scots against him; a new gunpowder plot to blow up the Thames, and drown the inhabitants of London; and details of a conspiracy, overheard by a Cripplegate tailor “while walking in the fields,” for 108 assassins to murder 108 leading members of Parliament, “at the rate of ten pounds for every lord, and of forty shillings for every commoner” (182–3). Milner remarks acidly that, during the ensuing civil war, “those boasted patriots who affected to dread such danger from the treason of Papists, were generally found in arms against their King and Constitution.” And this when Catholics were “lavishing their blood and treasure in defence of a country from which they had little to hope.” Though they would still have refused the oath of allegiance, “had it been tendered to them,” they proved their loyalty to the crown “with a heroism which has extorted the praises of their more candid enemies”— including Dr. Sturges himself (Milner 184–5; Sturges 189). Yet, in spite of their loyalty and suffering in the royal cause, Catholics at the Restoration were accused of being “the promoters and actors in the rebellion.” When London caught fire in 1666, the Catholics were blamed, just as Nero, “the real incendiary,” blamed the burning down of Rome on the primitive Christians. The unfounded charge against Charles II’s Catholics was perpetuated on the Monument to the Fire. Dating from 1681, the inscription ended with the words: “But the

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 17

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

18

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched.” The accusation, Milner could justly claim in 1800, “still remains to attest, not the crime of Catholics, but the dreadful bigotry and intolerance of the time when it was raised” (185–6, 189). The offending sentence was finally erased in 1830, after the passing of Catholic Emancipation. Milner does not comment on the reign of James II (also omitted from his History of Winchester), but contents himself with the evasive affirmation that “whatever the law considers illegal in the conduct of the deposed monarch, that I admit to be illegal also” (192). The Milner–Sturges debate defines the clash of historical perspectives that will dominate the next three decades, and demonstrates the polemical skills of John Milner, whom Southey will regard as one of his principal antagonists. Milner’s Letters to a Prebendary ended on a more strident note than it began. But this work of 1800 was generally more temperate in tone than some of his later publications. What changed the climate of the debate dramatically was Sir Richard Musgrave’s account of the 1798 Rebellion, in Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland, published simultaneously in London and Dublin in 1801. Before the Irish Union, which became operative on January 1 of that year, Musgrave was the member for Lismore in the Irish Parliament, high sheriff of County Waterford, and a magistrate. He was thus an archetypal representative of the Anglican ascendancy that governed Ireland. His narrative of the rebellion was scrupulously documented, but only from Protestant ascendancy sources. Thomas Pakenham, in his Year of Liberty, notes that sources are embarrassingly rich on the loyalist side, “with 10,000 documents in the Rebellion papers at Dublin Castle, but fewer than 100 documents on the rebel side” (45). If the historical bias is Protestant, the geographical bias (as Whelan points out in his Tree of Liberty, 148) is shown by 80 percent of the text and appendices being devoted to Leinster, with only 3 percent to County Antrim and County Down. Musgrave’s thesis, that the 1798 Rebellion had purely religious causes and was merely the latest manifestation of popish aggression, had first been aired in 1799, in his anonymous pamphlet published in Dublin but not in London (A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities which occurred in the present Rebellion). Musgrave adopted the pseudonym Veridicus in answer to Veritas (Dr. James Caulfield). As Catholic bishop of Ferns, Caulfield wrote Vindication of the Roman Catholic clergy of the town of Wexford (1798). Musgrave, in his challenge to Caulfield, went back to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215— a key event for Southey and other

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 18

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

R ebel l ion a n d Un ion

19

Anglican opponents of Milner. Musgrave lists Catholic massacres and crusades over five centuries: the suppression of the Albigenses in the thirteenth century (for which the 1215 Lateran Council was called), the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in sixteenth-century France, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish rebellion of 1641, persecution of French Protestants in 1791, and the massacres of Vinegar Hill, Scullabogue, and Wexford in the 1798 Rebellion (Musgrave 1799: 14–15; 17, 22). Musgrave asserts his uncompromising opinion that “many Doctrines of the Popish Church, not only encouraged, but even recommended Persecution and Bloodshed,” and that since the beginning of the twelfth century, “these abominable Doctrines have been frequently sanctioned by General Councils, by Popes’ Bulls and Epistles,” and have been “constantly enforced in every Country in Europe, where the Roman Pontiff had attained any Authority” (2–3). The 85-page Concise Account ends with a call for the union of Britain and Ireland “to protect us from foreign and domestic enemies” (84). By the time Musgrave’s Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland appeared in 1801, the Union had become an established fact, and the debate about Catholic Emancipation had begun in earnest. Memoirs of the Rebellions, running to 626 pages, with another 210 pages of appendices, repeats the arguments of Musgrave’s 1799 pamphlet. The impact on the English reading public of this magisterial but highly partisan history has been traced in two recent studies: James Kelly’s Sir Richard Musgrave and my own Irish Rebellion: Protestant polemic 1798–1900. As instances of the dismissive manner in which Musgrave treats his opponents, the Critical Review for September 1802 notices that (for Musgrave) Bishop Caulfield, is a man “of false and forward assertion who pays no regard to truth,” and that Charles Butler is the writer of “a flimsy pamphlet” (his Letter to a Nobleman). Even Lord Cornwallis (to whom Musgrave had optimistically dedicated his Memoirs of the Rebellions) is reproached for “intending to put protestants and Roman-catholics on exactly the same footing.” Yet the Critical Review reminds its readers that it is not only possible for Protestants and Catholics to live together without cutting one another’s throats, but that “in Germany, Holland, Helvetia, and the whole civilized continent of North America” intolerance and persecution for religious opinions are “totally unknown” (CR 36: 42–3). But it was Musgrave who won the debate. His first edition of Rebellions sold out within two months, while a second edition (with a similar print run of 1250) was followed in 1802 with a Dublin edition of 1350 copies. His extreme anti-Catholic prejudices were

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 19

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

20

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

kept before readers of the periodical press. The British Critic and the Antijacobin Review gave Musgrave maximum coverage (Andrews 2006: chapter 3). In Southey’s Bristol, where the subscription library allowed borrowers to keep books for up to a month, the register shows that Musgrave’s massive volume of over 800 pages was borrowed 24 times between July 1801 and August 1803. In eight instances, the book was taken out on the same day as the previous borrower returned it. And in 1810, when Musgrave’s publisher (Stockdale) published Lord Kenyon’s Observation on the Roman Catholic Question, it would carry an appendix of some two dozen extracts from Musgrave. Kenyon’s volume ends by citing, as evidence against the Catholics, an extract from Milner’s newly published Elucidation of the Veto (1810) together with a vote of thanks from the Catholic prelates of Ireland for Milner’s “faithful discharge of his duty, as agent to the Roman Catholic Bishops of this part of the United Kingdom” (Kenyon 73–9). By then, Milner and Musgrave would be locked in controversy, and would remain at each other’s throats until Musgrave’s death in 1818, the year that Milner’s grievously misnamed End of Controversy was published— and six years before Southey’s Book of the Church made its appearance.

9780230115132_02_ch01.indd 20

8/22/2011 6:31:23 PM

2

Poe t a s Tr av e l e r : L isbon, M a dr i d, D u bl i n

In the summer of 1801, Southey arrived back in Bristol from his

second visit to Spain and Portugal. This time his stay in Lisbon had been for his health, and his wife Edith had accompanied him. In early September, by which time Southey was already missing the Portuguese sunshine and what he called “southern luxuries” (Speck 88), the pair set off to visit the Coleridges in Keswick. Leaving Edith with the Coleridges, Southey then left for a tour of North Wales with Charles Wynn in search of material for Madoc, the epic narrative in verse of a legendary Welsh prince who was supposed to have discovered America in the twelfth century. Southey had conceived the idea in 1789, while still at Westminster School. He took it up again in 1794, when he and Coleridge were hoping to establish their model community in Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna. On February 22, 1797, Southey entered Gray’s Inn, under the sponsorship of Charles Wynn, a friend from his Westminster schooldays, to gain the necessary residential qualification to practice as a barrister. The poet’s commonplace book (later edited by his son-in-law John Warter) reveals that, on the same day, he started to revise Madoc (Warter series 4: 45). By 1801, Wynn must have realized that Southey would never make a career as an advocate. Yet one of the aims of this book is to show how effectively Southey could employ his rhetorical gifts when writing on history, politics, or religion. Meanwhile the writing and rewriting of Madoc would occupy most of the time that he could snatch from bread-and-butter reviewing. But first he must travel to Dublin to take up the post that John Rickman had secured for him as secretary to the

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 21

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

22

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Irish chancellor of the exchequer. It soon turned out to be not merely a sinecure, but a nonexistent post. After only a few weeks, the chancellor and his new secretary returned to London, where Edith rejoined her husband. The one-year appointment ended prematurely in May 1802. Southey’s short stay in Dublin did nothing to change his views on Catholic countries. He wrote to Edith just before returning to London: “It will be difficult to civilize this people” (L&C 2: 169). Southey’s casual encounters with Catholicism in Portugal, Spain, and Ireland had not yet crystallized into a concerted attack on the Catholic Church or a coherent defense of Anglicanism. Madoc remained his major literary preoccupation until its publication in 1805. But as early as the summer of 1804, he was sketching out his plan for Letters from England, which he would work on for the next two years. He explained the project in a letter to Wynn in July 1804: The book would contain “all I know and much of what I think concerning this country and these times.” The fictitious chief character would be “an able man, bigoted to his religion, and willing to discover such faults and such symptoms of a declining power as may soothe the national inferiority, which he cannot but feel” (SL 1: 282). The religious bigot is unsurprisingly a Spanish Catholic. Southey’s three-volume Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella was published in 1807 and quickly reached a second edition. Like Montesquieu in Lettres Persanes (1721), Southey would comment on British politics and society through imaginary foreign eyes— and so combine amusement with anonymity. The British Critic quickly decided that “the pretended Don Manuel is no Spaniard, but some Englishman discontented with the institutions of his native country,” and guessed that Southey was the author. The tendency of the work, the British Critic reckons, is “to inflame vulgar prejudices against the principle on which Mr Pitt conducted the administration of the empire; to excite among the lower orders of society discontent with their lot, and indignant envy of comforts enjoyed by their superiors . . .” (31: 168). The imaginary Spaniard, Espriella, was supposedly in England from April 1802 to October 1803, during the Peace of Amiens. Contrasts between England and Spain—to England’s disadvantage—include the harshness of the death penalty for forgery (LE 1: 258), the oppressive noise and smoke of Birmingham (LE 2: 59–60), child labor in Manchester factories (LE 3: 81–6),and the disadvantages of England’s boasted freedom of the press. The last topic is soon confronted. Landing at Falmouth, Espriella and his equally fictitious traveling companion find themselves at Dorchester, where the Unitarian Gilbert Wakefield had been jailed for seditious writing. Espriella observes “how far more humane it was to prevent the publication of obnoxious books than to

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 22

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

23

permit them to be printed and then punish the persons concerned” (LE 1: 41). Wakefield was released in June 1801 and died of typhus three months later. The author’s oblique reference to the Vatican’s index of prohibited books shows that he is targeting the practice of Catholic countries, as well as that of his own. By the twelfth letter, Espriella is confronting the question of Catholic Emancipation and what he regards as the unexpected but “highly honourable” resignation of William Pitt and his fellow-ministers over the issue: They had held out the promise of emancipation to the Irish Catholics as a means of reconciling them to the Union. While the two countries were governed by separate legislatures, it was very possible, if the Catholics were admitted to their rights, that a majority in the Irish House might think proper to restore the old religion of the people, to which it is well known with what exemplary fidelity the majority of the Irish nation still adhere. But when once the representatives of both countries should be united in one parliament, no such consequence could be apprehended; for, though all the Irish members should be Catholics, they would still be a minority. (LE 1: 128)

Southey is here expressing the view held by Pitt, Castlereagh, and Cornwallis, but (as Espriella explains) they had not calculated on the opposition of the king, “whose zeal, as the Defender of the Faith, makes it greatly to be lamented that he has not a better faith to defend.” The king believes that his coronation oath binds him to allow “no innovation in favour of Popery, as these schismatics contemptuously call the religion of the Fathers and of the Apostles, and this scruple it was impossible to overcome” (LE 1: 129). Espriella has been assured “on such authority that I cannot entertain the slightest doubt,” that this is indeed the explanation of the ministerial resignations. He knows that this is a minority view, but thinks that the public’s unwillingness to believe the official version is due to “a settled opinion that statesmen always consider their own private interests in preference to everything else” (LE 1: 128–30). According to Espriella, the public expects Pitt and his former colleagues to return to power. Pitt was the only one of them openly to defend the Peace of Amiens, yet his return to office is, to Spanish eyes, “not very likely on account of the Catholic question, to which he is as strongly pledged as the Grenville party” (LE 1: 131–2). Meanwhile Southey’s own approval of the Addington ministry colors Espriella’s account: “The peace with France is regarded by the wiser persons with whom I have conversed as a trifling good, compared to the internal purification which Mr Addington has effected.” He immediately put an end to “suspicion, and alarm, and plots; and conspiracies were no

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 23

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

24

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

longer to be heard of, when spies were no longer paid for forming them” (LE 1: 133). But by the time Letters from England appeared in 1807, it was clear that Espriella’s prediction, that “from all that I can learn, Mr Addington is likely long to retain his situation,” had not been fulfilled (LE 1: 136). Espriella’s account of what he calls “the ceremonies of the English church”— or later “this heretical church”— contains more than a hint of truth, as some of his readers would recognize. Not for Anglican clergy were “thread-bare garments of religious poverty, eyes weakened by incessant tears of contrition, or of pious love, and cheeks withered by fasting and penitence.” Such austerities would hardly appeal to those congregations for whom the popular preacher of London curls his forelock, studies gestures at his looking-glass, takes lessons from some stage-player in his chamber, and displays his white hand and white handkerchief in the pulpit. The discourse is in character with the orator; nothing to rouse a slumbering conscience, nothing to alarm the soul at the sense of its danger, no difficulties expounded to confirm the wavering, no mighty truths enforced to rejoice the faithful . . . only a little smooth morality, such as Turk, Jew or Infidel may listen to without offence . . . (LE 1: 210–11).

Espriella concedes that not even in Spain are the clergy “exempt from the frailties of human nature.” But the Catholic Church has secured her clergy from the vanities of the world: “We may sometimes have to grieve, because the wolf has put on the shepherd’s cloak, but never can have need to blush at seeing the monkey in it” (LE 1: 211). The irreverence of the English shocks the Spanish traveler—not least their lack of reverence for Mary: “The most obscure saint in the calendar has more respect in Spain, than is shown here to the most holy Virgin! St Joseph is never mentioned, nor thought of; they scarcely seem to know that such a person ever existed.” No business is transacted on the saint’s day of the apostles, but there are no processions and nobody goes to church. “Holyday means nothing more here than a day of cessation from business, and a school-boy’s vacation. The very meaning of the word is forgotten” (LE 1: 217). Espriella is struck by how small a part religion seems to play in an Englishman’s life compared with his home country: “We cannot go abroad without seeing some representation of Purgatory, some cross which marks a station, an image of Mary the most pure or a crucifix—without meeting priest, or monk, or friar, a brotherhood busy in their work of charity, or the most holy Sacrament under its canopy borne to redeem and sanctify the dying sinner” (LE 1: 221). And, it seems, the English have as little

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 24

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

25

to do with religion in death, as in life: “No tapers are lighted, no altar prepared, no sacrifice performed, no confession made, no absolution given, no unction administered; the priest rarely attends; it is sufficient to have the doctor and the nurse by the sick-bed; so the body be attended, the soul may shift for itself” (LE 1: 223). There is an ambiguity of intention in Southey’s framing of Catholic criticism of the Established Church. He seems to enjoy wresting humor from his role as devil’s advocate. But one detects a more calculated pandering to Protestant prejudice when he describes the improving fortunes of English Catholics since the 1745 defeat of the Jacobites. Fortunately for the Catholics, Espriella notes, “as soon as they had ceased to be objects of suspicion the Presbyterians became so.” Even the 1780 Gordon Riots—“the work of the lowest rabble, led by a madman”— excited compassion for Catholics “in the more respectable part of the community.” As far as England was concerned, the French Revolution had markedly improved the situation of Catholics: The English clergy, trembling for their own benefices, welcomed the emigrant priests as brethren, and, forgetting all their former ravings about Antichrist, and Babylon, and the Scarlet Woman, lamented the downfall of religion in France. An outcry was raised against the more daring heretics at home, and the tide of popular fury let loose upon them. While this dread of atheism prevailed, the Catholic priests [Milner among them] obtained access every where; and the university of Oxford even supplied them with books from its own press. (LE 1: 326)

A side effect of the arrival of Catholic refugees from France was the reestablishment of the monastic orders in England— described by Espriella as “the most important advantage which has ever been obtained for the true religion since its subversion” (LE 1: 326–7). Just as the barbarians’ capture of Rome had led to their conversion, and the fall of Constantinople ignited the Renaissance, so too the persecution of Catholicism in France led to its establishment in England. According to this well-informed traveler, there were “five Catholic colleges in England and two in Scotland, besides twelve schools and academies for the instruction of boys.” There were also 11 schools for girls, apart from those run by nuns (LE 1: 328–9). Of the monastic orders, Espriella lists only the Carthusians, though he might also have mentioned the Benedictines from Douai, where Milner had been educated at the English College. Milner himself established a house for Belgian Benedictine nuns at Winchester, and had a neo-Gothic Catholic chapel built in the city in 1792. Espriella might well exclaim: “Who could have hoped to live to see these things in England?” (LE 1: 329).

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 25

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

26

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

In reviewing Letters from England, the British Critic thinks Espriella’s upbeat views of the revived fortunes of Catholicism in England are exactly what one would expect of a Spanish Catholic: “Even the exultation which escapes him, when speaking of what he calls the re-establishment of the monastic orders in England; the zeal of the French refugees, male and female, in making converts; the controversial arts of Bishop Milner; and the eagerness with which, he says, the daughters of Protestant parents profess in their English nunneries, was extremely natural under his assumed character” (BC 31: 174). And the guardians of the constitution in church and state ought to be grateful for the information thus disclosed. If one half of what is alleged of the refugees is true, the magistrates “will probably find means of shutting up the convents, without withdrawing from their inhabitants that protection which is due to their sufferings for what they believe to be the truth” (174). The Anti-Jacobin also seizes on Espriella’s account of what it calls “the artifices and zeal of the Papists to propagate their superstition,” and quotes the whole passage in which Espriella describes how the French Revolution helped the spread of Catholicism in England (AJR 34: 280–3). As the statistics cited by Espriella demonstrate, the refugee Catholic clergy, on arrival in England, had been warmly welcomed as victims of French Jacobinism. But as the war wore on, local friction increased, especially at Winchester, where by 1796 there were over a thousand Catholic refugees in a population of under 6,000. Huntingford, warden of Winchester College and future bishop successively of Gloucester and Hereford, was at first sympathetic to the émigré clergy, and supported Milner over the 1791 Catholic Relief Act. Yet in 1794, Huntingford, not yet on the episcopal bench, wrote to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) drawing attention to the risk of Catholic proselytizing. He promised £10 from college funds to finance distribution of antipopery tracts to parish clergy. Members of the Cathedral chapter wrote to the SPCK in a similar vein (Mather 105). In May 1800, a private member’s bill sought to subject convents to the Aliens Act, forbidding them to recruit novices, and requiring them to make annual returns of members, number of pupils taught, and addresses of pupils’ parents. During the debate in the House of Lords, Bishop Horsley (to whom Milner had again appealed) presented details of numbers, location, and nationality of the monastic institutions. He recorded six houses of monks, and 22 convents of nuns (of which 18 were English and only four were French), and he reminded their lordships that existing regulations, imposed on monastic schools by the 1791 Relief Act, offered sufficient remedy. What ensured the failure of the bill was the lord chancellor’s

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 26

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

27

indiscretion in reading a private letter relating to the conflict between Milner and Sturges— an action rightly described by Lord Hardwicke as a “highly disorderly” procedure (Mather 108–12). Southey promised Charles Wynn that his Letters from England would be “very amusing” and would “certainly excite attention and curiosity.” But it is evident that the author is also ringing alarm bells, and regretting the failure of the 1800 bill designed to rein in the monastic institutions. He is surely writing in his own character when he notes that most Catholic converts are among the poor, who are more susceptible than the rich “because their inheritance is not in this world, and they enjoy so little happiness here that they are more disposed to think seriously of assuring it hereafter” (LE 1: 329). He seems to be suggesting that the spread of Catholicism among the lower orders was as dangerous as working-class Jacobinism. But unlike “Jacobins,” Catholics also know that “there is no longer any danger in publishing Catholic writings.” As examples, Espriella mentions [Sir Thomas Philipps’s] life of Cardinal Pole (1764), “which exposes the enormities of Henry VIII, and the character of the wretched Anne Boleyn,” a history of Henry II, which “has vindicated the memory of the blessed Saint Thomas of Canterbury, who is so vilified by all English historians,” and Bishop Milner who, in his work on antiquities, “has ventured to defend those excellent prelates who attempted under Philip and Mary, to save their country from the abyss of heresy” (LE 1: 329–31). When Espriella and his traveling companion reach Oxford, there are similar echoes of the controversy provoked by Milner’s History and Antiquities of Winchester : “Our friend told us that Cranmer and Latimer were burnt before the gateway of this college [Balliol], in bloody Mary’s days, by which they always designate the sister of the bloody Elizabeth” (LE 2: 10). Amid all the humor, Southey is drawing the battle lines of his forthcoming paper-warfare with Milner. But for the moment, the pamphlet war is waged against the bloody background of the struggle against Napoleon. Addington had been replaced, in May 1804, by Pitt, whose second ministry was cut short by his final illness and death (1806). He was succeeded by the so-called “Ministry of all the Talents,” with Grenville as first lord of the treasury and Charles James Fox as foreign secretary. Fox and Grenville had agreed while in opposition that Catholic Emancipation was “absolutely necessary,” and Fox told Windham that he would not have remained in Parliament “if it had not been in consideration of the Catholic Question” (Mitchell 216). Fox had spoken in favor of the Catholic Relief Bill introduced into the Commons in May 1805, though neither he nor Grenville addressed the issue when they were in power. In March 1807, Milner expressed

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 27

8/22/2011 6:31:27 PM

28

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Catholic optimism in his dedication to William Windham of the second edition of the Case of Conscience Solved. But Fox himself had died, six months after Pitt and less than a year since attaining office. In 1807, Grenville resigned when George III forbade him to allow Catholics to serve as officers in the armed forces. Grenville’s resignation led to his replacement by Portland. And a general election, fought on a “No Popery” ticket, confirmed the Portland ministry in power. Southey approved of the change of government, writing to Grosvenor Bedford (another of his Westminster school friends) that he disapproved of Grenville’s proposal as its result would be that “every ship which had a Catholic Captain would have a Catholick chaplain, & in no very long time a Catholick crew; and so on in the army” (L&C 3: 86–9). The new ministry’s policy was wittily ridiculed by the Rev. Sydney Smith, cofounder of the Edinburgh Review. His Letters of Plymley, which had first appeared in the Edinburgh, were published in a single volume in 1807—the same year as Letters from England. Arguing that nothing is more important than the defeat of Napoleon, Smith pictures Spencer Perceval in the House of Commons as the captain of a frigate confronted by “a corsair of immense strength and size,” its own “rigging cut, masts in danger of coming by the board, four foot of water in the hold.” Instead of uniting his men by speaking of “King, country, glory, sweethearts, gin, French prison, wooden shoes, Old England, and hearts of oak,” he prefers a rigidly Protestant form of leadership: The first thing he does is to secure 20 or 30 of his prime sailors who happen to be Catholics, to clap them in irons, and set over them a guard of as many Protestants; having taken this admirable method of defending himself against his infidel opponents, he goes upon deck, reminds the sailors, in a very bitter harangue, that they are of different religions; exhorts the Episcopal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian quarter-master; issues positive orders that the Catholics should be fired at upon the first appearance of discontent; rushes through blood and brains, examining his men in the Catechism and 39 articles, and positively forbids every one to spunge or ram, who has not taken the Sacrament according to the Church of England. (Smith 38–40)

Smith’s argument is anchored in the wartime context, but there is also a principle at stake. He professes himself “as disgusted with the nonsense of Roman Catholic religion” as anyone. But what, Smith asks, “have I to do with the speculative nonsense of his theology, when the object is to elect the mayor of a county town or to appoint the colonel of a marching regiment?” (Smith 9–10)

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 28

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

29

Smith warns ministers of the folly of seeking to suppress the Catholic question: “If the wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be heard ere long in the madness of mobs and the conflicts of armed men” (Smith 63). More startlingly, Smith contrasts “our matchless stupidity and immutable folly” with the conduct of Bonaparte in the matter of religious persecution: “At the moment when we are tearing crucifixes from the necks of Catholics, and preposterously expressing hopes of their conversion; this man is assembling the very Jews at Paris, and endeavouring to give them stability and importance” (Smith 69). Recalling, as Charles Butler had done in his Letter to a Nobleman, that Catholics were not excluded from the Irish House of Commons, or from military commands, before the early years of William III and Mary, Smith cites the example of the union with Scotland: “The Scotch were suffered to worship God after their own tiresome manner, without pain, penalty, and privation,” whereas “in the six hundredth year of our empire over Ireland, we are making laws to transport a man, if he is found out of his house at eight o’clock at night.” Why, Smith asks, is this necessary? “It is not necessary in Greece, where the Turks are masters” (Smith 54–5). It was amid this increasingly strident public debate that in1808 Southey published the third edition of his Letters written during a journey and a short residence in Spain and Portugal. The two-volume travelogue was a revision of the one-volume 1797 edition, written and published soon after Southey’s return from his first stay in Lisbon. Spain had declared war on Britain in 1804, but it was the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon in early May 1808, and the replacement of the Spanish royal family by Joseph Bonaparte, that led to British intervention. In early August 1808, Sir John Moore’s expeditionary force landed in Portugal. Thus, the republication of Southey’s Letters from Spain and Portugal at this critical moment can be seen as either fortuitous or opportunist. The first volume focuses on Spain. By the fourth letter, he has reached the cathedral city of Lugo, where he finds the streets narrow, dirty, and dark. He records without comment that the sacrament is reserved and that “the wafer is always exposed,” purportedly because “the doctrine of the Real Presence was established in a Council which was held here” (LSP 1808 1: 60). He then attacks the Catholic sacrament of penance: “While we were in the cathedral, I observed a woman at confession. Much of the depravity of this people may be attributed to the nature of their religion; they confess their crimes, wipe off the old score by absolution, and set off with light hearts and clear consciences, to begin a

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 29

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

30

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

new one.” Southey notes that “it is urged, in favour of this practice, that weak minds may be saved by it from that despair of salvation, which makes them abandon themselves to the prospect of an eternity of wretchedness.” He considers it “a bad way to remedy one superstition by establishing another,” and that “this forgiving power vested in the church will, among the mob of mankind, destroy the motives to virtue, by eradicating all dread of the consequences of vice.” And adding a sentence that is not in the 1797 edition (LSP 1797: 45), he expresses his conviction that “the frequency of assassination in all Catholic countries is greatly to be attributed to the absolving power of the Church” (LSP 1808 1: 61–3). The assassination of a British prime minister occurred just four years later (see chapter 4). In the course of his travels, Southey encounters various reports of miracles. He recounts them, often without comment, but sometimes with sardonic humour. Noticing in his host’s house, a representation of the linen cloth in which Joseph of Aramathea wrapped Christ’s body, our poet records the belief that “through this Holy Knapkin, or Santo Sudario, every time a certain prayer is repeated, a soul is released from Purgatory by permission of Clement VIII.” Southey helpfully provides an English translation of the prayer, commenting: “If the Pope should be right, you will do good by reading it; if not, you may at least gratify your curiosity” (LSP 1: 92–4). He notes that in England a “red petticoat [i.e., cassock or soutane] only peeps through a covering of lawn; but here the Babylonian walks the street in full dress scarlet.” In England, he had been inclined to think “that the absurdities of Popery may have been exaggerated,” but here, borrowing Mary Wollstonecraft’s phrase, “the serious folly of Superstition stares every man in the face” (LSP 1: 95). He finds, at the entrance to a village, a tree, with two branches and “the misfortune to grow in the shape of a cross.” The top and limbs had been lopped off and “a face carved on it, similar to what I have seen boys cut upon a turnip; this done, it is an object of devotion” (LSP 1: 95–6). He nevertheless concedes that “Europe has been in the highest degree benefited by the Benedictines,” and he provides a largely sympathetic account of Spanish monasteries organized according to a ninth-century rule adapted from the Benedictine blueprint (LSP 1: 110–16). Yet there had evidently been a fall from such high ideals. “In Spain, society is not improved,” Southey decides. At Astorga, where a new convent was being built by the ruins of the castle, he sees families “actually living in holes dug in the castle walls” (LSP 1: 132). Southey is not impressed by the moral tone of Madrid: “A woman of rank, during the absence of her husband, has been living at the hotel

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 30

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

31

with another man! And yet she is received into every company. I ought to add that she is not a Spaniard; but in England, adultery meets with the infamy it deserves” (LSP 1: 179). Southey does not, however, censure St. Isidoro, the patron saint of Madrid, “who is indebted for his apotheosis to the fables which others have invented for him, not to any roguery of his own” (LSP 1: 189). Paul V had beatified Isidoro “at the King of Spain’s intreaty,” and his beatification was celebrated with splendor: “The Church of St Andrea was hung with the richest tapestries from the Palace, and the body placed in the midst upon the triumphal car in which he had been carried in procession. It was in a silver shrine, the offering of the silversmiths” (1: 189–90). The occasion was enlivened by a poetry competition. Southey adds that “two of St Isidoro’s miracles amused me in prose, and perhaps they may amuse you in rhyme” 1: 190). Arriving at Talavera, soon to give its name to a battle in the Peninsular War, Southey notes that it is the only provincial town, except Coruña, “where I have seen a bookshop” (LSP 1: 219). Soon after the beginning of his second volume, Southey is back in Portugal— at Aldea Galega, across the estuary from Lisbon. On the way he had met a romeria (or procession of pilgrims). Such pilgrimages, Southey says, take place to give thanks in church to the Virgin or the appropriate saint, for recovery from illness. The more distant the church, the more meritorious is the pilgrimage. He explains: All their neighbours who are bigotted or idle enough to accompany them join the procession, and they collect the rabble from every village that they pass; for the expences of the whole train are paid by the person who makes the vow . . .. Whenever they approached a town or village, they announced their arrival by letting off rockets. Bag-pipes and drums preceded them, and men and women, half undressed, danced before them along the road. Most of the men were drunk, and many of the women had brought little infants upon this absurd and licentious expedition. (LSP 2: 44–5)

In Lisbon, Southey is sickened by the obtrusive medical condition of many of the beggars—“some huge tumour, some misshapen member, or uncovered wound, carefully exposed to the public eye.” Such beggars, he thinks, should not be allowed to “mangle the feelings and insult the decency of the passengers: if they will not accept the relief of the hospital, they should be compelled to endure the restraint of the prison.” He is more sympathetic toward “the multitudes of beggars who weary you at every corner with supplications for the love of God and the Virgin.” The indignant feelings aroused are directed “not against them, but against that mistaken system of society which disinherits of happiness so

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 31

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

32

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

large a proportion of the civilized world” (LSP 2: 81).. Southey predictably sees a link between poverty and superstition: “When the image of the Virgin Mary is carried through the streets, some of the devout think they catch her eyes and exclaim in rapture, ‘Oh! she looked at me!—the Blessed Virgin looked at me!’” (2: 84). Southey traces the persecution of the Jews by the Catholic monarchs of Spain and Portugal. He would return to this topic in his 1811 Quarterly Review article on the Inquisition (see chapter 3). In Letters from Spain and Portugal he tells us: “Till within the last fifty years, the burning of a Jew formed the highest delight of the Portugueze: they thronged to behold this triumph of their faith, and the very women shouted in transport as they saw the agonizing martyr writhe at the stake. Neither sex nor age could mitigate this persecution, “and Antonio Joseph da Silvo, the best of their dramatic writers, was burnt alive because he was a Jew” (LSP 2: 112–15). Southey professes himself unchristian enough to wish that the Portuguese nation was “converted to the Jewish faith, or at least to the Jewish ceremonies, for a reason which may be found in the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy at the thirteenth verse” (LSP 2: 116). (The verse gives instructions on camp hygiene regarding where to defecate.) The queen of Portugal, at her accession, had promised never to use the death penalty. According to Southey, she stuck to that policy “till the Almada church was robbed and the host scattered about, and trampled under foot.” The court went into mourning for nine days, and the thieves, when caught, were executed for sacrilege. Southey recounts a similar robbery at a Lisbon church: “The wafers were missing: of course the town was in uproar, and the court in mourning. During this period of public calamity, a priest, passing by a drove of oxen in one of the public streets, saw the foremost beast fall upon his knees. He leaped forward, and stooping to the ground, produced a wafer clean and immaculate, though the streets were dirty.” A miracle was declared, and suitably celebrated. According to Southey, “The priest and the driver were pensioned for this fortunate miracle; and even the oxen purchased, and turned out to be pastured for life at the public expense” (LSP 2: 148). The new convent for what he calls Franciscan nuns is described variously as “the most splendid monument to the queen’s devotion” and as “this noble, but useless fabric” (LSP 2: 148–9).The paintings are by Pompeio Battoni, commissioned to paint an altarpiece on the subject of Christ’s heart: The heart is in the heavens, emitting splendour; where likewise are the Pope and the cardinal virtues. Below are Europe, Asia, Africa, and

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 32

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

33

America, adoring the heart. The figure of Europe is that of a female loosely dressed, on a horse, whose hinder parts are foremost on the canvass. A Portugueze remarked, that it was very wrong to place such an altar-piece there, and make people kneel to a half-naked woman, and the rump of a horse. (2: 150–1)

Here too, the convent’s sanitation left much to be desired. His readers would “scarcely believe that the drain from the new convent opens into the middle of one of the public streets” 2: 151). Southey is soon prompted by a visit to another convent to write a poem of more than 50 lines—“Musings on the Convent of Arrabida”: Almost ye dwellers in this holy house! Almost I envy you! you never hear The groans of wretchedness; you never see Pale hunger’s asking eye, nor roam around Those huge and hateful sepulchres of men, Where WEALTH and POWER have rear’d their palaces, And VICE with horrible contagion taints The herd of human-kind.

But, like the mariner, who continues to weather storms and “many a whirlwind o’er the reeling mast,” and is reluctant to “quit yonder deep / And rather float upon some tranquil sea, / Whose moveless waters never feel the gale, / In safe stagnation,” the poet prefers independence— even at the cost of turbulence (LSP 2: 178–9). Southey soon reveals his deep-rooted hostility to monasticism and its institutions. The disparaging reference to monks and monasteries in Letter XVI of the 1797 edition (271) is omitted. But, having experienced what he dismissively calls “all the mummery of a Roman Catholic Lent” (LSP 1808, 2: 180), he expresses the hope that a community of English nuns of the order of St. Bridget, with its allegedly miraculous crucifix, will no longer be supplied from England “with victims to this wretched superstition,” and that “our country will not be long be disgraced by the institution.” While drinking tea with the nuns at the visitors’ grating, he hears an account of their day—“a melancholy round of prayer and silence, undiversified by one solitary pleasure.” He leaves the convent “fully convinced that a nun is as miserable in herself as she is useless to society” (LSP 2: 183–5). Southey’s skepticism seems to be unmitigated by any belief in the power of prayer. If he finds the nuns miserable, the friars are ignorant and the monks fraudulent, as he seeks to demonstrate by recounting various illustrative anecdotes.

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 33

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

34

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

He does not always distinguish too carefully between monks and friars, but it is the friars he is targeting when he writes: It is the duty of every man who believes his opinions necessary to the happiness of mankind, to disseminate those opinions by all fair means; if the friars therefore would attempt to convert me, I should respect their zeal though they pestered me with their absurdity; but they tempt in the day of poverty, they terrify on the bed of sickness, they persecute in the hour of death; and if they find a man senseless in his last agonies, they place a candle in his hand, and smuggle him under false colours into the kingdom of heaven. (LSP 2: 189)

Southey’s second volume of the 1808 edition of Letters from Spain and Portugal ends with an appendix of some 60 pages entitled “On the State of Portugal,” abridged from a manuscript paper allegedly written by Don Luis de Cunha, formerly (according to Southey) “Ambassador of the Court of London and at the Hague, and one of the Plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Utrecht” (LSP 2: 235–300). Southey’s own complaint against the “uselessness” of the contemplative life of monks and nuns is here reinforced by a Portuguese diplomat who might be presumed to express an authoritative view: “The principal, most excessive, and constant bleeding that Portugal suffers, is by the great number of convents of all orders, of monks and nuns established over all the provinces, and in all the towns of this kingdom, multiplying the mouths that eat, but not the hands that labour . . .” (LSP 2: 241). According to the former ambassador, this flight to the cloister is increased by “the natural indolence of the Portugueze” who find that, by becoming monks, nuns, or friars, “they can procure food by their profession without the trouble of labouring for it” (LSP 2: 241–2). The founding of convents in the Portuguese colonies of Brazil reduces the number of potential brides, while unmarried daughters, sent back to more fashionable convents in Lisbon, make matters worse (LSP 2: 245–6). Similar arguments, expressed with greater vehemence, appear in the Book of the Church and in Southey’s Quarterly Review articles. The 1808 edition of Letters from Spain and Portugal was largely based on the 1797 edition, though there were numerous omissions and additions. During the second stay in Lisbon, this time with Edith, Southey made two excursions from the city, one to the University of Coimbra, and the other down through the Algarve to the Spanish border (L&C 2: 50). His son, Cuthbert, when editing his father’s correspondence, found some “fragmentary preparations” for a second volume of the Letters. Southey certainly kept a journal during that second

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 34

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

35

visit. It was later edited by Adolfo Cabral, and published in 1960 as Journal of a Residence in Portugal, 1800–1801 and a Visit to France in 1838. Tim Fulford has quoted from it with considerable effect to show that “Portugal confirmed Southey in a belief in Englishmen’s superiority to the Irish, as well as to ‘Negroes,’ Indians, Tibetans and the Portuguese themselves” (Fulford 1998: 49). Southey would later liken the ascetic “extravagancies” of Egypt’s first Christian hermits to oriental fanaticism: “From the account which has been transmitted of these, they appear to have very much resembled the Yoguees of Hindostan” (QR 22: 62–3). And in the Book of the Church (1: 305), he asserts that monastic ascetic practices “not less extravagant than those of the Indian Yoguees & more loathsome, were regarded as indications of sanctity.” What linked the African, Indian, and Tibetan with the Irish and Portuguese, in Southey’s eyes, was their fanatical addiction to superstitious practices. Fulford instances what Southey called “bonfires of superstition” that were used to illuminate a procession, adding that he “could not help thinking how much finer a sight the spectators would have though it, if there had been a Jew or a Socinian in every barrel” (Fulford 1998: 48). Soon after arriving back at Lisbon in May 1800, Southey had written to his brother, Tom: “Religion is kept alive by these images, &c., like a fire perpetually supplied with fuel. They have a saint for everything.” And he added: “It is a fine religion for an enthusiast—for one who can let his feelings remain awake, and opiate his reason” (L&C 2: 72). Southey’s distrust of “enthusiasm” (in the eighteenth-century sense) made him critical of Catholicism and Methodism alike (see chapter 4). Southey contributed to the first issue of the Quarterly Review, founded in the second half of 1808, and provided perhaps ten more articles in the next three years. It would be 1811 before he embarked on his series of anti-Catholic reviews in the Quarterly Review, but it was in 1808 that John Milner (since 1803 bishop of Castabala and vicar apostolic to the Midland district of England) reentered the fray. Apart from a second edition of his Case of Conscience Solved and a fourth edition of Letters to a Prebendary (both appearing in 1807), he now printed Examination of the Article in the Antijacobin (1808). The pamphlet defended remarks made by Milner’s Anglican friend Sir John Hippisley. The full title of Hippisley’s Additional Observations (1806) indicates that it is the text of a speech he had intended to make in the Commons debate on the Irish Catholic petition in May 1805. The importance accorded by the Antijacobin Review to Hippisley’s undelivered speech (28: 267–92; 29: 23–43, 125–38, 224–38) is all the more striking as the printed pamphlet was not published, but was

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 35

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

36

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

circulated “not only to individuals but to some public libraries.” The Antijacobin announced that Hippisley’s pamphlet supported “the policy and expediency” of allowing Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament. The tone of the review is reflected in its claim that Hippisley’s arguments were “sophistical and fallacious,” and betrayed “a radical ignorance of the baneful doctrines of the Romish Church.” The reviewer considers that “history and experience should be the only guide to statesmen,” and that Irish history proves that Catholics “uniformly manifested a determination to subvert the constitution, to persecute their Protestant fellow subjects, and to separate their native country from England, with the aid of foreign enemies” (AJR 28: 267–9). In January 1808, the Antijacobin complains that, in his defense of Hippisley, Milner goes farther than Musgrave’s prime adversary, Francis Plowden or John Thomas Troy, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin (both of whom insisted that only ex cathedra pronouncements were infallible) by maintaining “the infallibility without the aid of the Cathedra.” Milner’s own words in Ecclesiastical Democracy (1793) are quoted as proof: “I was educated in the belief of the Pope’s inerrancy, nor have I yet seen sufficient arguments to change my opinion. No greater danger can result to the state from admitting the inerrancy of the Pope than from admitting the inerrancy of the church itself; and not a hundredth part so much as from allowing each individual to erect a little tribunal of infallible authority in his own breast for deciding on the sense of Scripture” (29: 42). The reference to scripture implies that Milner claims papal “inerrancy” only on questions of faith and morals. He responded swiftly to the Antijacobin’s attack. His Examination of the Article was printed on April 12, 1808, but (like Hippisley’s pamphlet) had been circulated rather than published. Milner already had Musgrave in his sights, devoting a chapter to Sir Richard’s Rebellions in his own Inquiry into Certain Vulgar Opinions (1808). Milner may have thought that Musgrave was the author of the Antijacobin’s review articles on Hippisley of 1807–8, though Musgrave’s biographer cannot find any evidence of his authorship (Kelly 192–3). There are seven explicit footnote references to Musgrave; much of the material seems to be drawn from Musgrave, while the reviewer’s phrase, “the mildest laws in the universe,” seems to echo Musgrave’s “the mildest government in the universe”— a phrase singled out by the Critical Review’s reviewer five years before (CR 36: 188). Whoever the Antijacobin reviewer of Hippisley’s undelivered speech was, the reviewer of Milner’s Examination was Musgrave himself. He first targets Milner’s insistence on Catholic loyalty to Elizabeth. In a waspish footnote, Sir Richard observes that Milner

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 36

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

L isbon, M a dr id, Dubl in

37

“declares excommunicating the Queen, pronouncing her deposed, absolving her subjects from their allegiance, and invoking them to rise in arms against her, a civil concern” (AJR 31: 369n). Milner, in his Examination, accused the Antijacobin of trying to open up “the old spiked battery of the general councils, in order to prove against him that catholics are bound by their religion to murder all Christians of a different belief from themselves” (Milner 8). Musgrave in turn censures Milner for seeming to defend what he had called in 1795 “the crusades against the infamous Albigenses,” and now (in his attack on the Antijacobin) calls “those rebels and murderers, guilty not only of the most open violence and insurrection, but of the secret infamies ascribed to them” (AJR 31: 385, 386). Musgrave’s review attacks other earlier works by Milner. Thus, his History of Winchester (1798 and 1801) is “the vehicle of an apology for popery, and a satire on the reformation, especially the established church.” His Ecclesiastical democracy detected (1793) “maintains and defends the papal infallibility in the most unqualified manner,” while his recent Tour through Ireland (1808) “is one of the most virulent libels that ever was written, with impunity, against the government and the established religion of a civilized state, by one of its own subjects” (AJR 31: 390–2). Milner’s defense of the loyalty of Irish Catholics is derided, though he is surely right in saying that the Scots and English were already “up in arms for the destruction of the king and constitution” before the civil war began in 1642 (Ecclesiastical Democracy 48). Musgrave similarly ridicules the assurance given to Pitt by the European universities (cited by both Hippisley and Milner) that “the claim of the Pope to temporal honour, the power to absolve from oaths given to an heretical government and the extirpation of heretics were not tenets of the Romish church” (AJR 31: 396). The Antijacobin is satisfied that it has disproved the universities’ verdict, and the reviewer’s concluding comment on Milner’s Examination is the satirical hope that his “friend and disciple,” Hippisley, will be rewarded with the honour of sainthood “for the zeal which he has manifested in the service of the Doctor of all Christians, the true Vicar of Christ, and the Vicar of God upon earth ” (AJR 31: 397). This was not quite the Antijacobin’s last word. In its April 1809 issue, a correspondent opened with these flippant but virulent words: It is said, that some weeks previous to his departure for Ireland, Dr M. was seen at Billingsgate listening attentively to the instructive and highly entertaining discourse of the nymphs who inhabit that region. Now . . . some persons gravely suppose that the Dr. lent an ear to the

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 37

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

38

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n pugilistic females of Billingsgate, for the express purpose of deriving a few elegant tropes, metaphors and sturdy epithets, from their impassioned eloquence. (AJR 32: 445)

The correspondent claims that Dr. Milner needs no instruction in “Billingsgate eloquence,” but notes that his Tour of Ireland, published soon after his visit to the fish market, “exceeds all his former works in his favourite virulence and coarse invective, and malignity of writing, of which he is so passionately enamoured” (446). The Antijacobin’s correspondent actually suggests that Ireland’s “national beverage of whiskey may, for aught we know, have infuriated his mind,” since the liquor has produced “much more serious effects, than giving a vertigo to an Popish Bishop.” For “whiskey, next to popery, is said to have been the most serious cause of the Irish rebellion.” But perhaps (he continues) “such paroxysms of fury in a Popish prelate” can rather be ascribed to the fact that “Sir R. Musgrave happens to have spoken the truth in a History of the Irish Rebellion . . . . ” (447). The abusive correspondent was allowed to continue his diatribe in the July issue (33: 325–8). By directing the searchlight on Bishop Milner and Sir John Hippisley from November 1807 to July 1809, the Antijacobin Review played its own part in raising the temperature of debate. And in 1809, Milner republished his History of Winchester. It would reach an eleventh edition by 1851. When in his Quarterly Review article of 1811 Southey came to pronounce on the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, the tone of controversy had markedly sharpened. In 1808, when the third edition of Letters from Spain and Portugal appeared, the Portland ministry, elected on a “No Popery” ticket, was still in power, and warmly supported by the Antijaccobin Review and the British Critic. Although in mid-1809, Spencer Perceval (whom Southey admired) headed a new ministry, the anti-Catholic ministerial line did not change, though Perceval expressed it in more moderate terms. Meanwhile the outcome of the Peninsular War remained uncertain, and, ironically the survival of traditional Catholicism in the peninsula might depend on Protestant Britain defeating Napoleon. The year 1809 began badly with the death of Sir John Moore at Coruña on January 16. In April, Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, took command in Portugal, but it would be two years before the first British victories at Fuentes d’Oñoro and Albuera were won. Not until April 1812 would Wellesley enter Madrid and prepare for a summer invasion of France.

9780230115132_03_ch02.indd 38

8/22/2011 6:31:28 PM

3

Poe t a s Jou r na l ist: Da i l i e s, Mon t h l i e s, Q ua r t e r l i e s

Both Southey and Coleridge had their early verses published in the

newspapers (Magnuson 41–2). Southey later told Henry Taylor that in 1798 Daniel Stuart offered him “a guinea a week to supply verses for the Morning Post ” (Speck 71). In November 1797, Coleridge had agreed with Stuart to provide “verses or political essays” on a regular basis and at a similar “pittance” of a guinea (CL 1: 360). At the beginning of the third volume of Letters from England, Southey, speaking through the fictitious Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, complains of government-controlled daily newspapers “in which all their measures are defended, their successes exaggerated, their disasters concealed or palliated, and the most flattering prospects constantly held out to the people” (LE 3: 25). Espriella reckons that, if the ministerial wartime estimates of Frenchmen killed were added together, “they would be found equal to all the males in the country capable of bearing arms” (LE 3: 25–6). It was to counter such propagandist reports that, a decade earlier, Coleridge launched his own shortlived weekly journal, the Watchman. Running from March to May 1796, it evaded the 1795 Gagging Acts by reprinting (without comment) articles and news items already published elsewhere— and adding editorial emphasis by a liberal use of italics and exclamation marks. The Watchman was distributed largely through the Unitarian network (Andrews 2003: 116–17). In the late1790s, Southey had relied on the Unitarian editor, Richard Phillips, when contributing translations of Spanish and Portuguese poetry to the Monthly Magazine. And it was Arthur Aikin, the Unitarian editor of the Annual Review,

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 39

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

40

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

who enlisted Southey as a reviewer in the new journal’s first issue of 1803. Southey’s opening review was of Periodical accounts relative to the Baptist Missionary Society for propagating the gospel among the heathen. Kenneth Curry’s analysis in the Bulletin of Bibliography (16: 195–7) records no fewer than 33 titles reviewed by Southey in the Annual Review’s second issue. Not surprisingly, Southey found so much reviewing sheer drudgery, and a great contrast to his eight months as secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer for Ireland, which (according to his son, Cuthbert) had “afforded him a large share of time for his literary pursuits” (L&C 2: 181). As he wrote to his naval brother, Tom, in October 1803: “My reviewing, more than ordinarily procrastinated, stands still. I began Clarke’s book, and having vented my gall there, laid the others all by till the first of November that I might be free till then for a work more agreeable. My main work has been Madoc” (L&C 2: 229–31). J. S. Clarke, whose Progress of maritime discovery Southey savaged, nevertheless became historiographer royal— an appointment that Southey himself coveted. Madoc was not the only “agreeable” work that Southey needed time for. In January 1803, he was writing to John Rickman about the books he still needed for his projected history of monasticism: “I have thirteen folios of Franciscan history in the house, and yet want the main one, Wadding’s Seraphic Annual, which contains the original bulls.” But meanwhile his Annual Review commitments require “that I must lay aside old chronicles and review modern poems; instead of composing from a full head, that I must write like a school-boy upon some idle theme on which nothing can be said or ought to be said” (L&C 2: 200). Six months later, he told Coleridge about his proposed seven-volume Bibliotheca Britannica, for which he had just concluded a contract with Longman. Southey envisaged that, after three volumes devoted to English poetry and prose, the fourth volume would take up “the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy, common, canon and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry VII,” besides “a grand article on the philosophy of the theology of the Roman Catholic religion.” The remaining three volumes would encompass post-Reformation theology—“the spirit of the theology of all the other parts of Christianity”—together with “all the articles you can get, on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation” (L& C 2: 217–19). Perhaps it was just as well that Longman abandoned the project because of what Southey, in a letter to Grosvenor Bedford on November 10, called “the universal panic that followed the return of

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 40

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

41

the country to a war footing” (L&C 2: 220–1). As he told Grosvenor Bedford in the same letter, he had “plans enough without it.” A week later, he was reporting to Rickman on the progress of his History of Portugal (L&C 2: 236). And before 1803 was out, he was asking Rickman: “Can you get for me the evidence on the Slave Trade as printed for the House of Commons? I want to collect all the materials for speculating upon the negroes” (L& C 2: 243). By January 20, 1804, Southey could report to Rickman that “1200 of the Annual Review have sold of 2000 that were printed, and demand continues unabated.” He notes that Aikin is “in high spirits at its success,” and adds (with some satisfaction) that “William Taylor and I constitute his main strength.” But his letter continues in a less positive vein: “This vile reviewing still birdlimes me; I do it slower than any thing else—yawning over tiresome work; and parcel comes down after parcel, so that I have twice whooped before I was out of the wood. Yesterday Malthus received, I trust, a mortal wound from my hand; to-day I am at the Asiatic Researches, Godwin’s Life of Chaucer is on the road to me . . .” (L&C 2: 250–1). A few weeks later Southey invites his brother, Tom, to picture his studious regime: “Imagine me in this great study of mine from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, and from tea till supper, in my old black coat, my corduroys alternately with the long worsted pantaloons and gaiters in one, and the green shade, and sitting at my desk, and you have my picture and my history” (L&C 2: 262). He soon writes to Coleridge: “Talk of the happiness of getting a prize in the lottery! What is that to opening a box of books?” (L& C 2: 272). He was presumably not thinking of books sent for review, but of the histories he mentioned to Rickman later that month: I have more in hand than Buonaparte or Marquis Wellesley— digesting Gothic law, gleaning moral history from monkish legends, and conquering India, or rather Asia, with Alboquerque; filling up the chinks of the day by hunting in Jesuit Chronicles, and compiling Collectanea Hispanica et Gothica. Meanwhile Madoc sleeps, and my lucre of gain [Specimens of the Later English Poets, finally published in 1807] goes on at night, when I am fairly obliged to lay history aside, because it perplexes me in my dreams. (L&C 2: 280)

He wrote to brother Tom at the end of June 1804, when Madoc was finally with the Edinburgh publishers, the Ballantyne brothers: “Reviewing is coming round again; I have a parcel upon the road, and groan in spirit at the prospect.” He added that he had contributed one-sixth of the second volume of the Annual Review (L& C

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 41

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

42

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

2: 297). Yet before the end of the year, Southey was offering to edit the works of Sir Philip Sidney for Longman: “It would make three octavo volumes” (L& C 2: 306). He begins the new year by admitting to Grosvenor Bedford that “the great use of reviewing is, that it obliges me to think upon subjects on which I had before been content to have very vague opinions” (L&C 2: 312–13). And, writing in May to the same correspondent, and referring to his 30-odd contributions to the Annual Review, Southey decides that his reviews reflect “more of the tone and temper of my mind than you can otherwise get at” (L& C 3: 42). This would certainly be true of his later reviewing for the Quarterly Review from 1809 onwards, which would prove more lucrative than much of his other writing. But already, in his Annual Review article on Hannah More’s Hints towards forming the character of a young Princess (1805), Southey insists that “the British sovereign must be of the Church of England, as it was in the days of our fathers, and as it is now, not as it would be if re-modelled by the Evangelicals!” (AR 3: 709). Those words are a reminder that Southey was concerned with the Evangelical Anglicans within the Established Church, as well as Methodists and Unitarians outside it. It also underlines his conviction that his attack on the Catholics was a defense of the constitutional, political, and social necessity of the Church of England. This did not prevent him from complaining to Rickman in March 1805 of the damage done to literature by the destruction of the monastic orders at the Reformation: “We laugh at the ignorance of these orders, but the most worthless of them produced more works of erudition than all the English and all the Scotch universities since the Reformation; and it is my belief that a man will at this day find better society in a Benedictine monastery than he could at Cambridge; certainly better than he could at Oxford” (L&C 2: 319–20). But perhaps the most striking letter was written to the MP, Charles Wynn, in the spring of 1805. Suggesting that a Catholic establishment would be “the best, perhaps the only, means of civilizing Ireland,” he explains: Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not enlighten the savages, would humanise them, and bring the country into cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly we are Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for us, and for you too,— such a petition I could support, considering what the present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been governed, and how hopeless the prospect is. (L& C 2: 322)

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 42

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

43

When editing his father’s letters, Cuthbert Southey decided to add a disclaimer: “In later life my father held very different opinions, respecting the effect likely to be produced by the establishment of Popery in Ireland. Increased knowledge of the past history of that country, and of its present condition, dispossessed him altogether of the idea that the Roman Catholic Church, set up in her full power, would be the most effective means of civilising and humanising the people” (L&C 325–6). Cuthbert Southey supports this claim with quotations from Colloquies, where his father argued that had the Catholic priests “exerted themselves for improving the condition of the people, with half the zeal that they display in keeping up an inflammatory excitement among them, the state of Ireland would have been very unlike what it now is.” They might indeed “have wrought as great a change in Ireland as the Jesuits effected among the tribes of Paraguay and California” (Colloquies 1:289). Southey continued to contribute to the Annual Review, but not so prominently. In December 1807, Walter Scott tried to recruit him to the Edinburgh Review. Apart from resenting Jeffrey’s disobliging reviews of Thalaba and Madoc (ER 1: 63–93 and 7: 1–28), Southey saw more substantial grounds for declining the invitation. As he wrote to Scott: “I have scarcely one opinion in common with it on any subject. Jeffrey is for peace, and is endeavouring to frighten the people into it: I am for war as long as Bonaparte lives. He is for Catholic Emancipation: I believe that its immediate consequence would be to introduce an Irish priest into every ship in the navy.” Southey admitted that no one was “more apt to speak in the very gall of bitterness than I am, and this habit is likely to go with me to the grave.” But Jeffrey’s brand of bitterness “which tends directly to wound a man in his feelings, and injure him in his fame and fortune,” is (Southey thinks) “utterly inexcusable” (L&C 3: 124–5). One detects echoes of Espriella’s observations in Letters from England, published earlier that year, that no reliance could be placed on the opinions of the monthly reviews, “because their party spirit now extends to every thing.” Whatever the subject of a book, “it is judged of according to the politics of the author.” Espriella also notes that many, if not most, of the critics are themselves authors who are not very highly regarded by the public: “Baboons are said to have an antipathy to men; and these, who are the baboons of literature, have the same sort of hatred to those whose superiority they at once feel and deny.” Few of the journals’ readers will remember that “when they are perusing a criticism delivered in the plural language of authority, that it is but the opinion of one man upon the work of another”

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 43

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

44

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

(LE 3: 33–5). Southey had experienced the genre as wounder as well as wounded, having written not only for the Annual Review and the Monthly Magazine, but also for the Critical Review (1798–1803) and the Athenæum (1807–9). In early November 1808, only weeks before Southey was signed up by the Quarterly Review, Coleridge issued a prospectus for a new periodical of his own, sending Jeffrey “a small parcel of prospectuses” (CL 3: 26). Presenting The Friend, A Weekly Essay, Coleridge’s prospectus was described as “extracted from a letter to a correspondent.” This fiction, Coleridge explains to Stuart, at the end of December, was intended “in some measure to cover the indelicacy of speaking of myself to Strangers and the Public” (CL 3: 151). The periodical would incorporate “Incidents and Observations” copied at random over the years into his “Memorandum or Common-place book.” He was conscious that in upholding “Principles both of Taste and Philosophy, adopted by the great Men of Europe from the Middle of the fifteenth till toward the Close of the seventeenth Century, I must run Counter to the Prejudices of many of my readers ( for old Faith is often modern Heresy). I perceived too in a periodical Essay the most likely way of winning, instead of forcing my Way” (CW 4 pt 2: 17). The list of proposed topics was preceded by a statement of the aim of the new periodical “to uphold those Truths and those Merits, which are founded in the nobler and permanent Parts of our Nature, against the Caprices of Fashion, and such Pleasures, as either depend on transitory and accidental Causes, or are pursued from less worthy Impulses” (CW 4 pt 2: 18). Southey, who saw an early copy of the prospectus, told Rickman that it looked “too much like it intends to be, talks confidently to the public about what the public cares not a curse for” (L&C 3: 210). Yet Southey did solicit subscriptions (Curry Southey 64). By October 1809, when the tenth issue of the Friend appeared, Coleridge had come to the same conclusion. He admitted to Southey that “the plan and execution of The Friend is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to preclude all rational hopes of its success.” He would do his best to lighten its weight: he would “frequently interpose tales and whole numbers of amusement,” and would make the sentences shorter. Yet he could not help feeling that the readership did not exist: “The obstinate, and now contemptuous, aversion to all energy of thinking is the mother evil, the cause of all the evils in politics, morals, and literature, which it is my object to wage war against; so that I am like a physician who for a patient paralytic in both arms, prescribes, as the only possible cure, the use of dumb-bells” (L&C 3: 259–60).

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 44

8/22/2011 6:31:32 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

45

Southey’s undated response was ambiguous. Cast in a formal style, addressed “To The Friend” and beginning, “Sir,” it was certainly forthright: “I know not whether your subscribers have expected too much from you, but it appears to me that you expect too much from your subscribers; and that, however accurately you may understand the diseases of the age, you have certainly mistaken the temper.” Moral medicine must be proffered in more acceptable form: “The Reverend J. Gentle administers his physic in the form of tea; Dr Solomon prefers the medium of a cordial; Mr Ching exhibits his in gingerbread nuts; Dr Barton in wine; but you, Mr Friend, come with a tonic bolus, bitter in the mouth, difficult to swallow, and hard of digestion.” Southey, in a postscript, does write in less formal vein, explaining that “from jest I got into earnest, and, trying to pass from earnest to jest failed.” He had just re-read the first eight issues of the Friend, and “the truth is, they left me no heart for jesting or for irony.” More consolingly, he added that, in time, the journal would do its work; it was “the form of publication only that is unlucky, and that cannot now be remedied.” Southey did add that “scarcely anything” would attract as much notice as a “character” of Bonaparte, which “would do good by counteracting that base spirit of condescension towards him, which I am afraid is gaining ground; and by showing the people what grounds they have for hope” (L& C 3: 261–5). It does not seem that Coleridge took Southey’s advice. Some of the later issues did contain poems by Wordsworth, and some by Coleridge himself. He did announce “a detailed analysis of the Character of BUONAPARTE, promised by the Author so long ago in the Morning Post, as a Companion to the Character of Mr Pitt,” to appear in “the twenty-eighth or perhaps thirtieth Number” (CW 4 pt 2: 283). But the nearest he got to a “character” of Napoleon is an article addressing the question of whether we could be “affirmed to have renewed the war for Malta alone” (CW 4 pt 2: 303–8). The Friend never did reach its twenty-eighth issue, expiring with no. 27 (February 8, 1810). The issues of the Friend offer few clues to Coleridge’s reaction at meeting Mediterranean Catholicism at first hand, during the two years he spent working in Malta and vacationing in Sicily. Arriving at Valetta in May 1804, he was initially appointed private secretary to Alexander Ball, British high commissioner. In January 1805 he became acting public secretary of the colony, newly captured from the French and originally ruled by the Knights Hospitaller. The incongruity of finding himself in so responsible a public post, even though he would hold it only until the designated successor returned

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 45

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

46

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

to Malta, was described in a letter to his wife, Sara, as being “like a mouse in a Cathedral on a Fair or Market Day” (CL 2: 1170). Unlike Southey’s Dublin appointment, the post of public secretary was no sinecure, as is shown in a recent study of the laws and public notices drafted by Coleridge (Hough and Davis chapters 4–6). After Ball’s death in October 1809, Coleridge wrote four biographical essays on Sir Alexander that were published in the Friend (nos. 21, 22, 26, 27) and that reveal his admiration for the governor. In the last of these (March 1810), which was also the final issue, Coleridge describes the “reverential gestures and shouts of triumphs” that greeted the governor when he appeared in public. Coleridge goes on to compare “the religious Processions in honour of the favourite Saints, both at Valetta and at Messina or Palermo,” where the onlooker cannot fail to be struck with the contrast between the apparent apathy, or least the perfect sobriety, of the Maltese, and the fanatical agitations of the Sicilian Populace.” Among the Sicilians, “each Man’s soul seems hardly containable in his body, like a prisoner, whose Jail is on fire, flying madly from one barred outlet to another” (CW 4 pt 2: 359). Elsewhere in the Friend there are scattered references to Catholicism. In the issue for August 10, 1809, concerned with the “communication of truth,” Coleridge appears to equate Catholic superstition with that of the Brahmins of Hindostan. Less obliquely, he refers to the Catholic Church’s encouragement of belief in miracles by circulating cheap tracts “sold by travelling Pedlars in villages and farm-houses” (CW 4 pt 2: 48–9). He makes a brief reference to “the Lightnings flashed by Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zwinglius, Latimer across Papal darkness” (CW 4 pt 2: 53). He makes a dismissive reference to “the interdicting catalogues of the Roman hierarchy,” and another to “the counterfeit frankincense which smoke-blacks the favourite idol of a catholic village” (CW 4 pt 2: 59, 285). Not until Coleridge’s articles on Spain, Malta, and Ireland in the Courier, from 1811 to 1814, does the Malta experience fully show through in his journalism. The impact of Coleridge’s Mediterranean experience was real enough (Fulford 1999: 232–53). The notebook entries show that he disagreed with Ball’s insistence on the need to tolerate Maltese superstitions, and records his own “horror with the Catholic faith and its consequences” (CN 2113). When he finds a painted cross in the Anglican chapel of the governor’s palace, he asks whether it was placed there “in complaisance to Maltese superstition” (CN 2101). Seeing crucifixes on the walls of the “Maltese Hospital” in Valetta, Coleridge deplores “the indefatigable ubiquitarian intrusion of the Catholic superstition,” contrasting it with “the English Bible and

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 46

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

47

Prayer Book seen in our houses and hospitals” (CN 2420). And finding religious statues in Valetta streets, he pronounces popery to be “true idolatry,” and proposes to investigate it “philosophically” (CN 2103). On vacation in Sicily, he dislikes the baroque cathedral of Syracuse (formerly the Temple of Minerva), calling its putti “little John Nobodies with chubby heads and wings looking up the Virgin’s petticoats as roguishly as may be” (CN 2244). He notes the “enormous burden” of the Catholic religion, recording at Perugia: “12000 inhabitants, 60 religious instit[utions] and 42 churches” (CN 2850). And there is even a hint (CN 2667) of Southey’s later claim that the Catholic sacrament of penance, with its mechanism of absolution for heinous crimes, explains the prevalence of assassination in Catholic countries (Southey 1808, 1: 62). The reference to assassination does not appear in the 1797 edition. By 1809 Southey had given up writing for the Annual Review, and had been taken on by the new pro-government Quarterly Review. Its editor, William Gifford, had formerly edited the shortlived but highly effective Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner that had so lampooned Southey in the 1790s. The Quarterly Review owed its foundation to Walter Scott, who had tried to capture Southey for the Edinburgh Review, but had then left the journal to set up the Quarterly Review in opposition to it—with an editorial line supporting the government’s war policy. Southey confessed to Grosvenor Bedford, in December 1808, that he had doubts about the degree of freedom that the Quarterly Review’s editor would allow him. He expected Gifford to “use the pruning-knife,” and feared that “the passages he would curtail—being the most Robert Southeyish—would be those that I should like best myself.” But if Gifford “understands his own interest, he will not restrict me.” The Quarterly Review should be more than a mere “ministerial business,” and a “sprinkling of my free and fearless way of thinking” would win friends for it among those most likely to be suspicious of it” (Speck 129). Southey clearly hoped that Bedford would pass on his views to Gifford, whom he had never met. Gifford would include almost 100 articles by Southey over the next 30 years, and pay him handsomely for them. It would provide Southey with a prominent platform for expressing his social, political, and religious ideas, which now became increasingly coherent. The first issue in February 1809, carrying Southey’s appraisal of the Baptist Missionary Society’s work in India, was in reply to a review in the Edinburgh Review. He commended the Baptist missionaries, describing them as useful auxiliaries to the Anglican missions, which he thought ineffective in their impact (QR 1: 226).

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 47

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

48

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

The Antijacobin Review was quick to challenge its new rival. The Antijacobin supposes that the editors of the Quarterly Review are “as hostile as ourselves to the corruptions which Popery has introduced into the Church, and from which it was purified by the Reformation” (AJR 34: 94–5). Within weeks the Antijacobin is complaining that “the Irish Papists are again at work.” Although they could not expect success, “they have resolved once more to agitate a question which, of all others, is most likely to inflame the passions, and increase the virulence of party” (AJR 34: 327). The pro- Catholic agitation complained of by the Antijacobin had been sparked off by a motion, proposed in May 1808 by Henry Grattan, that the petition of the Irish Catholics should be referred to a committee of the whole House. The proposal had attracted support in the House of Lords from the bishop of Norwich, but was voted down. Now in December 1809, the Antijacobin called Grattan “the pensioned advocate of the Irish Papists” (34: 405). Southey’s contributions to the Quarterly Review in 1809 and 1810 avoided political issues, though the Antijacobin’s complimentary review of Letters from England publicized his views through the person of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (chapter 2 earlier). And Southey now had another outlet for expressing his views on Grattan and the Irish Catholic petitioners. Having taken his leave of the Annual Review, he agreed to write an annual account of English domestic and European politics for the Ballantyne brothers’ Edinburgh Register. The Edinburgh Register was modeled on the Annual Register, founded in 1758 and edited by Edmund Burke for 30 years, and on its upstart rival the New Annual Register (1781– 1826), to which William Godwin contributed from 1784 to 1791. The Edinburgh Register lasted only four years, appearing from 1810 to 1813 and recording the events of 1808–11. In late 1809, Southey wrote the section covering the Grattan debates of 1808. These pages would be republished in 1832 in his Essays Moral and Political (2: 279–328). Before commenting on the parliamentary debates, Southey echoes the view expressed in his private correspondence— that Catholic Emancipation would immediately “introduce Irish priests into our army and navy.” They would be men “acting under orders from a church which Buonaparte has ostentatiously restored and which he will use in whatever manner his policy may require.” Emancipation would be useless as well as dangerous, since “it is not with such concessions that Popery will be contented, nor with anything short of its full and paramount supremacy.” There are also

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 48

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

49

echoes of Letters from England (published in 1807), in Southey’s remark that the French refugee monks and nuns had been permitted “to follow their accustomed way of life.” He agrees that “common humanity” required such tolerance, but concludes that “here toleration should have stopt.” The government should not have permitted them to recruit new members, and thus “perpetuate these communities, and re-establish monastic institutions in England; still less to wean away Protestants from the established faith, and from their parents’ houses, and induce them to take the monastic vows” (Essays 2: 280–2). The public should not be deceived by the moderation of Catholic laymen: “It is to their priesthood we should look.” And from publications by priests, “we shall find, what indeed no man who understands the system can have doubted, that its character is indelible; that it is still the same bedarkened and bedarkening superstition” (2: 282). Southey is clear who is to blame for the pitiful state of the Irish: “We have invaded and conquered them, but we have conferred no benefits upon them to atone for the evils of invasion and of conquest; after the lapse of six centuries, the remembrance of those evils is undiminished; the wounds themselves are, as it were, fresh and sore; and the desire of vengeance has continually been aggravated” (2: 285). Southey commends the line taken in the Grattan debates by Spencer Perceval, who explained that the ministers “admitted the truth and wisdom of Mr Grattan’s speech, and concerning the principle, pleaded only for delay.” Canning had said, in spite of the disappointment on this occasion, “there was the consolation of reflecting that the question must ultimately, though gradually prevail” (2: 291). Perceval gave Grattan’s supporters credit for sincerely believing that concessions would achieve “the purpose of tranquilizing Ireland, and putting the Catholics in a state of perfect satisfaction.” But Perceval believed “in my soul” that nothing was more likely to disturb Ireland—“to excite in it, or when excited to increase, religious animosity”—than “the adoption of the measure now recommended to us.” Perceval was convinced that it had come to this: “That if you mean to tranquilize them by granting what they ask, you must grant them the whole of what they think fit to ask; you must make up your minds to establish the Roman Catholic religion in Ireland.” The Prime Minister was satisfied that “we have gone farther than principle requires us to go, and we are arrived at that point at which it is our duty to make a stand” (2: 293). Grattan had argued that the Irish tenantry was too poverty-stricken to pose a threat to the landlords. Southey disagrees, arguing that it is

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 49

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

50

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the tenants’ poverty that makes them dangerous: It is because they cannot possibly emerge from their abject poverty that they are formidable; it is because they are stript and fleeced, and shorn to the skin by proctors and tithe-farmers, and cut to the quick by the whole race of harpies who intervene between the landowners and the lord; it is because they are in this state of hopeless poverty and grinding oppression, joined to the peculiar circumstances of irritation arising from the history of Ireland, that that country is always in danger of such insurrections as those of the Jacquerie in France, of Wat Tyler in England, and the peasants in Germany. (2: 297–9)

“Never in any part of the world,” declares Southey, “nor in any period of history, have four millions of men existed in circumstances so fearful and so humiliating to human nature” (2: 299). A Catholic establishment might do much, “but though it would remove much misery, it would perpetuate so much evil that it is no more to be thought of than Harrington’s extraordinary proposal of selling Ireland to the Jews” (2: 301). Southey cites the Duke of Norfolk’s explanation of the proposed crown veto that Catholic laymen thought could be applied to the appointment of Catholic bishops: “They were disposed to lay before his Majesty a list of three persons, of whom he was to reject two; but if he thought proper to reject the whole three, then another list be submitted to his consideration, and so on, until he should signify his approbation of an individual by allowing his name to remain.” Southey notes that “to the utter astonishment of their parliamentary friends,” the Catholic bishops, meeting in Dublin, declared “that it is inexpedient to introduce any alteration to the canonical mode hitherto observed in the nomination of Irish Roman Catholic Bishops; which mode long experience has proved to be unexceptionable, wise and salutary.” Southey, rather optimistically, decides that this blunt episcopal refusal closes the debate, as he makes clear in his uncompromising concluding paragraph: “Our constitution consists of Church and State; is it not therefore, a self-evident absurdity to give those persons power in the State, who are hostile to the Church? Happily the Catholics have relieved their parliamentary friends from all future obligation, by disavowing the terms which were proposed for them” (2: 295, 304). Southey’s reflections on the year 1808 would appear in the first issue of Edinburgh Annual Register for 1810. The same year would bring three major interventions against giving Catholics full civil rights. The first and most substantial was Dr. Patrick Duigenan’s

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 50

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

51

response to Henry Parnell’s History of the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics (1808). Duigenan had long been opposed to Catholic relief. Advocate-general in Dublin’s High Court of Admiralty (later professor of civil law at Trinity College Dublin and grand secretary of the Orange Order), he had entered the Irish Parliament in 1790. He spoke strongly against the Irish Catholic Relief Bill of 1793, and in the debates of 1799 in the Westminster Parliament on the proposed Union, he was cited as a famously hostile opponent of Catholic claims (Plowden 1803: 883). When the Act became law, Duigenan was appointed one of the commissioners for distributing compensation to displaced Irish MPs, officeholders, and borough-owners, while he himself continued to represent the city of Armagh until his death in 1816. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “the most violent speaker in the House of Commons” in the Irish debates, while recording that he married a Catholic and allowed her to keep a Catholic chaplain. Yet in his Answer to Grattan’s address to the citizens of Dublin, he did not shrink from calling the 1798 Rebellion “a Popish Plot” (Jupp 79–86). In his 1810 pamphlet, Demands of the Roman Catholics, Duigenan (like Musgrave) bases his arguments on the record of Catholic rebellions in Ireland: two in Elizabeth’s reign, one in the 1640s, and one against William III. “In all these rebellions,” Duigenan comments, “the Romanists conducted themselves with the utmost barbarity and the nation was completely wasted.” In his view, the 1798 Rebellion simply continued the same pattern (7), and the repeal of the penal laws had caused the 1798 Rebellion. In 1793 Irish Catholics were given the vote through the 40-shilling freeholder franchise, while the Act of Union disfranchised most Irish boroughs, where “a great portion of the Protestant interest in that country was exclusively vested.” This had transferred “almost the whole of the present Irish representation to popular elections” (Duigenan 9–10). Duigenan’s Irish perspective leads him to devote much of his pamphlet to defending the 1691 Treaty of Limerick from Parnell’s charge that the British government had broken its word. But he also denies that Pitt had broken his word to Irish Catholics in promising that Emancipation would follow Union. Parnell had added, as an appendix, an English translation of Bonaparte’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII concluded in 1801. (French text in Hales, 298–300.) The pope ceded to the First Consul the nomination to bishoprics and archbishoprics, together with approval of appointments to lower clerical offices, while according him the same rights and prerogatives in religious matters as French monarchs enjoyed before the Revolution. But

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 51

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

52

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

it is also stipulated that, if any of Bonaparte’s successors should not be Catholic, “the rights and prerogatives before mentioned, and the nomination to the bishop’s see, should be regulated by a new convention.” Duigenan asks whether the Irish Catholics are ready to accept a similar concordat (Duigenan 149–50). He blames Milner for the fiasco of the Irish bishops’ rejection of the proposed crown veto on Episcopal appointments. Milner (described by Duigenan as “a Romish priest, said to be one of the Vicars Apostolic in England”) had denied “in the public prints” and in his brief pamphlet, An elucidation of the Veto (1810), “that he ever authorised any person to make such a proposal on behalf of the Roman Catholics.” He had added, Duigenan recalls, “that he would rather shed the last drop of his blood than consent that any Catholic or Non-Catholic prince should have the power of interposing, in any manner whatsoever, in the appointment of Romish prelates, or to have any influence, whatsoever, in the Roman Catholic Church” (Duigenan 152). As for his seeming about-turn on the veto, Milner admitted that, although he had been sure that his fellow Irish bishops would not concede a positive veto, he had been “fully persuaded that they were disposed to yield a negative power,” by which he meant “a power that was sufficient to prevent disloyal or seditious candidates from being consecrated” (Milner 1810: 7–9). He insisted that “there was not the least question about giving security to Protestant Establishment, but barely about providing against treason and sedition.” He was clear that he did “ not enter into an engagement, but barely gave an opinion as to what the Bishops would consent, without the least engagement” (Milner 1810: 7–9). Duigenan also cites a report from the Irish Magazine of 1809 detailing the resolution of the Irish Catholic bishops on September 14, 1808 that “they never would, under any circumstances whatsoever suffer the crown to interfere in the election of their clergy” (153, Duigenan’s emphasis). He notes that “on the very next day” the bishops unanimously re-elected Milner as their representative in London. All these transactions, Duigenan decides, “demonstrate the utter impossibility of reconciling Irish Romanists to a Protestant government, or even procuring them to relax in the slightest degree, their active hostility to it” (Duigenan 153–4). Sir Richard Musgrave’s biographer singles out Duigenan as the best known of the baronet’s allies and supporters (Kelly 18). The second Lord Kenyon receives no mention in that biography—nor in the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet the Antijacobin chose Kenyon’s 90-page pamphlet for its lead review in January 1811 (38: 1–13). Much of Kenyon’s argument treads in the same tracks as Duigenan and

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 52

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

53

leans heavily on Musgrave, not only in the seven appendices extracted from Rebellions, but in the text itself where reference is made to “Sir R. Musgrave’s faithful and vainly assailed history” (Kenyon 62). Kenyon argues that the importance of the Established Church, “in a social point of view, arises from the necessity that a sense of religion should be impressed on the minds and consciences of the people.” Kenyon insists that the only effective way of providing security for the Established Church is “to restrict to its members the possession of that power, which, if placed in other hands, would endanger it” (4–6). Kenyon cautions against the easy assumption that the spiritual and temporal authority of the pope can be separated. He thinks experience suggests that “those persons who, under the pretence of religious direction, have once gained an influence over the mind of man, have no difficulty in directing every feeling and action in the common concerns of life” (46). The third champion of the establishment to publish a defense in 1810, George Isaac Huntingford, has direct links with Southey. As bishop of Hereford in 1826, he wrote from the warden’s lodgings at Winchester College (see chapter 10) to congratulate the Poet Laureate on his Book of the Church. When previously bishop of Gloucester, his pastoral charge of June 1810 was published as Petition of the English Roman Catholics. While lamenting the Catholics’ remaining disabilities, the bishop is convinced that they are necessary in order that “a Protestant Government should remain unshaken, and the profession of Protestant Christianity undiminished.” It was the Protestant duty of every Anglican that “with vigilant foresight he should guard against even the most distant approach of what may be injurious.” To the Catholics’ objection that they are required to have their marriages solemnized in Anglican churches, the bishop replies: “If the Catholics do not choose to admit our Form is valid in a religious light, yet at least they might comply with it as a Civil Institution calculated for domestic happiness and national benefit” (7–8). Nor is the bishop impressed by the petitioners’ claim that their creed is “the actual creed of four-fifths of Ireland and of much the greater part of Europe.” What inference should be drawn from such arithmetic? “Not that we should be intimidated and concede power, which ultimately may be employed for our own subversion. But that all Protestants should unite in support of Reformed Religion” (14). And although the Catholic creed was indeed that of our forefathers, “who in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, acted nobly at Runnymede, Cressy, Poitiers and Agincourt,” it was also the creed of Mary I who burned Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley; of the Gunpowder Plotters; and of

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 53

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

54

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the Irish rebels of Charles I’s reign. It was also the creed of James II, and of those who “within the short period of Eleven Years past” instigated the Irish Rebellion, which, an Irish writer affirms, “massacred without mercy, all Protestants, Men, Women and Children” (17–18). The Irish writer in question was Dr. Patrick Duigenan. Having dismissed all the requests of the petitioners, the bishop himself cites various books of Catholic devotion as a stark warning to his clergy: “Your Ministry is holden in contempt; your Churches are considered as profane; your Rites are branded with condemnation; you are shut out from all participation of God’s mercy in Christ!” And he asks: “Can we think it Expedient, that Men so persuaded and so disposed should be invested with political authority over us?” (41). Coleridge’s language was less inflammatory than the bishop’s, but his contributions to the Courier in 1811 displayed the same distrust of the Catholic petitioners. Of his 149-odd contributions printed in the Courier between February 1894 and March 1818, no fewer than 90 fall within a five-month period from April to September 1811, when he was on the staff of the newspaper as a regular contributor (CW 3 pt 2 cxxii). Though writing for the now pro-government Courier, which Cobbett’s Political Register denounced as serving “all the old blood-sucking Antijacobin crew” (30: 226), Coleridge had not lost his sympathy for the sufferings of the Catholic Irish. But his target in May 1811 was Dublin’s reactivated Catholic Committee. Coleridge caricatures the members of the committee in an imaginary speech: Let us elect Deputies— let us meet— let us rouse the people— Catholic Emancipation!— that is what we mean to petition for in order that we may not be restricted in our plan of assembling. But Catholic Emancipation is of no more importance than a child’s rattle to us. We wish other things—Repeal of the Union—Popish Parliament— separation from Great Britain, and, perhaps other Connections [e.g. France]. These objects, if you will but sit quietly by while we pursue, these will render us indifferent as to Catholic Emancipation. (CW 3 pt 2: 255)

In December 1811, following a judicial ruling that the Catholic Committee was an illegal assembly, the committee reconstituted itself as the Catholic Board. In the same month, the Antijacobin devoted 20 pages of its lead review to an unpublished, Dublin-printed, 240page pamphlet entitled Proceedings of the Catholic Committee, as taken from their accredited papers (40: 337–58).

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 54

8/22/2011 6:31:33 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

55

The terminal incapacity of George III, leading to the Regency Act of 1811, had encouraged the hopes of Catholics and Whig opposition alike. Southey focuses on these expectations in the second volume of the Edinburgh Annual Register (Essays : 307–20). But with public attention fixed on the Peninsular War, the prince regent was unlikely to promote Catholic Emancipation. Two of Southey’s contributions to the Quarterly Review during 1811 touched on religious matters. Writing on rival systems of education, and switching allegiance to the Anglican Andrew Bell from the Quaker Joseph Lancaster (whom he had championed in the 1806 Annual Review), Southey asserted: “The system of English policy consists of church and state, they must stand or fall together; and the fall of either would draw after it the ruin of the finest fabric ever yet created by human wisdom under divine favour.” To provide a system of national education that did not instruct children in the national religion would, Southey claimed, be “palpably absurd” (QR 6: 289). Bell became godfather to Southey’s daughter, Isabel, born in November 1812, and would leave Southey £1000 on his death. Southey told John May in February 1832 that he would rely on the money “for Cuthbert’s support at Oxford” (L &C 6: 178–9). Now in 1811, however, Southey turned his hand to a detailed depiction of the Inquisition. The British Critic had noticed a newly published illustrated history of the Inquisition in March (37: 280–4). Southey’s review of the same book in the December Quarterly Review embraced two other titles, one translated from the Spanish and the other from Portuguese: A letter upon the mischievous influence of the Spanish Inquisition as it operated in contemporary Spain, and a twovolume narrative from the editor of the Correo Braziliense (QR 6: 313–57). Southey dismisses the history of the Inquisition as “a paltry work compiled with little knowledge and less judgment.” The Letter, which Southey pronounces “excellent,” was first published in the Spanish periodical El Español. He attributes the Letter to Joseph Blanco White (pseudonym for the current publication: Leucadio Doblado), a Jesuit turned Protestant, who would later cross swords with Butler and Milner. Hippolyte da Costa’s Portuguese narrative would also supply Southey with some effective ammunition. Noting that in both Spain and Portugal “despotism and intolerance have been carried to the fullest extent,” Southey recalls that it was in Spain that the first appeal was made to the secular power for the suppression of heresy, “and the first blood shed with the forms of law in a persecution of christians against christians” (QR 6: 314). Southey traces the history of Christianity back well before the Inquisition, to when Christendom was “more than a name.” As

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 55

8/22/2011 6:31:34 PM

56

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

he had done in Letters from Spain and Portugal, he pays tribute to the Benedictines: “The world has never been so deeply indebted to any other body of men as to this illustrious order” (QR 6: 318). The monks of Malmesbury, Lindisfarne, and Jarrow, he describes as “a community of pious men devoted to literature and to the useful arts, as well as to religion,” who seemed in those early ages “like a green oasis amid the desert; like stars in a moonless night; they shine upon us with a tranquil and heavenly radiance.” By contrast, readers are referred to Southey’s introduction to his translation of the Chronicle of the Cid (1808) for evidence that “from a very early period the Spanish priests had recourse to pious fraud for political purposes” (QR 6: 318–19). But Southey reserves his severest strictures for the Dominicans, whom he blames for the Inquisition. He confidently asserts that the Spaniard, Domingo de Guzman, known to history as St. Dominic, “being employed against the Albigenses, invented the Inquisition to accelerate the effect of his sermons.” For Southey, “St Dominic is the only saint in whom no solitary speck of goodness can be discerned. To impose privations and pain was the pleasure of his unnatural heart, and cruelty was in him an appetite and a passion. No human being has ever been the occasion of so much misery” (QR 6: 321). It seems a somewhat extreme epitaph. Southey would return to the Dominicans’ role in the Albigensian Crusade in his Quarterly Review article of 1819 on Monasticism, and in his Book of the Church five years later (see chapters 6 and 7). Dominic’s alleged founding of the Inquisition, and his part in the campaign against the Albigenses, explains the title of Coleridge’s Sancti Dominici Pallium, written as a gloss on the Southey–Butler–Milner exchanges (see ix). After his account of the extermination of the Albigenses, Southey turns in his 1811 article to the use of the Inquisition against the Jews of Spain, “who had enjoyed more intervals of prosperity in that country than in any part of Christendom” (QR 6: 326). He comments that “the Romanists, proceeding upon the principle of exterminating heresy, did their work effectually in Spain: if our bloody Mary, instead of dying when she did, had lived to the age of Elizabeth, the same work would have been done as effectually in England” (QR 6: 335). What Southey calls “the first bloody harvest” of the Inquisition ended in Spain before it began in Portugal—where it was allegedly forced on a reluctant Joam III by forged papal bulls. The chronicler of Joam III’s reign, Southey notes, “passes over the establishment of the inquisition with a single sentence, exactly as a man would do who did not chuse to say that the King had been the dupe of an impostor”

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 56

8/22/2011 6:31:34 PM

Da il ies, Mon t hl ies, Qua rt er l ies

57

(QR 6: 338–41). Southey evidently relishes the extravagant imagery used in defense of the Inquisition by one of its own advocates: “The truth is that the Inquisitors are the sentinels of heaven, the shepherds of the pontifical flock, the husbandmen of the fields of Christ; what wonder the sentinels should be abhorred by the enemy whom they espy, the shepherd by the wolves whom he wounds, the husbandman by the tares which he plucks up!” (QR 6: 343). In spite of such emollient words, persecution of the Jews in Portugal was as brutal as it had been in Spain. Not until the “enlightened despotism” of the Marquis of Pombal, Joseph I’s all-powerful minister who died in 1782, was the persecution of the Jews (and of Jewish converts to Christianity) ended, and the power of the Inquisition curbed. When Southey finally returns to the three publications he has supposedly been reviewing, he commends Blanco White’s Letter on the influence of the Spanish Inquisition “as it actually exists.” As reviewer, he decides that Portugal needs three things: “the suppression of the Inquisition, the execution of the laws, and the restoration of the whole free government.” And he adds a comment that would seem as startling in his own day as it does in ours: “That free government under an absolute monarchy is no impossibility, is shown by some excellent essays on the subject in the Correio Braziliense, wherein a parallel is drawn between the English and Portugueze constitutions, which would perhaps surprise an English reader as much as it must gratify a Portugueze patriot” (QR 6: 356–7). Southey would soon be proposing to the Quarterly Review’s publisher, John Murray, two textbooks for use by pupils aged 12–14. They were intended for the Church of England’s national schools founded by Joshua Watson in 1811, and using Bell’s system. One would be on the British Constitution, the other a history of the church in England, including “a view of Popery with its consequences—from which the Reformation delivered us.” Both books, “if they be put into the hands of the rising generation would go far towards inspiring the ardent and devoted patriotism of which the ancients had so much and we so little” (Speck 148). On January 10, 1812, a contract was signed with Murray for both books. The Book of the Church was already in the embryo stage, and its political purpose already visible.

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 57

8/22/2011 6:31:34 PM

9780230115132_04_ch03.indd 58

8/22/2011 6:31:34 PM

4

Jac obi ns a n d Jesu i t s: W A T TY L E R a n d O t h e r Ghost s

Among the events of 1811 listed in the June issues of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner were the following: floods in Shropshire and Worcestershire, the failure of another motion for the relief of Irish Catholics, more than 100 bankrupt traders, and the suicide of a 17-year-old girl through an overdose of opium. Hunt would later look back to that summer when the prince regent had not only retained his father’s Tory ministers, but “had broken life-long engagements, had violated his promises, particular as well as general, those to Catholics among them, and led in toto a different political life from what had been expected” (Autobiography 2: 114–15). He was now greeted in public with hisses rather than with the customary cheers. The Examiner ’s attacks on the prince regent would soon land Hunt in prison (Roe 160–89). The sense of gloom was not alleviated by Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, published in February 1812. Mrs. Barbauld (née Aikin) was from a Unitarian family and was a friend of John Prior Estlin, Unitarian minister of the Presbyterian congregation at Lewin’s Mead, Bristol, where Coleridge worshipped in the 1790s. She wrote the memoir prefixed to Estlin’s posthumously published Lectures (1818). Estlin had responded to Paine’s Age of Reason with Evidences of Revealed religion (1796), while his Bristol sermons on the Nature and causes of Atheism (1797) carried an epigraph from Coleridge’s Destiny of Nations. Mrs. Barbauld’s Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts deplored the exclusion of Dissenters from public office and mocked the exaggerated fears of her opponents: “Is

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 59

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

60

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the Test Act, your boasted bulwark, of equal necessity with the dykes in Holland, and do we wait like an impetuous sea, to rush in and overwhelm the land?” (4–5). The Dissenters had no wish to share in the emoluments of the Established Church: “We know it is the children’s bread, which must not be given to dogs.” But “we could wish to be considered as children of the state, though we are not so of the Church” (8–9). By 1812, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was still 16 years away, though in 1813 Unitarians would be formally freed from the penalties of the 1698 Blasphemy Act, and thus placed on par with other Dissenters. In 1793, Mrs. Barbauld attacked the war against revolutionary France at its outset, in Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation. Now, almost 20 years later, she attacks the war against Napoleon in a 334-line poem printed in 25 pages by her old publisher, Johnson: Man calls to Famine, nor invokes in vain, Disease and Rapine follow in her train; The tramp of marching hosts disturbs the plough, The sword, not sickle, reaps the harvest now; And where the soldier gleans the scant supply, The helpless peasant but retires to die; No laws his hut from licensed outrage shield, And war’s least horror is the ensanguined field. (Eighteen Hundred and Eleven ll. 53–60)

The printing of paper money beyond the Bank of England’s gold reserves had not averted economic disaster, while the country was preparing for war with the United States over Britain’s right to search merchant ships. Like Macaulay in his later review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, Barbauld imagines a future tourist viewing the ruins of London: “by scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound / And, choked no more by fleets, fair Thames survey— / Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way” (ll. 174–6). Macaulay, foreseeing the survival of the Catholic Church into a remote future, imagines the moment when “some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s” (ER 41: 535). Barbauld’s fellow Unitarian, Crabb Robinson, as reported in Morley’s Henry Crabb Robinson on books and their writers, described her as writing more in sorrow than in anger; but he confessed that “there was a disheartening and even gloomy tone which I, even with all my love for her, could not quite excuse.” He added that “it provoked a very coarse and even blackguard review in the ‘Quarterly’,

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 60

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

61

which many years after Murray told me he was more ashamed of than any other article in the review” ( Robinson 1: 64). Crabb Robinson does not attribute the review to Southey, who does not seem to have admitted authorship in any of his correspondence. Barbauld’s sister, Lucy Aikin, was convinced that the reviewer was Southey, but her brother, John, writing to James Montgomery, regretted that “our friend Southey” should review for the Quarterly Review, and added: “I cannot suspect him of writing the article.” Cuthbert Southey does not list the review among the Quarterly Review articles he attributes to his father—though the list is admittedly unreliable. A more likely author is John Wilson Croker, whose name is pencilled into the publisher’s copy. William McCarthy, Barbauld’s recent biographer, accepts this attribution (477–8). Whoever the reviewer was, his tone was undeniably supercilious: “We had hoped, indeed, that the empire might have been saved without the intervention of a lady-author.” Objecting to the line “Man called forth famine nor invoked in vain,” the reviewer asks what Mrs. Barbauld means. “Does she seriously accuse mankind of wishing for a famine, and interceding for starvation? Or does she believe that it is in the power of this country, of what remains of independent Europe, nay, of herself, to arrest the progress of war, and, careless of what Buonaparte or his millions may be about, to beckon back peace and plenty, and to diffuse happiness over a reviving world?” And the poet is mocked for suggesting that “America is to go on increasing and improving in arts, in arms, and even, if that be possible, in virtue” (QR 7: 309–10). The Barbauld review appeared in the same month as the United States declared war on Britain. The year 1812 was to prove even more disastrous than 1811. The assassination of the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, in May, raised fears that the Burdettite Whigs would take office and carry Catholic Emancipation. Southey wrote to Grosvenor Bedford after the assassination: “I can scarcely refrain from tears while I write. It is my deep and ominous sense of danger to the country, from the Burdettites on one hand, and from Catholic concessions on the other.” Southey had already asked Bedford to tell William Gifford that he would soon deliver “a sketch of the [French] Revolution, introducing an examination of our own state as tending towards the same gulf. Would to God it were not so well timed!” (L& C 3: 337–9). And he wrote to Rickman proposing desperate measures: “This I am certain of, that nothing but immediate suspension of the liberty of debate, and the liberty of the press can preserve us. Were I a minister, I would instantly suspend the Habeas Corpus, and

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 61

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

62

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

have every Jacobin journalist confined” (L& C 3: 342). Fear of revolution was perhaps not altogether fanciful in the England of 1812, when Luddite machine-smashing became so widespread that troops were deployed in Nottingham, and when, in January 1813, there were 17 executions in York with a further six of the accused transported (Watson George III 571). While Britain was at war with the United States—unintentionally, as news of the revocation of the disputed Orders in Council took too long to cross the Atlantic—Prussia, a former ally against republican France, sided with Bonaparte—whose invasion of Russia seemed likely to knock out another coalition partner. Only Wellington’s victory in Spain lightened the gloom. Southey was relieved that Lord Liverpool’s ministry (called to office by the prince regent) was returned in the 1812 election; but he was worried that Canning’s campaign for Catholic relief might yet succeed. When in 1813 Grattan introduced his Catholic Relief Bill with an amendment tabled by Canning, Southey wrote from Keswick to Charles Wynn, warning him not to be too confident of victory on the Bill. He predicted that there would again be disagreement over the “securities” that needed to be built into the Bill.. Even if the Bill failed, “the mischief” would have been done. The more Southey reflected, the more reason there was “to fear that our turn of revolution is hastening on” (L&C 4: 24). In June 1813, the Antijacobin published the full text of Grattan’s Bill (AJR 44: 634–40). The “securities” mentioned by Southey repeated the oath of allegiance imposed by the 1791 Catholic Relief Act, and added a further declaration that “it is not an article of the Roman Catholic faith, neither am I thereby required to believe or profess that the pope is infallible.” Additionally, the clergy were required never to “concur or assent to the appointment or consecration of any Roman Catholic bishop or vicar apostolic, in the United Kingdom, but such as I shall conscientiously deem to be of unimpeachable loyalty or peaceable conduct” (Costin and Watson 2: 4–6). Southey was correct in his prediction of disagreement over “securities.” An amendment, deleting the right to sit in Parliament from the listed civil and military privileges conferred by the Bill— thus wrecking the main intention—was narrowly carried, by 251 votes to 247. The emasculating amendment might have failed if the Irish bishops had not reacted angrily to what they saw as a post-Union curbing of their independence. The British Critic would later record that in the very month (May 1813) when the Bill had been expected to pass the Commons, the Irish Catholic hierarchy declared that “the Ecclesiastical clauses, or securities, are utterly incompatible with the

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 62

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

63

discipline of the Roman Catholic Church, and with the free exercise of their religion.” The British Critic recalls Milner’s boast that “thirty bishops with their clergy, and a numerous laity, are ready to mount the scaffold, and submit to the axe or halter, rather than submit to the securities proposed for enactment” (BC 2nd series 5: 515–19). It was Milner whom Musgrave targeted in January 1813, writing in the Antijacobin under the pseudonym of “HIBERNICUS.” Reporting on a dinner at Kilkenny the previous October for the Friends of Religious Liberty, Musgrave first ridicules the chairman’s toast to “The friends of civil and religious liberty all over the world.” He describes the wording of the toast as “the most severe sarcasm that could be cast on the Romanists,” since it was well known that “the fundamental principles of Popery are inscribed in blood and founded in persecution,” and that Catholics are “enjoined, as a sacred duty, to extirpate heretics” (AJR 44: 59–60). Writing anonymously, Musgrave can cite as confirmation the appendix of his own History of the Rebellions (AJR 44: 62, 71). He similarly refers to his own publications in his other “Hibernicus” contributions to the Antijacobin in 1813 (44: 294–311 and 45: 474–97). Charles Butler also features in the Antijacobin for 1813. His 23-page pamphlet Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland is noticed in the May issue. The review opens uncompromisingly: Advocates of what is usually called by the vulgar and ignorant, catholic emancipation, being convinced that the cause they espouse is not maintainable on the grounds of truth and reason, and that it is incompatible with the principles of our constitution, have recourse to all the arts of deception which sophistry can afford to mislead their readers . . .. They follow the rule laid down by the Jacobins to promote their designs, viz. that a lie often repeated will make some impression. (AJR 44: 457–8)

Butler had argued that English Catholics recognized the spiritual authority of the pope, but not his temporal authority. The Antijacobin’s riposte is to quote the third canon of the 1215 Lateran Council, empowering the pope to excommunicate and depose heretical princes. Butler appeals to the oath of allegiance demanded of English Catholics, requiring them to deny that “the Pope of Rome or any other foreign prince, prelate, state, or potentate hath, or ought to have, any temporal or civil jurisdiction, power, authority directly or indirectly, within the realm of England.” The Antijacobin retorts that Catholics are notoriously reluctant to take the oath. And Butler’s insistence on the loyalty of Irish Catholics in repelling French

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 63

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

64

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

invaders in the 1798 Rebellion, is contradicted (the Antijacobin says) by the welcome given to the French troops who landed at Killala in the autumn of 1798 (44: 463–6). The Antijacobin’s 1813 review of Butler’s Address to the Protestants foreshadows Southey’s own exchanges with Coleridge’s “courteous Butler” of the 1820s. But 1813 was the year in which Southey accepted the laureateship. He was the prince regent’s preferred candidate, though Prime Minister Liverpool offered it to Walter Scott who, luckily for Liverpool, declined the honor. Scott told Southey that he hoped that it would be offered to him instead, graciously writing that he himself was “not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry” (NL 2: 66). The laureateship was offered in the year that Southey’s two-volume Life of Nelson was published. Speck has recently called it “the definitive biography for generations, and one that is still in print today,” while in 1925 Sir Henry Newbolt, in his introduction to A. & C. Black’s one-volume edition, could still call it “the best life of Nelson” (Speck 151; Nelson 1). Contemporary reviews were also complimentary. The Critical Review, in a 15-page notice, praised the work’s objectivity: “Mr Southey has an eagle’s, or rather perhaps he would wish us to say, a poet’s eye; and he has ventured to look full and fixedly on the sunny radiance of Nelson’s fame; and has both seen and marked the blots of infirmity, by which it was partially obscured” (CR 4th series 4: 12). The British Critic thought the narrative “beyond all question faithful,” but disputes Southey’s opinion that the English government’s initial reaction to the French Revolution was “a miserable error.” The British Critic predictably takes the contrary view, though suggests that “it can hardly at this period be worth while to argue.” The reviewer was overoptimistic in supposing that the debates of the 1790s were dead and buried, but he thought Southey’s Nelson “admirably adapted to answer the purpose for which it was intended” (BC 42: 366). The Eclectic Review found that “the talents of the historian, and the powers of his hero, are here displayed to the utmost advantage,” and that “the picture drawn by the poetical writer, by land and water, of living and inanimate nature, are perfectly realized in the reader’s imagination” (2nd series 1: 606–12). The care taken by reviewers to give equal credit to Southey’s talents as poet and historian are understandable. For the past four years, he had been writing an annual survey of the political affairs of Europe as “historiographer to Mr Ballantyne.” Southey used the phrase in a letter to his uncle, Rev. Herbert Hill, on August 31, 1809 (Speck 135). James and John Ballantyne were publishers of the newly

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 64

8/22/2011 6:31:38 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

65

founded Edinburgh Annual Register (see chapter 3). The new journal, three years before the laureateship, had raised the question of Southey’s poetical status by unwisely linking him with Walter Scott and William Campbell as the three leading poets of the age. The Critical Review for March 1811, in a notice of Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810), objected to “a strain of dogmatical self-sufficiency which we have seldom seen equalled.” After quoting from the poem, the review concludes: “In the preceding selections, we think there is quite enough to discover to us how great a poet Mr Southey might be, were the single gift of judgment to be added to the qualities which he undoubtedly possesses. Till then we fear that we shall never be able to subscribe to the belief in a Trinity of living poets, of whom Mr S. is represented as entitled to the foremost honours” (CR 3rd series 22: 225–51). Southey’s response was characteristic. In a letter to Mary Barker in the month that the Critical Review’s notice appeared, he preferred to bracket himself with Scott and Landor— as a fourth, “Coleridge might be added if he pleased” (Speck 140 citing Kirkpatrick 350). As far back as the autumn of 1804, Southey, writing from Keswick to Lieutenant Tom Southey, listed his proposed historical works: My whole historical labours will consist of three separate works. 1. Hist. of Portugal— the European part, 3 vols. 2. Hist. of the Portugueze Empire in Asia, 2 or 3 vols. 3. Hist. of Brazil. 4. Hist. of the Jesuits in Japan. 5. Literary History of Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. 6. Hist. of Monachism. In all ten, eleven or twelve quarto volumes; and you cannot imagine with what pleasure I look at all the labour before me. God give me life, health, eyesight, and as much leisure as even now I have, and done it shall be. God bless you! (L&C 2: 305–6)

Of these only his History of Brazil in three volumes would be published, though his research for the promised history of monasticism would find an outlet in his reviews for the Quarterly Review and in his Book of the Church. And he would treat the Jesuits with surprising sympathy in his History of Brazil, the first volume of which had appeared in 1810. By 1814, he was working on the second volume to be published in 1817. In its review of Charles Butler’s Address to the Protestants (1813), the Antijacobin had quoted the preamble to William III’s 1698 statute banishing “all popish archbishops, bishops, Jesuits and other ecclesiastical persons of the Romish clergy” (AJR 44: 462). Now in 1814, the Jesuit order, dissolved by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 at the insistence of European governments, had been reinstated. Southey would draw a sharp distinction between the

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 65

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

66

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

politically influential European Jesuits of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and the self-sacrificial Jesuits of the South American mission field. The Jesuits make their appearance in chapter 8 of the first volume of the History of Brazil, when in 1549 the newly appointed governor general of Brazil takes out with him the first Jesuits to set foot in America. Southey gives the names of these first Jesuit missionaries to South America, led by father Manoel de Nobrega, arguing that “the Jesuits have borne so great a part in the history of South America that the names of the first missionaries deserve to be recorded” (HB 1: 215). Some 70 pages (out of a massive 1,300 pages covering the first two volumes) describe the contribution made by the Jesuits in civilizing the indigenous inhabitants of South America. He describes the teaching in reading, writing, and arithmetic for orphan boys shipped out from Lisbon (HB 1: 216). He commends the Jesuits’ visitation of the sick; their success in reconciling old enemies, preventing drunkenness, and “making them promise to be contented with one wife”; and their choristers singing the litany on their preaching expeditions, as “the Savages, like snakes, were won by the voice of the charmer.” But they could not eradicate cannibalism. Southey decides that “the delight of feasting upon the flesh of their enemies was too great to be relinquished.” The Jesuits were allowed to baptize the condemned men before they were put to death— until it was rumored that “the water of baptism spoilt the taste of the meat” (HB 1: 252–7). Southey’s admiration for the Jesuits was tinged with a touch of irony: They were zealous for the salvation of souls; they had disengaged themselves from all the ties which attach us to life, and were therefore not merely fearless of martyrdom, but ambitious of it; they believed the idolatry which they taught, and were themselves persuaded that by sprinkling a dying Savage, and repeating over him a form of words which he did not understand, they redeemed him from everlasting torments to which he was otherwise inevitably, and according to their notions of Divine justice, justly destined. (HB 1: 252–3)

Southey applauded the dedication without endorsing the theology— though he did concede that, if both patient and healer believed that miracles were possible, healing might indeed take place . The conversion of Portuguese colonists proved more difficult. Father Nobrega and his fellow-Jesuits sternly refused to administer the sacraments of the Church to “those who retained native women as concubines, or men as slaves.” Southey reports that this holy blackmail often

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 66

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

67

succeeded: “Many were reclaimed by this resolute and Christian conduct; some because their consciences had not been dead, but sleeping; others for worldly fear, because they believed the Jesuits were armed with secular as well as spiritual authority.” Yet “mighty as the Catholic religion is, avarice is mightier,” and in spite of the efforts of some of the “best and ablest men” that ever graced the Jesuit order, the practice of enslaving the natives continued.” At this early stage, the Jesuits did not have to face the rivalries of competing monastic orders or friars: “The cells had not yet been built, nor the honey deposited for the drones of superstition” (HB 1: 258–9). But Southey soon records the arrival in Brazil of the Carmelites, closely followed by “a swarm of Benedictines,” who settled at St. Salvador (HB 1: 316). By the time the Jesuits reappear in the second volume of the History of Brazil, Southey finds it necessary to reaffirm his duty as “an historian to relate the good and evil of the Jesuits with strict impartiality, neither detracting from their virtues, nor concealing their impostures” (HB 2: 252). Turning from Portuguese Brazil to Spanish Paraguay, he describes how, in 1586, Dom Francisco Victoria, first bishop of Tucuman, “seeing the lamentable state of religion in his diocese,” wrote to the Jesuit provincials in Brazil and Peru asking for assistance from the Society. Southey notes that the bishop was a Dominican and that the request thus “shows how highly the Jesuits were at that time regarded.” According to admittedly partisan accounts by Jesuit historians, the missionaries’ arrival was greeted “as though they had been angels from heaven” (HB 2: 251). The Jesuits, when confronted by slaves in Paraguay, were unwilling to be responsible for instructing and directing persons “who could not easily be persuaded that the yoke of the gospel was light, when they felt that of the Spaniards upon their necks” (HB 2: 274). Grappling with the contradictions implied by the evangelistic agenda within a superstitious faith, Southey decides that “whatever motives of ambition may be imputed to the Paraguay Jesuits in the days of their prosperity, certain it is that nothing but zeal could have activated them at this time, or supported them through the arduous labours which they underwent” (HB 2: 276). Acknowledging that it is sometimes difficult in their accounts “to distinguish the effects of credulity and imagination from deliberate falsehood,” Southey thinks the Jesuits “never scrupled at falsehood when it was to serve a pious purpose, or produce an impression favourable to their views” (HB 2: 276). Recounting the murder of Jesuits Gonzalez and Rodriguez in 1628, as they were hanging the bell in a newly constructed church for the local population, Southey cites an account by the Jesuit

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 67

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

68

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

historian, Pierre Charlevoix, of the miracles that followed their martyrdom, commenting sardonically: “A martyrdom among catholic church-historians is incomplete without a miracle; and these being the protomartyrs of Paraguay, the miraculous accompaniments were the more to be expected, and the less to be dispensed with” (HB 2: 294). But Southey admits that it was not only the patronage and intercession of the new saints that impressed the natives: “Nor could they contemplate without astonishment the conduct of the Jesuits, their disinterested enthusiasm, their indefatigable perseverance, and the privations and dangers which they endured for no earthly reward” (HB 2: 299). And the 1642 celebrations marking the centenary of the founding of the Society of Jesus prompt Southey to reflect: “Europe had no cause to rejoice in the establishment of the Jesuits; but in Brazil and Paraguay their superstition may be forgiven them, for the noble efforts which they made in behalf of the oppressed Indians, and for the good which they effected” (HB 2: 332). He sees the Jesuit missionaries as a counterpoise to the tyranny of the European colonists, whose lifestyle would “counteract all the lessons of religion and morality which the most zealous instructors could inculcate.” The Jesuits set out “with no other weapons than those of the Gospel,” to reclaim “innumerable tribes, addicted to the vices, prone to the superstitions, and subject to the accumulated miseries of the savage life.” And the Spanish government, “whatever the enormities of its first conquest,” gave backing to the Jesuits to “form establishments according to their own ideas of a perfect commonwealth, and to mould the human mind, till they made a community of men after their own heart” (HB 2: 333–4). Southey recognizes the contradictions implied in the Jesuit Utopia: For on one hand they argued with irresistible truth against the slavetraders, that the Indians ought to be regarded as human, rational, and immortal beings; and on the other they justified themselves for treating them as if they were incapable of self-conduct, by endeavouring to establish, that though they were human beings, having discourse of reason, and souls to be saved or lost, they were nevertheless of an inferior species. (HB 2: 334–5)

By trying to establish a community of goods, the Jesuit commonwealth “excluded a large proportion of the crimes and miseries which embitter the life of civilized man.” They had biblical authority for such a system, and Southey cannot resist adding that “if they could have found as fair a ground-work for the mythology of Popery in the

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 68

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

69

scriptures as for this part of their institution, the bible would not have been a prohibited book wherever the influence of the Jesuits extended” (HB 2: 335). Censure and praise are again equally balanced: “Never was there a more absolute despotism; but never has there existed any other society in which the welfare of the subjects, temporal and eternal, has been the subject of government.” And Southey recognizes that, in the Jesuit order, every man is placed precisely according to the usefulness of his talents: “From those who directed the councils of the Catholic monarchs, or organized conspiracies in heretical countries, to the humble lay-servant of a hospital, who offered himself with all the ardour of religious love for the most loathsome offices which suffering humanity requires” (HB 2: 360–1). Yet as far as South America is concerned, Southey’s portrayal remains one of devotion, dedication, and endurance. The Jesuit missionary “set forth with his breviary, and a cross, six feet in height, which served him for a staff: about thirty converts accompanied him as guides, interpreters, and servants, or rather fellow-labourers; they were armed, but not with fire-arms, and carried axes and bills to open a way through the woods, a stock of maize for their supply in case of need, and implements for producing fire” (HB 2: 364). There was not much danger from wild beasts in Paraguay and neighboring provinces, but “there are few parts of the world in which the traveller has so many plagues to molest him.” Indeed, “all the plagues of Egypt seem to have been transferred to the lowlands of South America” (HB 2: 364–5). Southey traces the conflict between the Jesuits and the bishop of Paraguay, who enlisted the Franciscans and Dominicans in his support (HB 2 chapter 25). The Jesuits were expelled from Asuncion, and had their property confiscated, but would remain part of Paraguay history for another century (HB 2: 611–14). In Brazil, they faced similarly mixed fortunes in the second half of the seventeenth century, suffering deportation from Maranham (Maranahão), and then reinstatement (HB 2: 537–46). In 1663 there were new royal edicts respecting the Brazilian Indians. Thanks to “the Slave-party and the Friars” gaining the royal ear, the Portuguese king deprived the Jesuits of all temporal authority over the natives, while dividing spiritual management between the various religious orders—“it being just,” he said, “that all should labour in the Lord’s vineyard.” Yet at the same time the Jesuits’ churches and chapels were restored to them as royal recognition of their “good conduct and zeal for the service of God” (HB 2: 590–1). They would nevertheless be expelled from Brazil in 1760 by the bishop of Rio de Janeiro. Southey explains in the third volume of his History (published in 1819) that the bishop

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 69

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

70

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

“being a Friar,” seems to have “indulged the envy and hatred with which that description of Religioners commonly regarded the Jesuits” (HB 3: 541–7). At the same time, the Jesuits were expelled from the mother country by the Portuguese minister, the marquis of Pombal, and their seminaries turned into secular colleges. But by the end of the second volume of Southey’s History, Brazil was still in the seventeenth century. His judgment at the end of that volume, while recognizing the charitable work of the Catholic Church in Brazil, excoriates its spiritual system: For the self-government which divine philosophy requires, it had substituted a system of self-torture, founded upon Manicheism, and not less shocking to the feelings or repugnant to reason, than the practices of the eastern Yoguees. Its notions of exaggerated purity led to the most impure imaginations and pernicious consequences: its abhorrence of luxury was manifested by habitual filth, and in actions unutterably loathsome; and let the Romish Church appeal to its Canons and Councils as it may, its practices were those of Polytheism and Idolatry. (HB 2: 689–90)

Yet the essentials of religion could not be wholly destroyed. Notwithstanding the errors of popular belief, and “the villainous impostures of the Romish clergy,” regeneration was “not unfrequently” accomplished: “The sinner sometimes turned from his iniquity; nor can it be doubted but that the peace of God was vouchsafed to the humble spirit and the broken heart” (2: 6–90). The somewhat faint praise that concludes Southey’s analysis hardly effaces the initial damning accusations, framed in words that uncannily mirror Milner’s charges against the Albigenses in End of Religious Controversy (1841: 431–3). Reviews of the first volume had been less than fulsome. The Eclectic Review commended Southey’s genius in being able “so completely to carry the reader’s attention through such a train of unimportant and monotonous details, and compel them to afford him so much delight.” But it considered that “the settlements in Brazil were far from deserving so many fine paragraphs” (6: 785, 800). The Monthly Review, while thinking Southey’s history an improvement on his poetry, does “not altogether agree with him respecting the mode of writing history,” and decides that he has gone “greatly too far into particular detail for the taste of the present generation” (MR 69: 337–52). The British Critic, by delaying its notice until 1818, was able to review the first two volumes together. The review, spread over two issues, acknowledges that Southey has “earnestly sought after the truth; in

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 70

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

71

this pursuit, no prejudice seems to have bewildered, nor any labour to have deterred or wearied him.” He is praised for his “high and fervent tone,” and for the fact that “his standard is the unerring rule of right and wrong.” But the British Critic cannot agree that it is the historian’s duty to “unfold minutely every thing whether important or interesting in itself or not.” In the reviewer’s judgment, “events are not merely to be recorded, but to be selected, classed, compared and estimated, the influence of each on the other duly pointed out; where it begins and where it ceases; at certain periods, pauses to be made, and summary reviews taken; moral lessons enforced and principles of human conduct deduced” (BC 2nd series 9: 226–7). In 1817, when the second volume of the History of Brazil was published, both Coleridge and Southey were compelled to confront their “Jacobin” past. When Coleridge published Sibylline Leaves (1817), he wrote an embarrassing disclaimer regarding his “War Eclogue,” first published in the Morning Post in 1798 in condemnation of the “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” unleashed on the Irish rebels by Pitt’s government. Coleridge’s long “Apologetic Preface” denies any subversive intention, and claims that the “grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification” operated only at the imaginative level (Holmes 349). Coleridge drew a similar distinction between violent rhetoric and violent action in a letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont as early as 1803. Citing one of his more extreme declarations against a supper given by a peer of the realm—“a true Lord’s Supper in the Communion of Darkness! This is a Eucharist of Hell! A Sacrament of Misery!”— Coleridge counts himself lucky that ministers knew that “both Southey & I were utterly unconnected with any party, club or society.” He acknowledges his youthful disposition “to catch fire by the very rapidity of my own motion,” and goes on to liken himself to the Irish rebel Robert Emmet, that “most mistaken and bewildered young man” (CL 2: 1001–3). In William Hazlitt’s article, “On the Connection between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants,” in the second issue of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner for 1817, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey were all targeted: Coleridge for contributing to the pro-government Courier, Wordsworth for accepting the government office of distributor of stamps for the county of Westmorland, and Southey for seeking the laureateship. Coleridge’s attack on the “gagging Acts” of 1795 certainly contrasts awkwardly with his letter to Lord Liverpool in the summer of 1817, when he urged the prime minister to use all necessary repressive force against those who took to the streets. Such mass protest (Coleridge asserts) “ends as it began in ‘physical force’, as the sovereign people are sure to

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 71

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

72

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

learn, where the minority happens to consist of a ruffian at the head of an army of ruffians” (CL 4: 757–63). Yet whether Coleridge could be called a Jacobin “in the common acceptation of the name” (NL 1: 511), he was never a democrat— as his Bristol lectures of the 1790s clearly show. In Conciones ad Populum he warned that the history of the French Revolution had “recorded in Blood, that the knowledge of the Few cannot counteract the Ignorance of the Many.” And he urged the need to find a teacher who, “uniting the zeal of the Methodist with the views of the Philosopher, should be personally among the Poor, and teach them their Duties in order that he may render them susceptible of their Rights” (Morrow 26, 32). But it was surely going too far to claim, as he did in Biographia Literaria (published in July 1817) that he was always a Trinitarian in philosophy, though Unitarian in religion— even if he had undoubtedly opposed Jacobinism in its republican and deistical form (96–7). Hazlitt’s review of the Biographia in the Edinburgh Review famously censured Coleridge for abandoning radical politics for an obsession with metaphysics, “promising us an account of the Intellectual System of the Universe, and putting us off with a reference to a promised dissertation on the Logos, introductory to an intended commentary on the entire Gospel of St John” (28: 488–515). Hazlitt had opened fire on Southey as soon as he became laureate. “To have been the poet of the people may not render Mr Southey less a court favourite,” he wrote. And a week later he ridicules the very notion of the laureateship: “Why have we not retained a Royal Jester as well as a Royal Poet? They both had their origin in times of equal rudeness and simplicity; and as much wisdom would have been displayed in abolishing the one as the other” (Wu 2007, 1: 72). Leigh Hunt adopted a similarly mocking tone in the Examiner for September 26, 1813 (609–11). When the new poet laureate’s first celebratory poem, Carmen Triumphale, appeared in the Morning Chronicle on January 8, 1814, Hazlitt used the occasion to recall the days of Southey’s “Jacobin enthusiasm” (Wu 2008, 157). Like Coleridge, Southey had written to Lord Liverpool— though what was supposed to be a confidential memorandum had somehow been seen by Hazlitt (Speck 158). He would not have seen Southey’s letter to Charles Wynn in January 1813, reporting that he had sent the Quarterly Review “some remarks upon the moral and political state of the populace, and the alarming manner in which Jacobinism (disappearing from the educated classes) has sunk into the mob” (L&C 4: 12). In 1816—fixed in European folk-memory as “the year without a summer”— Southey had written to Grosvenor Bedford, on

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 72

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

73

September 8, amid anxieties about poor harvests and postwar social distress: “Make by all means the utmost use of the press in directing the public opinion, but impose some curb upon its licence, or all will be in vain” (L&C 4: 203). And on October 2, he wrote to John Rickman: “It is perfectly clear that the more we can improve the condition of the lower classes, the greater the number of customers we procure for the home market; and that if we can make people pay taxes instead of claiming poor rates, the wealth as well as the security of the state is increased” (L&C 4: 214). In 1817, while Coleridge invited comparisons with his youthful radicalism, by publishing Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, Southey was faced with a pirated publication of his previously unpublished verse tragedy, Wat Tyler, written in 1794 while he was still a student at Oxford. The pirated edition from the London publishers, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, was already being advertised in the Morning Chronicle, as Southey saw in mid-February. It did not identify the author. But a month later, another edition appeared (according to the advertisement pasted into the Bristol Library’s copy) “correctly and literally reprinted, verbatim (not a word being omitted), carefully collated with the Original, and enlarged by the addition of a NEW PREFACE, suited to present circumstances.” This new edition was printed by William Hone, publisher of the Reformists’ Register, which ran from February to October 1817. In the issue of 22 February, Hone identifies the author of Wat Tyler as Southey, whom he describes as “a gentleman of credit and renown, and, until he became Poet Laureate, a Poet” (Madden 232). The preface to Hone’s edition, evidently written by the publisher himself, not only quotes the opening words of Southey’s Quarterly Review article on parliamentary reform (QR 16: 225–77), but also gives examples of his poems from the 1797 collection, and from the Annual Review of 1800 (Hone ed. v, x–xv). Hone also mocks Coleridge’s attempted defense of Southey, spread over four issues of the Courier, from March 17 to April 2, 1817: Mr COLERIDGE, who was one of Mr ROBERT SOUTHEY’s memorable Pantisocracy, instead of proceeding to his friend’s assistance, and recommending quiet, on a sudden “arose and saddled his ass.” And preached lay sermons in the Courier to prove to all the world that Mr ROBERT SOUTHEY, as an old Poet, and a young Laureate, had a right to a pension . . . (Hone vii)

Whatever the shortcomings of Coleridge’s defense of the poet laureate— and Southey can hardly have relished much of what he

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 73

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

74

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

wrote—the subversive impact of Wat Tyler was likely to be greater in 1817 (the year after the Spa Fields Riots) than it would have been if published in 1797. As Coleridge rightly recalled, “The greater part of the speeches were even then designed to be read by imagined oppressors, not by the oppressed” (CW 3 pt 2: 458). Accounts of Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt against the government of Richard II inevitably awakened French Revolutionary echoes. After storming Rochester Castle, the rebels sacked the archbishop’s palace at Canterbury and liberated John Ball from the archbishop’s prison. From Maidstone, Wat Tyler led the rebels to London, where they burned down the prisons of Southwark, Newgate, and the Fleet; pillaged Lambeth Palace; sacked and burned John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace; dragged the treasurer and the archbishop from the safety of the Tower and murdered them on Tower Hill. The king (still only 14) had met the rebels at Mile End, and conceded Tyler’s demands for the abolition of serfdom and the removal of restrictions on labor and trade. But at a further conference at Smithfield, Tyler added new demands including the confiscation of ecclesiastical estates and the introduction of social equality. In the altercation that followed, Tyler was killed by the mayor, and in the following year Parliament revoked the Mile End concessions. Wat Tyler rates only a brief mention in the Dictionary of National Biography. Southey’s Wat Tyler has scarcely opened before one of the rebels launches his attack on taxes in general, and on the hated poll tax in particular: Curse on these taxes— one succeeds another— Our ministers— panders of a king’s will— Drain all our wealth away—waste it in revels— And lure, or force away our boys, who should be The props of our old age—to fill their armies, And feeds the crows of France! year follows year, And still we madly prosecute the war. (Hone 5–6)

George III could hardly be accused of presiding over a riotous or licentious court. But by 1817 the royal court was that of the prince regent, who had promoted Southey’s appointment as laureate. Wat Tyler’s rhetoric is soon targeting the owners of large estates, reminding his followers that “your hard toil / Manures their fertile fields—you plow the earth, / You sow the corn, you reap the ripen’d harvest,— / They riot on the produce!” (Hone 21). John Ball, the

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 74

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

75

rescued priest, reinforces Tyler’s denunciations with an appeal to the New Testament: The Son of God Came not to you in power—humble in mien, Lowly in heart, the man of Nazareth Preach’d mercy, justice, love: “Woe unto ye, Ye that are rich:— if that ye would be sav’d, Sell that ye have, and give unto the poor.” So taught the Saviour.

The priest passes from Gospel teaching to a paean to the bounty of the natural world, and the bold assertion: “There is enough for all” (28–9). Jack Straw resorts anachronistically to Natural Rights vocabulary, uttering the threat: “We will assert our rights” (31). Wat Tyler finally addresses the king: Do you not claim the country as your own? Do you not call the venison of the forest, The birds of heaven, your own?— prohibiting us, Even though in want of food, to seize the prey Which Nature offers?—King! Is this just? Think you we do not feel the wrongs we suffer? The hour of retribution is at hand, And tyrants tremble— mark me, King of England. (44)

At the end of this speech comes the fatal stabbing of Tyler by Mayor Walworth, but John Ball gets the last word at his trial, addressing the judge: What does the government avail the peasant? Would not he plow his field, and sow the corn, Aye, and in peace enjoy the harvest too; Would not the sunshine and the dew descend, Tho’ neither King nor Parliament existed? (Hone 67)

Well might Southey’s Richard II exclaim, “This is treason!” William Hone, himself a proponent of parliamentary reform who would be imprisoned three times for sedition, saw no need to emphasize the seditious flavor of Wat Tyler. And Hazlitt’s demolition of Southey in the Examiner is famous for its sustained and devastating contrast: “The author of Wat Tyler was an Ultra-Jacobin; the author of

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 75

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

76

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Parliamentary Reform is an Ultra-Royalist; the one is a frantic demagogue; the other is a court tool . . .” (Wu 2008: 206). Southey was used to Hazlitt’s gibes, but the speech delivered in Parliament by the Dissenting MP, William Smith, during the 1817 debate on the Seditious Assemblies Bill, was another matter. Smith entertained the House of Commons by alternately reading extracts from Wat Tyler and Southey’s Quarterly Review article opposing parliamentary reform. Though not naming the author, Smith charges him with “the settled determined malignity of a renegade” (The Times, March 15, 1817). Southey’s defense was a 45-page Letter to William Smith, published by Murray. After lamely sheltering behind the supposed anonymity of Quarterly Review reviewers, Southey addresses the charge of apostasy. Wat Tyler had been written “under the influence of opinions which I have long since outgrown, and repeatedly disclaimed, but for which I have never affected to feel either shame or contrition.” It was written when republicanism was confined to a very small number of the educated classes; when those who were known to entertain such opinions were exposed to personal danger from the populace; and when a spirit of Anti-jacobinism was predominant, and which I cannot characterize more truly than by saying, that it was as unjust and intolerant, though not quite as ferocious, as the Jacobinism of the present day. (Letter 1817, 6–7)

Wat Tyler had been “the verses of a boy, of which he thought no more than of his school exercises” (13). Were he writing the drama in 1817, he would have found “much to add, but little to alter.” He would have “set forth with equal force the oppressions of the feudal system, the excesses of the insurgents, and the treachery of the government, and hold up the errors and crimes which were then committed, as a warning for this and for future ages. I should write as a man, not as a stripling” (15). While that “stripling” had imbibed the republican opinions of the day, he had, Southey insists, “escaped the atheism and the leprous immorality which generally accompanied them.” The much-ridiculed scheme of pantisocracy had as its purpose, “to retire with a few friends into the wilds of America, and there lay the foundations of a community, upon what we believed to be the political system of Christianity.” The scheme had been “much talked of” in the Dissenting circles in which Smith moved, and he had no need to search in Wat Tyler for Southey’s youthful political principles: “They are expressed in poems which have been frequently reprinted, and are continually on sale; no alterations have ever been made for the purpose of withdrawing, concealing or extenuating them” (19–22).

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 76

8/22/2011 6:31:39 PM

Jacobins a n d Jesu i ts

77

Which of his youthful opinions had Southey since changed? He gives his answer: He has ceased to believe that old monarchical countries are capable of republican forms of government. He has ceased to think that he understood the principles of government, and the nature of man and society, before he was one and twenty years of age. He has ceased to suppose, that men who neither cultivate their intellectual nor their moral faculties can understand them at any age. He has ceased to wish for revolutions even in countries where great alteration is to be desired, because he has seen that the end of anarchy is military despotism. (Letter 1817: 24)

But he has not ceased to “love liberty with his whole heart and with all his soul and with all his strength; he has not ceased to detest tyranny wherever it exists, and in whatever form.” Nor has he ceased to “sympathize with those who were engaged in the defence of their country and in a righteous cause.” And, with a thrust at Hazlitt and the Examiner and their continued hero-worship of Napoleon, he could confidently claim that “at no time of my life have I held any opinions like those of the Buonapartists and Revolutionists of the present day” (24–6). Southey had been consistent in pursuing the one object of contributing, as far as he could, to “the removal of those obstacles by which the improvement of mankind is impeded.” This, he declares, “has been the pole star of my course” (27). He is candidly explicit about what such a social agenda entails. There could be “no safety with a populace half Luddite, half Lazzaroni.” Britain was far from “that state in which any thing resembling equality would be possible; but we are arrived at that state in which the extremes of inequality are become intolerable.” And even less equivocally, “The condition of the populace, physical, moral and intellectual must be improved . . . It is the People at this time who stand in need of reformation, not the Government” (30–1). What was needed was “the great boon of parochial education, so connected with the Church as to form part of the Establishment,” which would provide “a bulwark to the State as well as to the Church.” Savings banks should be “generally introduced” and the government should embark on “a liberal expenditure in public works.” Nothing was more senseless at a time of economic distress than “retrenchment in the public expenditure” (35–6). Southey was justified in remarking that his critics “had turned their faces toward the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking Eastward still,” while he had altered his position “as the world went round” (28). But Hazlitt retorted that the sun came round to the east again— and he shot the barb that “the crime of Mr William Smith and others,

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 77

8/22/2011 6:31:40 PM

78

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

against whom this high-priest of impertinence levels his anathemas, is in not being Mr Southey” (Wu 1998, 4: 175). The relevance of Wat Tyler to the Catholic Emancipation debate lies in Milner’s Letters to a Prebendary, which reached its seventh edition in 1822. Milner condemns the Peasants’ Revolt as the offspring of the heretical and politically subversive John Wycliffe and the Lollards. Milner’s adversary, Prebendary John Sturges of Winchester, in writing on Wycliffe, had conceded that “there might be some mixture of what was exceptionable in his opinions.” To this masterpiece of understatement, Milner responds: Which, I pray you, Sir, of the inflammatory orators or writers of the day has approached to the seditious excesses of Wycliff, where he teaches the people, that if they can discover any mortal sin, that is to say, any signal violation of sobriety, chastity, piety, meekness or humility in their rector, bishop, magistrate, or sovereign, they are at liberty to disclaim his authority, and depose him if it is in their power? (69–70)

Milner lists nine subversive Wycliffian doctrines. And pointing to the simultaneous outbreak of Wat Tyler’s rebellion in Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, notes that “this time was no other than the week for celebrating the institution of the Holy Eucharist [Feast of Corpus Christi] which is well known to have been the chief article of the received faith that Wycliff declaimed against.” Milner adds: “It is clear from our ancient historians, that the subsequent sedition which marked this and the following reigns, are equally to be ascribed to the pestiferous doctrines of these democratical reformers” (73). Milner argues that Richard II’s marriage to a Bohemian princess “caused Wycliff’s doctrines to be wafted thither,” and that John Hus and Jerome of Prague were not put to death “until the doctrines of that heresy were proved by their effects, as well as by arguments, to be utterly inconsistent with the peace of society and the very existence of civil government” (75). And in his swift and pseudonymous response to Southey’s Book of the Church, Milner asks whether “the dignitaries, whose favour the Poet courts, will echo back his applause of the fore-runners of the Anabaptists and Regicides” (Merlin 26). In Milner’s eyes, the Lollards, like the Albigenses, were as destructive of civil society as they were of the church (see chapter 7).

9780230115132_05_ch04.indd 78

8/22/2011 6:31:40 PM

5

E n d of C on t rov e r s y ? Mon k s, Fr i a r s, M e t hodist s

Milner’s End of Religious Controversy, written in 1801–2, was first

published in 1818. He had intended it as a reply to Beilby Porteus’s Brief Confutation of the Errors of the Church of Rome (1796), when Porteus was bishop of Chester. But by 1802, Porteus was bishop of London, and Milner had already created a stir with his Letters to a Prebendary (1800), addressed to Dr. John Sturges and incidentally attacking the latitudinarian former bishop of Winchester, Benjamin Hoadly. Bishop Samuel Horsley, who himself moved in 1802 from Rochester to St. Asaph, had spoken in the House of Lords against the Bill designed to subject English and émigré monastic institutions to stricter regulation. The Milner–Sturges confrontation had been cited by the lord chancellor during the debate, and Horsley understandably advised Milner not to excite further controversy with his proposed new publication (Mather 109–12). Porteus died in 1809, and when a fifth edition of his Confutation appeared posthumously in 1815, Milner evidently decided to wait no longer. The End of Religious Controversy was not only a delayed answer to Porteus, but a wide-ranging answer to Protestant critics of Catholicism as well. As the title suggests, it was meant to be conclusive and unanswerable. Instead it re-ignited debate. Two years earlier it had been possible to conclude that both sides had argued themselves to a standstill. In May 1816, the British Critic began a 20-page review by reporting somewhat smugly: “It must be a source of much satisfaction to every thinking mind, that the great question of CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION, which has now for so

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 79

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

80

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

many years agitated and divided the British nation, is no longer a rallying point of political animosity or a watchword of contending factions.” The reviewer contrasted this happy state of affairs with May 1813 “when Mr Grattan’s bill, with Mr Canning’s amendment, was expected to have been carried through the House with a triumphant majority” (BC 2nd series 5: 515–16). Yet in May 1817, the same journal was recommending a newly published collection of documents to the notice of “Lords Harrowby, Castlereagh and Grenville, Mr Canning, and other leading advocates of concession.” The reviewer hoped the noble lords would discover that their arguments were fallacious and “the reasonings of Lord Liverpool, Mr Peel and the other supporters of the Church and Constitution fully confirmed” (7: 500–1). The British Critic went on to quote Peel’s denial that Catholics admitted to Parliament would have the same loyal commitment as Protestants (7: 505). Later that year, it would itself echo Peel’s theme when reviewing a Catholic translation of the New Testament, first published by the English College at Rheims in 1582: The tolerance of the Church of England is such, that its enemies cannot accuse it; the intolerance of the Church of Rome is such that its friends cannot defend it. By the Church of England, the principle of persecution is abhorred; by the Church of Rome it is acknowledged; and although by her advocates it may be kept out of sight, to suit the convenience of the moment, yet never has the principle been abandoned, or its practice forgotten. (BC 2nd series 8: 296)

It epitomizes the argument that Southey would sustain for more than 30 years. By 1818 Milner had two bishops in his sights. In the “address” to Bishop Burgess of St. David’s, which prefaced the finally published End of Controversy, Milner explains that the book had grown out of his public disagreement with Dr. Sturges. “That controversy having made some noise in public and even in the House of Commons,” Milner had allowed Horsley (“a predecessor of your Lordship, then the light and glory of the Established Church”) to dissuade him from publication. So “these letters which otherwise would have been published fifteen years ago, have slept ever since” (Milner 1818: iii–iv). Milner had published them now because of “the increased and increasing virulence of the press against Catholics,” and because of “the number and acrimony” of his own public opponents on religious questions.” Among the opponents listed are: the dean of Peterborough, the dean and two prebendaries of Winchester, and Dr. Benjamin Hoadly (junior), whose father, successively bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 80

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

81

Winchester, Milner had attacked in his History of Winchester and Letters to a Prebendary. To these and a dozen other names, Milner adds “numerous anonymous riflemen” in the Monthly Magazine, Antijacobin Review, the Protestant Advocate, and “other periodical works including newspapers” (iv–vii). Milner’s more immediate focus is on Thomas Burgess’s newly published Protestants’ Catechism, which (says Milner) was not provoked by any recent Catholic attack on the Established Church, or on Protestantism in general. Yet the bishop “comes forward in his Episcopal mitre” bearing in his hands a new catechism, which teaches Protestants “to hate, and persecute their elder brethren, the authors of their Christianity, and civilization” (vii–viii, Milner’s emphasis). Milner is particularly disturbed by Burgess’s repeated quotations from Milton, who (as secretary to the council of the Long Parliament) is “a Puritan regicide” in Milner’s rogues’ gallery. The first of Burgess’s Miltonic extracts (with Milner’s emphasis) is that “Popery is not to be tolerated, either in public or in private, and that it must be thought how to remove it, and hinder the growth thereof.” For Milner, “it breathes the whole persecuting spirit of the sixteenth century, and calls for the fines and forfeitures, dungeons and halters of Elizabeth’s reign” (viii–ix). He notes that the Catholics of England and Ireland—“more than a quarter of his Majesty’s European subjects”— are accused by the bishop of “acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Pope in defiance of the laws, and of the allegiance due to their rightful Sovereign.” And this (Milner complains) although Burgess “well knows that they have abjured the Pope’s jurisdiction in all civil and temporal cases, which is all that the King, Lords and Commons require of them in their acts of 1791 and [in Ireland] 1793” (1818: ix–x, Milner’s emphasis). The bishop describes Catholic opposition to a royal veto on ecclesiastical appointments as “Treasonable by Statute,” though such royal interference, Milner recalls, is “equally opposed in the appointment of their respective Pastors by all Protestant Dissenters” (x). In the bishop’s so-called catechism, Milner cannot find a word about “Christ or God, or any doctrinal matter, except that ‘they, who do not hold the worship of the Church of Rome to be idolatrous, are not Protestants, whatever they profess to be.’” That, says Milner, is “a sentence of excommunication.” There are no moral or practical lessons in the text, except that “every Member of Parliament’s conscience is pledged against the Catholic claims.” Had the catechism been published anonymously, Milner suggests, “it might be supposed to be a posthumous work of Lord George Gordon.” Had it been traced back to Wales, “it would certainly be attributed to some itinerant

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 81

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

82

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Jumper, rather than to a successor of St Dubritius and St David” (xiv). Burgess’s catechism itself asks (44), “What is it that excludes Pagans, Jews and Mahometans from our Churches, and from Parliament?” The bishop’s answer—“Religion”— prompts Milner to ask, “Whose religion?” It is not (says Milner) the religion of “the Vedam, or the Talmud or the Koran, which prohibits its respective votaries from sitting and voting in the British Parliament if they can get entrance into it.” Nor is there anything in Protestantism that “prevents a man who publicly proclaims Mahomet or publicly denies Jesus Christ, or who publicly worships the obscene and blood-stained idol Juggernaut, from being a member of either House of the Legislature.” The only religious qualification for sitting in Parliament, is their witnessing under oath that “there is no transubstantiation in the Mass” (Milner 1818: xxxi). The main text of the End of Religious Controversy (Milner 1841) does not focus on the question of Catholic Emancipation, but follows the chapter sequence of Bishop Porteus’s Brief Confutation. After a first part (Part I) of 12 “letters,” seven of them opposing Protestant insistence on seeing the scriptures as only rule of faith, Milner turns in Part II to examine four marks of the true Church: unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolic continuity. Part III comprises answers to Protestant charges—in effect Porteus’s charges— against Catholic tradition. The most notable accusations are those of idolatry (whether in respect of images, transubstantiation, or the worship of the saints) and what Porteus characterizes as the Catholic practice of “punishing whom they please to call heretics, with penalties, tortures and deaths” (Porteus 18–20). Milner’s response to Protestant claims that Rome is a persecuting church confronts one of Southey’s most persistent charges. But a preliminary assessment of Milner’s polemical methods is first needed. Milner proves a formidable antagonist, showing (as one would expect) a close knowledge of Biblical texts, not least in the original Greek of the New Testament. He is familiar with the works of key historians and theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, and is scrupulous in giving references for his sources. There is more than an element of pedantic point-scoring, as when he argues that allowing communion in only one kind (bread) to the laity is a matter merely of discipline, and that the Catholic Church has in certain circumstances authorized communion in both kinds or in wine only. Whereas English Protestants, following the King James Bible, quote St. Paul’s words on the Eucharist—“Whoseover shall eat this bread AND drink the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 82

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

83

of the Lord”—Milner points to the Greek, which has the disjunctive “or” (not the conjunctive “and”), as evidence that the bread and wine could be seen as alternatives. The English version’s alteration of the original Greek is (we are told) at odds not only with the Vulgate, but with the translation of the Swiss Protestant Reformer, Theodore Beza (Milner 1841: 301). Quite apart from questions of translation, Milner insists on the need for an “authorized judge” to interpret scripture— even if Christ had “appointed the bare written word for the rule of faith.” This was a response to Porteus who had asked: “What need of an infallible decision in matters of faith? Why is it not sufficient that every man determine for himself, as well as he can in this world, and that God, the only infallible judge, will determine with equity concerning us all in the next?” And Porteus adds, echoing Wycliffe, that ministers of the Gospel may forfeit the trust of the faithful: “We are no means bound to follow our spiritual guides into opinions plainly false, or plainly practices sinful, than to follow a common guide down a precipice, or into the sea, let our own knowledge of the way be ever so little, or the other’s pretences to infallible skill in it ever so great” (Porteus 18–20). Milner responds by pointing to what happened at the Reformation: “No sooner than their progenitor, Martin Luther, set up the tribunal of private judgment on the sense of scripture, in opposition to the authority of the Church, ancient and modern, than his disciples, proceeding on this principle, undertook to prove, from plain texts of the bible, that his own doctrines were erroneous, and that the Reformation itself wanted reforming” (Milner 1841: 34–5). Milner’s tone is uncompromising, but it is undeniable that it was the Church that decided what the Bible was. It was not until the end of the fourth century that the approved canon of scripture was established, and it was then fixed (says Milner) “by the tradition and authority of the Church, declared in the third council of Carthage and a decretal of pope Innocent I” (1841: 45, Milner’s emphasis). Milner defines the Catholic rule of faith as “not merely the written word of God, but the whole word of God, both written and unwritten; in other words, scripture and tradition, and these propounded and explained by the Catholic Church” (53, Milner’s emphasis). This contrasts with the heading of Porteus’s fourth chapter: “Tradition Exploded.” Arguing from the undoubted corrupting tendency of truths passed on by word of mouth, Porteus writes: “An original account [i.e. Scripture] is always to be depended on in the first place.” Others that come later may be used “to illustrate and confirm the former; but wherever they appear to contradict it, must be rejected without scruple” (Porteus 10).

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 83

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

84

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

The church’s claim to infallibility had been derided by Porteus in drawing an analogy with Judaism: “The Jewish church, we know, was not infallible. For they denied their Saviour, and it was by following tradition that they came to do it. How then does it appear that the Christian must be more infallible?” (Porteus 12). Milner illustrates the argument for infallibility of doctrine by analogy with the use of our reason to find the best lawyer or medical practitioner for our needs. Milner asks whether, having done so, we “dispute with the former about the quality of medicines, or with latter about forms of law?” The Catholic similarly makes use of his reason “to observe which, among the rival communions, is the Church that Christ established and promised to remain with”; and on the basis of “the plain acknowledged marks which this Church bears, he trusts his soul to an unerring judgement, in preference to his own fluctuating opinion.” The infallibility of the Church’s teaching is “merely the aid of God’s holy Spirit, to enable her truly to decide what her faith is and ever has been, in such articles as have been made known to her by scripture and tradition.” The Catholic Church does not presume to “dictate an exposition of the whole bible, because she has no tradition concerning a very great portion of it” (Milner 1841: 82–4). In describing other marks of the church, Milner attacks the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which (he claims, with some justice) was originally grounded upon the pernicious and impious principles, that God is the author and necessitating cause, as well as the everlasting punisher of sin; that man has no freewill to avoid sin; and that justification and salvation are the effects of an enthusiastic persuasion, under the name of faith, that the person is actually justified and saved, independently of any real belief in the revealed truths, independently of hope, charity, repentance for sin, benevolence to our fellow-creatures, loyalty to our king and country, or any other virtue . . . (Milner 1841: 139)

In support of this severe characterization of the Calvinist tradition, Milner quotes Luther’s remark that “if God foresaw that Judas would be a traitor, Judas necessarily became a traitor; nor was it in his power to be otherwise.” What is implicit in Luther is explicit in Calvin, whose “impious and immoral system,” was adopted not only by Anglicans, but by “the numerous and diversified societies of Methodists.” And where Calvinist severities are abandoned by Protestant churches, they give way to Arianism or Socinianism—“impieties, which formerly they condemned as ‘damnable heresies,’ and punished with fire and fagot” (Milner 1841: 140, 144–5).

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 84

8/22/2011 6:31:44 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

85

Southey would castigate Calvinist doctrines with equal vehemence in his Book of the Church (e.g. 2: 398–9, 456–7). And his Life of John Wesley (1820) would exhibit as much distaste for instantaneous conversion (1: chapter 11) as is shown by the three-page postscript on Methodism that Milner added to his delineation of the marks of the true Church. Milner’s conclusion is that whatever theological differences there might be between Wesley and Whitefield, “still the tenet of instantaneous justification, without repentance, charity or other good works,” remained common to both (146–9). But Southey would not have endorsed Milner’s remedy—unquestioning trust in the unchangeability of the Catholic Church: If this [church] was once holy, namely in the apostolic age, it is holy still; because the Church never changes her doctrine, nor suffers any person in her communion to change it, or to question any part of it. Hence the adorable mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, &c. taught by Christ and his apostles, and defined by the four first general councils, are now as firmly believed by every real Catholic, throughout her whole communion, as they were when those councils were held. (145, Milner’s emphasis)

This very boast of unchangeability would be turned against Catholicism by its Protestant critics, and held to be justification for raking up the papal politics and the Catholic practices of the thirteenth century. On the theme of sanctity, Milner reminds Protestants that all the saints in the Anglican calendar, in whose names Anglican churches are dedicated, “lived and died strict members of the Catholic Church.” And he again instances Luther, who “acknowledges St Antony, St Bernard, St Dominic, St Francis, St Bonaventure &c to have been saints, though avowed catholics and defenders of the Catholic Church against the heretics and schismatics of their time” (157). Milner repeats the claim made in his Letters to a Prebendary (95–125) that the Protestant Reformation damaged morality. In England, for example, where writers boast of the orderly manner in which the change of religion was carried on, “it nevertheless most unjustly and sacrilegiously seized upon and destroyed in the reign of Henry VIII 645 monasteries, 90 colleges and 110 hospitals, besides the bishopric of Durham.” And under Edward VI, “it destroyed 2,374 colleges, chapels or hospitals.” Such, Milner adds, “were the fruits of sanctity every where produced by this Reformation” (Milner 1841: 159–60). He finds proof of the sanctity of the Catholic Church in its profusion of miracles— a particular target of Southey’s critique of Catholicism,

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 85

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

86

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

whether in England, Spain and Portugal, or Brazil. Why, Milner asks, should Protestants accept the miracles of the New Testament—“those main props of the gospel and our common Christianity”—but not those of the later Church? (170). Yet sometimes Milner’s own seeming credulity strains the sympathy of those most anxious to defend him, as when he reports: “I have had satisfactory proof that the astonishing catastrophe of Louis XVI and his queen, in being beheaded on a scaffold, was foretold by a nun of Fougères, sister Nativité, 20 years before it happened” (172). Southey, writing in the Quarterly Review for March 1826, would challenge the claims made for Sister Nativité’s prophetic powers (QR 33: 375–419). Milner’s exposition of the catholicity or universality of the Church is unequivocal: It consists of the most numerous body of Christians ; it is more or less diffused wherever Christianity prevails ; and it has visibly existed since the time of the apostles. Hence, dear Sir, when you hear me glorying in the name of Catholic, you are to understand me as equivalently proclaiming thus: “I am not a Lutheran, nor a Calvinist, nor a Whitefieldite, nor a Wesleyan; I am not of the church of England, nor of the kirk of Scotland, nor of the consistory of Geneva: I can tell the place where, and the time when, each of these sects began; and I can describe the limits within which they are respectively confined; but I am a member of that great Catholic Church, which was planted by Christ and his apostles, and has been spread throughout the world, and which still constitutes the main stock of Christianity.” (Milner’s emphasis 187–8)

And to Protestant insistence on the existence of an invisible church— “not visible until it was unveiled by Luther”—which had “subsisted in the hearts of the true faithful ever since the days of the apostles,” Milner answers brusquely that “an invisible church is no church at all” (192–3). As for the visible Protestants before Luther’s Protestantism, dismissively listed as “the Arians, the Nestorians, the Eutychians, the Monotholytes, the Albigenses, the Wycliffites and the Hussites,” their very variety is an argument against them. Yet the followers of Wycliffe and Hus, though they were “the levelling and sanguinary Jacobins of the times and countries in which they lived,” were in other respects Catholics, “professing their belief in the seven sacraments, the mass, the invocation of the saints, purgatory, &c” (194). Milner had denounced both the Albigenses and the Wycliffites or Lollards in Letters to a Prebendary (68–77).

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 86

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

87

The Anglican Church created at the Reformation, Milner predictably claims, cannot trace the direct descent of its priests from the apostles. And, given the context of the Catholic Emancipation debate, he provocatively declares: “Now, though I sincerely and cheerfully ascribe to my sovereign all the temporal and civil power, jurisdiction, rights and authority, which the constitution and laws ascribe to him, I cannot believe that Christ appointed any temporal prince to feed his mystical flock, or any part of it, or to exercise the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven at his discretion” (1841: 216). The king of England, as supreme governor of the Established Church, can therefore claim no spiritual authority over non-Anglicans, and there can be “no apostolical succession of ministry in the established church, more than in other congregations or societies of Protestants” (1841: 216, Milner’s emphasis). In the final part of the End of Religious Controversy, Milner responds to what he sees as the misunderstandings and deliberate calumnies of Protestants. Addressing his Protestant correspondent, John Brown, and the members of his society, who are supposed to have been almost persuaded by the preceding letters, Milner responds to “the heavy charges, particularly of superstition and idolatry” brought by “our eminent divines, and especially by the bishop of London (Dr Porteus) and never, that we have heard of, refuted or denied” (229–30). Milner is anxious to distinguish between articles of faith, with which all Catholics must agree, and “mere scholastic opinions, of which every individual may judge for himself.” He also distinguishes between “the authorized liturgy and the discipline of the Church, and the unauthorized devotions and practices of particular persons.” He stresses these distinctions because Protestant controversialists “dress up a hideous figure, composed of their own misrepresentations, or else of those undefined opinions and unauthorized practices which they call Popery ; and then to amuse their readers or hearers with exposing the deformity of it and pulling it to pieces” (231–2). Milner challenges the consciences of those Anglican bishops who are guilty of such rhetorical methods. If their “clamorous charges” against their Catholic neighbors turn out to be calumnies, “what will it avail their authors, that they have answered the temporary purpose of preventing the emancipation of Catholics, and of rousing the popular hatred and fury against them?” (238–420). Milner’s response to Protestant censures of such Catholic devotional practices as invocation of the saints, veneration of images, transubstantiation, the sacrament of penance, and belief in purgatory— together with the associated practices

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 87

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

88

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

of papal indulgences and prayers for the dead—need not be followed in detail. In the 1841 edition (which Southey would not have seen, as he was by then in his final illness), “letters” on these topics are interspersed with replies to the Rev. Richard Grier, vicar of Templeboden, County Cork, whose Reply to the End of Controversy: as discussed in a correspondence between a supposed society of Protestants and the Rev. John Milner appeared in 1821. The Protestant charge that the Roman Church is inherently a persecuting church is central to Southey’s critique of Catholicism and to the debate on Catholic Emancipation. Milner portrays his Protestant critics as vying with each other “in the vehemence and bitterness of the terms by which they endeavour to fix this most odious charge of cruelty and murder on the Catholic Church.” And he caricatures the arguments— while perhaps hardly exaggerating the rhetoric— of those who oppose Catholic Emancipation: “If you admit the Papists, they cry, to equal rights, these wretches must and will certainly murder you as soon as they can: the fourth Lateran council has established the principle, and the bloody queen Mary has acted upon it.” Observing that “many heresies are subversive of the established governments, the public peace and natural morality,” Milner argues that, although there have been “persecuting laws” in many Catholic states, the Church itself, “so far from claiming, actually disclaims the power of persecuting.” As an illustration of the persecuting policy and practices of the civil arm, Milner returns to the fourth Lateran Council, the political character of which he emphasizes. It was summoned (he observes) to promote “the common cause of Christianity and human nature ; namely the extirpation of the Manichean heresy,” which preached the dual deities of the Gnostics: one “the creator of devils, of animal flesh, of wine, of the old testament &c”; the other, “the author of good spirits and the new testament &c.” Among the teachings Milner attributes to the Manichean heresy are “that unnatural lusts were lawful, but not the propagations of the human species”— a reference to their alleged homosexual practices (1841: 431–3). The Council was attended by “the Greek and the Latin Emperors; the kings of England, France, Hungary, the Sicilies, Arragon, Cyprus and Jerusalem; and the representatives of a vast many other principalities and states.” The Council was in effect (says Milner) “a congress of Christendom, temporal as well as spiritual.” The Albigenses of Languedoc were themselves supported by what Milner calls “powerful counts” and other “feudatory princes,” together with “numerous bodies of banditti,” whom they hired for the purpose. The rebels “set

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 88

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

89

their sovereigns at defiance, carrying fire and sword through their dominions, murdering their subjects, particularly the clergy, burning the churches and monasteries; in short, waging open war with them, and at the same time with Christianity, morality and human nature itself: casting the bibles into the jakes, profaning the altar-plate, and practising their detestable rites for the extinction of the human species.” Milner insists that the “exterminating canon” was never put into force “against any other heretics except the Albigenses” (433–4). Well might Coleridge as “Friend” in Sancti Dominici Pallium exclaim: “Enough of Milner! We’re agreed / Who now defends would then have done the deed.” Southey in his Book of the Church would lay equal blame on the Gnostic’s “marvellous mixture of revealed truth and the devices of man’s insane imagination,” and on both orders of friars, who (he says) “engaged in the bloody service of extirpating the Albigenses by fire and sword” (BoC 1: 304, 322–31). Milner suggests that English Protestants are less concerned with the Albigenses than with “the Smithfield fires of queen Mary’s reign.” He refers readers to Letters to a Prebendary (Letter 10) and his History of Winchester (1: 296), where he thinks he had “unanswerably demonstrated” that if Mary was a persecutor, “it was not in virtue of the tenets of her religion that she persecuted” (1841: 434). During almost the first two years of her reign, “no Protestant was molested on account of his religion,” and when, in the wake of Wyatt’s rebellion and other incursions, Bishops Gardiner and Bonner of the Queen’s Council pressed for the adoption of the harsher penalties of stake and scaffold, “none of them pretended that the doctrine of the Catholic Church required such a measure.” On the contrary, all their arguments were “grounded on arguments of state policy.” Such reasoning echoes Milner’s insistence in Letters to a Prebendary that Huss was put to death, not by the Church but by the secular arm (75). Milner does concede that persecution was not the way “to diminish either the number or the violence of the enthusiastic insurgents.” With toleration and prudence on the part of the government, he decides, “the paroxysms of the governed would quickly have subsided” (1841: 435). This seems a surprising conclusion for the defender of the Albigensian crusade. More topically, Milner sees no need to answer the calumny that Catholics are “obliged by their religion to be persecutors,” when every Protestant English gentleman on the Grand Tour “has been cordially received by the pope himself, in his metropolis of Rome, where he is both prince and bishop.” How does the Protestants’ own boasted toleration, Milner asks, square with Luther’s outburst: “If we send thieves to the gallows and robbers to the Block, why do we not fall on

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 89

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

90

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

those masters of perdition, the popes, cardinals and bishops, with all our force, and not give over until we have bathed our hands in their blood?” (435–7). Similarly, the Scottish Calvinist reformers, having killed the cardinal archbishop of St. Andrews, “riotously destroyed the churches, monasteries and every thing else which they termed instruments of Popery.” Even before their own religion was established by law, “they condemned the Catholics to capital punishment for the exercise of theirs” (439). And, as in Letters to a Prebendary (117–25), Milner depicts Cranmer as a persecutor in the reigns of both Henry VIII and Edward VI, and portrays Elizabeth as buttressing Protestantism “by the most persecuting laws” (1841: 440–1). Milner’s confident conclusion was hardly likely to mark the end of controversy: If Catholic states and princes have enforced submission to the Church by persecution, they were fully persuaded that there is a divine authority in this Church to decide in all controversies of religion, and that those Christians who refuse to hear her voice, when she pronounces upon them, are obstinate heretics. But on what grounds can Protestants persecute Christians of any description whatsoever? The grand rule and fundamental charter is, that the scriptures were given by God for every man to interpret as he judges best. If, therefore when I hear Christ declaring, take ye and eat, this is my body, I believe what he says, with what consistency can any Protestant require me, by pains or penalties, to swear that I do not believe it, and that to act conformably with this persuasion is idolatry? (447)

Yet Milner ends on a note of optimism, for which the vehemence of his challenge to the late bishop of London hardly prepares his readers. Religious persecution, he predicts, “will not much longer find refuge in this most generous of nations: much less will the many victorious arguments which demonstrate the true Church of Christ, our common mother, who reclaimed us all from the barbarous rites of paganism, be defeated by the calumnious outcry that she herself is a bloody Moloch that requires human victims” (447). Shortly after the publication of Milner’s End of Religious Controversy in 1818, but five years before the Book of the Church appeared, Southey again charged the Catholic Church with maintaining a tradition of persecution. In an article in the Quarterly Review for November 1819 (22: 58–102), he resumes his attack on St. Dominic and the Dominicans, first launched in his 1811 article on the Inquisition (QR 6: 313–57). Southey’s 1819 review of Thomas Fosbrooke’s British Monachism, or Manners of the Monks, and Nuns of England commends the Benedictine Rule for its “mitigated system” suited to averagely

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 90

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

91

devout monks. Southey deplores the fanaticism, not only of the monastic reformers who thought they could improve on the Rule of St. Benedict, but also of the Dominicans. Southey considers that “the most remarkable fanatic” of the age was St. Dominic the Cuirassier, “so named because of an iron cuirass which he wore next to his skin, which was never taken off till it was necessary to replace it by a new.” Dominic’s extraordinary acts of self-flagellation were prompted (says Southey) by the belief “that a sinner could be flogged into a saint, as it has been supposed within our own memory, that a dunce might be whipped into a scholar.” Southey seeks to amuse his readers by computing the number of years that Dominic’s regime of penitential psalms and accompanying lashes would abridge his stay in purgatory. And he asks how Dominic could flog himself effectively while still wearing the never-to-be removed cuirass? (QR 22: 79). Southey decides that “the story bears the stamp of fraud, as well as of folly and madness,” adding that “the church which has accredited it by canonizing the man, whether knave or maniac, or both, thereby encouraging the grossest superstition and the most absurd practices, is implicated in the imposture” (QR 22: 81–2). In the Book of the Church, Southey does not expand on the example of St. Dominic, describing him simply as famous “for flogging himself, with a scourge in each hand, day and night.” Instead he refers readers to the 1819 Quarterly Review, and to the second volume of the History of Brazil (BoC 1: 307n). Southey’s sardonic treatment of St. Dominic is further instanced, in the same Quarterly Review article, by his account of the rivalry between Dominicans and the monastic orders: While the friars were thus rivalling each other in extravagant fables, the elder orders of the Benedictine family (brave liars in their day) found themselves outdone, and the spirit of emulation set their inventive faculties at work. It was revealed to St Dominic, in a vision, that the place of his friars in heaven was under the Virgin Mary’s robe. The Cistercians, on the contrary, maintained stoutly, on the faith of a revelation equally well attested, that this was their place, consequently, the Dominicans could have no right to be there. (QR 22: 87–8)

Yet, as he reaches the Reformation, Southey argues that the sociopolitical advantages provided by the monasteries would have been recognized at the Dissolution, if it had not been for “the rapacity by which that event was forwarded and disgraced.” Besides the encouragement monastic institutions gave to literature, “cases which in our days are consigned to a madhouse found a better asylum in the convent.” They also offered for “ruined fortunes and for broken hearts a

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 91

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

92

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

religious retreat for repentance and affliction which was sanctified by public opinion” (QR 22: 88–9). Thus, Southey regrets the disappearance of nunneries, which he seems to think should have been converted into Protestant establishments. Few people, he decides, could regard the plight of women in contemporary British society, “without regretting that an opportunity for alleviating so much evil should have been neglected.” The postwar economic recession had created a situation where “throughout the middle and lower classes of society, children have been educated for a stage above that in which they were born.” Confronted by this “evil of a redundant population in the educated classes,” so that “every profession and every way of business is overstocked,” Southey can see no remedy but emigration for genteel but impoverished widows and unmarried women. He considers that “the condition of unprotected women is perhaps the greatest evil in our present system of society.” Samuel Richardson, the novelist, had proposed the establishment of Protestant nunneries in every county, in which “single women of small or no fortune might live with all manner of freedom, under such regulations as it would be a disgrace for a modest or good woman not to comply with were she abandoned on her own hands” (QR 22: 90–3). In December 1818, Southey had written to John May: “Another thing needful is some sort of establishment for educated women, which should have the advantages of a convent, without the vows and the superstition” (Ramos 172–3). A year later he told May (Ramos 183–4) that the “purpose” of the Quarterly Review article was “to introduce the subject of the Braybrooke House establishment.” Fosbrooke argued that “monasteries of learned women would be injurious, because they might be much better employed” (QR 22: 95). Southey does not want to create convents of bluestockings, but he commends Lady Isabella King’s institution for single women established in 1816 at Braybrook House, near Bath. The regulations (according to the prospectus, which Southey quotes) were framed “to prevent the institution from being a mere accommodation to the sordid and selfish, or one of the temporary resting-places of the discontented or the whimsical.” It was to be a Protestant and English community (98). If Braybrook House were allowed to fail, Southey warns his readers, “it will immediately pass into the hands of the papists, and be converted into a regular nunnery.” A Catholic school will be set up, and “young women will be perverted and inveigled from their parents, to become the tenants of the Bedlam which is designed for them.” Southey has no doubt that

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 92

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

93

the Catholic priest is skilled in detaching young women from their families: And when he has turned her brain, and separated her for ever from her parents, he congratulates himself upon having one good work more added to his account in the next world, and shuts up the poor victim of delusion for the remainder of her days, to say prayers by the score which she cannot construe, to rise at midnight and attend a service which she cannot understand, to address her supplications not to her Creator and Redeemer, but to Saints, of whom, some were madmen and some knaves, and many are nonentities; to put her trust in crosses and in relics; to practise the grossest idolatry; to believe that the food which is innocent on Thursdays, becomes sinful on Fridays, and, if her devotion aspires to the higher honours of her profession, to torment herself with whipcord, and a horse-hair shirt. (QR 22: 101–2)

It is hard to imagine how more criticisms of the devotional practices of the Catholic Church could be crammed into a single paragraph. Southey never wrote the history of monasticism that he had envisaged as early as January 1803 (L&C 2: 200), but as late as 1839 he would report to John Hookham Frere: “I continue to collect materials for a History of the Monastic Orders for which I have long been preparing, and which I believe to be the most useful work on which I can employ the remainder of my life” (Speck 246). But in the year of his 1819 Quarterly Review article on monasticism, Southey published the third volume of his monumental History of Brazil, which enabled him again to champion the Jesuits at the expense of the monastic orders and the friars. In 1817, he asserted in his review for the Quarterly Review of Henry Koster’s Travels in Brazil: “There is little hope that the Romish church will give up the three great points which render it most injurious to society,— its Infallibility (from which intolerance follows as a necessary consequence)—its auricular Confession— and the Celibacy of its Clergy.” Southey thinks, however, that Catholicism might “easily rid itself of many minor and gross abuses; and of these the mendicant orders are not the least” (QR 16: 346–7). Echoing the earlier volumes of his own History of Brazil, Southey pays a backhanded tribute to the Jesuits: “The Indian slavery has long been abolished, but the Jesuits have been abolished also, and the Indians have reason to regret the extinction of the order whose exemplary conduct towards this unhappy race may almost atone for their offences against civil and religious liberty in Europe” (QR 16: 373). Southey returns to native Brazilian slavery in the third volume of his History. Recording the expulsion of the Jesuits from Asuncion in

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 93

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

94

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

1724, he explains that their opposition to slavery was much resented. Complaints were carried back to Lisbon “that the State was ruined for want of slaves, and that the effect of the Jesuits’ over-scrupulous religion was to deprive the people of bread.” Yet the Jesuits were not deterred by “fear of obloquy or of odium” from doing what they considered their duty: “They perseveringly represented to the Court, that the only remedy for the evils of the State was the total abolition of Indian slavery” (HB 3: 367). Similarly, in Paraguay, the Jesuits secured peace between the rival native tribes, “and the civilization of this extraordinary people” would have been gradually accomplished, if the work of the Jesuits had not been “first interrupted, and finally frustrated, by the unforeseen consequences of a political arrangement between the courts of Lisbon and Madrid” (HB 3: 440–1). The attempted assassination of the king of Portugal in 1758 was blamed on the Jesuits, on evidence obtained under torture. Jesuit property was confiscated throughout Portugal and her colonies. The deportation of the missionaries from Brazil is poignantly described by Southey (3: 546–7). The Jesuits expelled from Paraguay were sent to Italy, where they “employed the melancholy hours of age and exile in preserving, as far as they could from memory alone (for they had been deprived of all their papers), the knowledge which they had so painfully acquired of strange countries, strange manners, savage languages, and savage man” (HB 3: 614). Southey adds his own epitaph on the Jesuits’ missionary endeavor: The Company originated in extravagance and madness: in its progress it was supported and aggrandized by fraud and falsehood; and its history is stained by actions of the darkest die. But it fell with honour. None ever behaved with greater equanimity than the last of the Jesuits; and the extinction of their order was a heavy loss to literature, a great evil to the Catholic world, and an irreparable injury to the tribes of South America. (HB 3: 614 4)

Southey would exhibit a comparably balanced judgment in his twovolume Life of John Wesley published in 1820. The Jesuits appear on the first page, as Southey recalls that they observed “with much complacency” that when Luther began “publicly to preach the abominable errors of his depraved mind, Loyola was converted to the service of the Lord and commenced his war against the Devil.” There are other echoes, as when Southey calls the asceticism of the young Wesley, on his transatlantic voyage to convert the native Americans, “as severe as

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 94

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

95

the rule of a monastic order” (Wesley 1: 80). And Wesley’s admiration for the Moravians, first encountered on that voyage, leads Southey to link Waldensian refugees in Bohemia with John Wycliffe’s teachings, and John Wesley’s encounter with Moravian “Brethren of the Common Life” (1: 176). Unsurprisingly, Southey disapproves of field preaching (a practice not seen in England “since the dissolution of the monastic orders”) and also of the paroxysms it produces in audiences—“a bodily disease, peculiar and infectious” (1: 237). Samuel, the eldest Wesley, is alarmed that his brother John, like George Whitefield, does not use the Anglican liturgy at his openair services. Samuel was afraid, not that the church would excommunicate his brother— discipline was “at too low an ebb”— but that John would excommunicate the church (1: 292–3). Southey’s own verdict on Wesleyan preaching is that the doctrines of instantaneous regeneration, assurance, and sinless perfection “gave just offence, and became still more offensive when they were promulgated by unlettered men with all the vehemence and self-sufficiency of fancied inspiration” (Wesley 2: 23). Southey nevertheless pays tribute to Wesley’s itinerant ministry, traveling on horseback at a time when “there were no turnpikes in England, and no stage–coach which went farther north than York” (2: 51). Unlike Milner (1841: 144), Southey draws a proper distinction between the extreme Calvinism of Whitefield and the universally embracing Arminianism of Wesley (Wesley 1: chapter 11). And he recognizes the social impact of Methodism: “It was among those classes of society whose moral and religious education had been blindly and culpably neglected, that Methodism produced an immediate beneficial effect; and, in cases of brutal depravity and habitual vice, it often produced a thorough reformation, which could not have been brought about by any less powerful agency than that of religious zeal” (2: 528). Lecky would echo those words in his History of England (2: 635–6). The principles of Methodism, Southey concedes, are “strictly loyal,” and the language used by the Methodist Conference “in all times of political disturbance, has been highly honourable to the Society, and in strict conformity to the intentions of the founder.” Yet the good that the Methodist revival did by rendering men and women responsible citizens “is counteracted by separating them from the Church”— an outcome that Wesley “could not foresee, and when he perceived it he could not prevent it” (Wesley 2: 532–4). Although Coleridge never warmed to Wesley, objecting to what he called “the pervading I, I, I, I,” he wrote enthusiastically about Southey’s Life, but with a sting in the tail: “O dear and honoured Southey! This,

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 95

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

96

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the favourite of my Library among many favourites, this is the book which I can read for the 20th time with delight, when I can read nothing else at all—the darling Book is nevertheless an unsafe Book for unsettled minds” (CM 5: 133–4). The British Critic’s review of Southey’s Life of Wesley spanned two issues in its year of publication. The reviewer begins by commending the author’s impartiality: He is not the advocate, or the accuser, but the historian of Methodism: his admiration of the piety, zeal, and perseverance which adorned the heroes of his tale, does not render him blind to their imperfections, or indifferent to the evils which they produced. While recording the progress of a most injurious schism, he has found fresh reasons for adhering to the Church. (BC 14: 2)

The reference to “a most injurious schism” is picked up later in the review, when it has some bearing on Southey’s forthcoming defense of the Anglican Establishment in his Book of the Church. The reviewer concludes that Southey has exposed “the pernicious tendency of that inquisitorial power, which the individuals of this society exercise over each other, and of that discipline, which breaks down the mind, more particularly of its juvenile victims, to one common standard of fanaticism.” And Southey has clearly stated that “Methodism and Schism are inseparable” (BC 14: 165). Ironically, the British Critic proceeds to denounce the sin of schism, without any hint that its words could be equally directed by Catholic apologists against the Church of England, which was itself born of schism. The reviewer is aware that “to insist upon Schism as a deadly sin,” is unfashionable doctrine; and that “those who teach it are generally met by charges of bigotry, and priestcraft, and intolerance.” But this does not deter the reviewer from attributing to Anglican clergy “a commission regularly derived from Christ himself.” That commission not only empowers them to teach Christian doctrines, and to present “the public prayers of the assembled worshippers,” but it also offers those worshippers the sacraments, which, when duly administered and faithfully received, provide “pardon for past sin, and power to lead an holy life in future.” The reviewer wonders what legitimate claim to such rights and powers can be made by those, “who have separated themselves from the only regular channel by which they can be transmitted” (BC 14: 166–7). The words could almost be Milner’s, defining the authority of the Catholic Church.

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 96

8/22/2011 6:31:45 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

97

John Wesley’s own attitude to Catholics was ambiguous— or at least variable. At the time of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, Methodists were suspected of being closet Papists. Frank Baker in “Methodism and the ’45 Rebellion” records rumors circulating in London that Wesley kept two Catholic priests in his house, and was in the pay of Spain (Baker 325–33). By 1780, Wesley was evidently alarmed by the growth in Catholic numbers, which were “increasing daily,” and wrote to London’s Public Advertiser in January of that year to express his concerns. There is evidence of growing hostility between Methodists and Catholics in Ireland, while Wesley in his pamphlet exchanges with Father Arthur O’Leary insists on the unchangeable persecuting tradition of the Catholic Church with a vehemence worthy of Southey himself (Hempton 33–43). Methodist reactions to the Catholic Emancipation debate may be traced in the pages of the Methodist Magazine and Hempton chapter 5. A contemporary Methodist response is Richard Watson’s Observations on Southey’s “Life of Wesley” (1820). An extract from its opening pages is printed in Madden (273–8). Watson was a former editor of the Liverpool Gazette and a Methodist minister for 21 years. The British Critic objected to Southey’s use of the phrase “orthodox of all descriptions,” as it seemed to suggest that “all Christians of every denomination are here placed on a level; and that Churchmen and Dissenters . . . differing as they do from each other on questions of no trivial import, may still be all sound and correct in their opinions.” If only Southey’s “candid and intelligent mind” could be employed in examining “the subject of Church Communion fully, and take the best authorities for its guides,” the reviewer is convinced that Southey’s verdict would be what “every well informed friend of our pure and apostolic Church would wish” (BC 14: 168). It is a seductive invitation, though somewhat removed from the reviewer’s opening commendation of Southey’s impartiality as a historian. Whatever Anglicans and Methodists (then and now) may think, Southey’s account strikes the modern reader as generally fair, and very much at odds with his propagandist writings on Catholicism. Balance and evenhandedness are hardly the dominant features of Southey’s A Vision of Judgment, published by Longman in 1821 to mark the death and imagined apotheosis of George III. The dedication to George IV sets the tone: “We owe much to the House of Brunswick; but to none of that illustrious House than to Your Majesty, under whose government the military renown of Great Britain has been carried to the highest point of glory.” The success against Napoleon “was not more splendid than the cause was good;

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 97

8/22/2011 6:31:46 PM

98

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

and the event was deserved by the generosity, the justice, the wisdom, and the magnanimity of the counsels which prepared it.” Southey continues: The same perfect integrity has been manifested in the whole administration of public affairs. More has been done than was ever before attempted, for mitigating the evils incident to our stage of society; for imbuing the rising race with those sound principles of religion on which the welfare of states has its only secure foundation; and for opening new regions to the redundant enterprize and industry of the people. (A Vision of Judgment vi–vii)

In dedications to royalty, as Dr. Johnson remarked of tombstone inscriptions, “a man is not upon oath.” But Southey could scarcely have believed that the two Georges merited such effusiveness— even though both opposed Catholic Emancipation. The reviewers heaped ridicule on both meter and content. The Literary Gazette for March 17, 1821, pretended to have believed at first that it was a hoax. The poet had “indeed indulged in a Vision, but in the Judgment part of the matter he has been lamentably deficient . . . The sin of Wat Tyler was nothing to this.” A week later, the Literary Chronicle and Literary Review could not decide which to condemn most: “the prosing absurdity of the poem, its wanton political profligacy, or its blasphemy” (Madden 284–5), while Byron, provoked by the preface, wrote his devastating parody entitled The Vision of Judgment. Of the poem’s 843 lines, 160 are devoted to Southey, who is found smugly naming his works (“he would cite but a few / ‘Wat Tyler’—‘Rhymes on Blenheim’—‘Waterloo.’” Byron presents him in the well-worn garb of renegade who “had turn’d his coat— and would have turn’d his skin.” He pictures Southey, fresh from writing Wesley’s life, offering to write Satan’s: In two octavo volumes, nicely bound, With notes and preface, all that most allures The pious purchaser; and there’s no ground For fear, for I can choose my own reviewers. (Complete Poetical Works 6: 342–3)

According to Dorothy Wordsworth in the Selincourt edition of her letters, George IV had sent Southey “a message that he had read the poem twice over, and thanks him for the dedication” (4 pt 1: 30–1).

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 98

8/22/2011 6:31:46 PM

Monks, Fr i a rs, Methodists

99

But Catholic hopes that the new monarch would approve their admission to Parliament were disappointed. In 1821, William Plunket, MP, and the son of an Irish Presbyterian minister, introduced two bills that incorporated a crown veto on Catholic episcopal appointments. The bills passed the Commons, but were defeated in the Lords where the Duke of York’s speech, opposing the measure, “did more to quiet the matter than everything else put together” (Woodward 328). Predictably, Plunket’s Bills were denounced by Milner. In 1821, Richard Grier’s reply to the End of Religious Controversy, provoked Milner’s Vindication of the End of Religious Controversy (1822). This would be answered in turn by Grier’s Defence of the Reply (1825). By then Milner had found a new target in Southey’s Book of the Church.

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 99

8/22/2011 6:31:46 PM

9780230115132_06_ch05.indd 100

8/22/2011 6:31:46 PM

6

L au r e at e H ist or i a n: S ou t h e y a n d “smoo t h Bu t l e r”

In the summer of 1822, Southey wrote to the Rev. Joseph Blanco

White, the former Spanish Catholic priest of Irish extraction, who had changed his name when adopting Anglicanism: “It will not be long before I shall send you an epitome of our religious history, written for the purpose of making the rising generation feel and understand what they owe to the Church of England.” Southey explains that his intention is to “strengthen the moral and religious feelings, and to uphold those institutions upon which the welfare of society depends” (Thom 1: 380). He evidently expected publication before the end of the year. Southey’s Book of the Church, published in 1824, begins with a similar tribute to the Established Church: “Manifold as are the blessings for which Englishmen are beholden to the institutions of their country, there is no part of those institutions from which they derive more important advantages than from its Church Establishment, none by which the temporal condition of all ranks has been so materially improved . . .” His Book of the Church would show from what heathenish delusions and inhuman rites the inhabitants of this island have been delivered by the Christian faith; in what manner the best interests of the country were advanced by the clergy even during the darkest ages of papal domination; the errors and crimes of the Romish Church, and how when its corruptions were at the worst, the day-break of the Reformation appeared among us: the progress of that Reformation through evil and through good; the establishment of a Church pure in its doctrines, irreproachable in its order; beautiful

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 101

8/22/2011 6:31:49 PM

102

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

in its forms; and the conduct of that Church proved both in adverse and prosperous times, alike faithful to its principles when it adhered to the monarchy during a successful rebellion, and when it opposed the monarch who would have brought back the Romish superstition, and together with the religion, would have overthrown the liberties of England. (BoC 1: 1–2)

Southey later cites the seventeenth-century Church History of Britain by Thomas Fuller, which describes St. Augustine and his missionaries as finding in Britain a plain religion, and bringing in instead a religion “made luscious to the senses, with pleasing ceremonies, so that many who could not judge of the goodness, were courted with the gaudiness thereof” (Southey BoC 1: 63n citing Fuller 68). When Southey turns to appraise the medieval “papal system,” he soon focuses on the scriptures. The Bible, “even in the Latin version” had long become a sealed book to church congregations, and the use of such vernacular versions as existed was “discouraged or proscribed.” The Roman see withheld the scriptures from the laity (says Southey), “not lest the ignorant and half-informed should mistake the sense of scripture, not lest the presumptuous and the perverse should deduce new errors in doctrine, and more fatal consequences in practice, from its distorted language; but in the secret and sure consciousness that what was now taught as Christianity was not to be found in the written word of God.” Southey finds the “earliest corruptions” growing out of “the reverence which was paid to the memory of departed Saints,” and leading to “a train of error and fraud” (1: 288–90). In a rising crescendo of censure on the trade in relics, he declaims: “Such was the impudence of Romish fraud, that portions were produced of the burning bush, of the manna which fell in the wilderness, of Moses’s rod and Samson’s honeycomb, of Tobit’s fish, of the blessed Virgin’s milk, and of our Saviour’s blood!” (BoC 1: 293). Each of the monastic orders, Southey reports, “claimed the Virgin Mary for its especial patroness,” and all “united in elevating her to the highest rank in the mythology of the Romish Church.” The bodily assumption of the Virgin into heaven was presumed “because, had her remains existed upon earth, it was not to be believed but that so great a treasure would have been revealed to some or other of so many Saints.” Her home in Nazareth had been allegedly carried by four angels to Loretto, where (claims Southey) it is “still shewn.” By such “representations and fables, the belief of the people became so entirely corrupted that Christ, instead of being regarded as our Mediator and Redeemer, appeared to them in the character of a jealous God,

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 102

8/22/2011 6:31:49 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

103

whom it behoved them to propitiate through the mediation of his Virgin Mother.” The Roman Pantheon, which Agrippa had dedicated to Jupiter and all the Gods, was turned by the pope into a church, “inscribed to the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the Saints.” Southey admits that some of the “reprehensible resemblances between Popery and Paganism” were accidental, having arisen from “the excess and misdirection of the same natural feelings;” but most of them arose from “a desire of accommodating the new profession of the converts to their old ceremonies, and of investing the Clergy with the authority and influence possessed by the Pagan priesthood” (1: 296–300). St. Augustine of Hippo is castigated for introducing Manichean dualism into Christianity—what Southey calls “the tenet of two hostile principles in man, which had led to such extravagancies among the Eastern Christians.” The monastic penitential tradition, Southey claims, was shaped by the Manichean teaching: “The triumph of the will over the body was, indeed, complete; but it triumphed over the reason also; and enthusiasts, in order to obtain Heaven, spent their lives, not in doing good to others, but in inflicting the greatest possible quantity of discomfort and actual suffering upon themselves.” Thus, “practices not less extravagant than those of the Indian Yoguees, and more loathsome, were regarded as sure indications of sanctity” (BoC 1: 301–5). St. Dominic’s own practice of self-flagellation and his alleged use of the Inquisition against the “Manichean” Albigenses are constant themes of Southey’s polemical writing, at least from his 1811 Quarterly Review article on the Inquisition. In the Book of the Church, he refers readers to his1819 Quarterly Review article on monasticism and to his History of Brazil (1: 307–8). Southey’s more immediate target is the doctrine of purgatory. He explains: “The redemption, which had been purchased for fallen man, was from eternal punishment only; sin was not, therefore to go unpunished, even in repentant sinners who had confessed and received absolution.” Only the souls of baptized children passed immediately to heaven. For others, except for the few destined to be saints, “purgatory was prepared; a place according to the popular belief, so near the region of everlasting torments, though separated from it, that the same fire pervaded both.” Purgatorial suffering, though not eternal, was “more intense than heart could think, or tongue express, and enduring for a length of time, which was left fearfully indefinite.” But, Southey adds ironically, “happily for mankind, the authority of the Pope extended over this dreadful place” (BoC 1: 309–10). Such papal authority was expressed in the form of indulgences, remitting time due to be spent in purgatory, sometimes for shorter

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 103

8/22/2011 6:31:49 PM

104

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

periods, but often (Southey notes) “by centuries or thousands of years, and in many cases, the indulgence was plenary— a toll ticket entitling the soul to pass scot free.” According to Southey, “The set-off for a single year was fixed at the recitation of 30 psalms, with an accompaniment of 100 stripes to each: the whole psalter, with its accompaniment of fifteen thousand, availing only to redeem five years” (1: 310–12). Routine penance was administered through the confessional, which (along with celibacy of the clergy) Southey considers, is “why the state of morals is generally so much more corrupt in Catholic than in Protestant countries.” He argues that the confessional does away with the promptings of conscience: “Actions then, instead of being tried by the eternal standard of right and wrong, on which the unsophisticated heart unerringly pronounces, were judged by the rules of a pernicious casuistry, the intent of which was to make men satisfied with themselves upon the cheapest terms” (1: 313–14). Southey’s objections to “the prodigious doctrine of Transubstantiation,” which he sees as the consequence of “taking figurative language in a literal sense,” are predictable: “The Priest, when he performed this stupendous function of his ministry, had before his eyes, and held in his hands, the Maker of Heaven and Earth; and the inference which they deduced from so blasphemous an assumption was, that the Clergy were not to be subject to any secular authority, seeing that they could create God their Creator!” (1: 315–16). Around the question of exactly what happens at the consecration of the bread and wine in the Christian Eucharist, as on the other doctrines and practices recited by Southey in his first volume, the Lutheran Reformation would revolve. Southey treats as precursors of the Reformation, not only Wycliff and the Lollards, but also reformers “who found followers in the Alps and Pyrenean countries, where the truth of better ages had been preserved.” These reformers, “agreeing in their detestation of Romish tyranny,” disregarded for the time being their own disagreements on lesser issues: “They taught that the Pope was the head of all errors; that the Romish Church is that woman who is described in the Apocalypse, as sitting on the beast, arrayed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones, having the golden cup of her filthiness in her hand, and upon her forehead written, ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’” (BoC 1: 321–2). Southey censures the excesses of those zealots, who condemned most of the ceremonies of the Church, joining “what was innocent and useful, in the same proscription with what was superstitious and injurious.” For once

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 104

8/22/2011 6:31:49 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

105

he strikes a balance: Because the Monks deceived the people, they proclaimed that Monkery was a stinking carrion, and monasteries an evil. Because the churches were profusely adorned, they would have stript them bare. Because the doctrine of merits was preposterous, they maintained the not less preposterous tenet, that the best works of man are sinful in themselves. And because the Clergy arrogated a monstrous power, they were for a levelling system, which in its direct and certain consequences, extended from religious to political opinions. (BoC 1: 322)

This brief instance of evenhandedness is a reminder that Southey, while praising proto-Protestants, has no time for proto-Puritans. And within three pages, he returns to a condemnation of the Dominicans. He complains that “the wildest romance contains nothing more extravagant than the legends of St Dominic,” and notes that “the envious enmity” between Dominicans and Franciscans was displayed in “competitions of falsehood” (1: 325–7). The so-called Spiritual Franciscans, who preached poverty, were condemned as heretics, and so repudiated papal authority. Irritated by this (says Southey), “the Pope let loose the Dominicans against them; and the Order, for ever infamous for having founded the Inquisition, had the satisfaction of persecuting these Spiritual Franciscans, and seeing many hundreds of them expire in the flames, with constancy worthy of a better cause.” Those who escaped the flames found asylum in Germany, “where in safety they continued their attacks upon the Papacy; and by exposing its rapacity, its inconsistency and its crimes, prepared the way for the great reformation which was at hand” (1: 331). The British Critic, reviewing the Book of the Church as early as May 1824, praised Southey’s approach: “Desirous of stimulating curiosity, rather than satiating it, Mr Southey avoids that prolix narrative, and lengthed [sic] details, which are so delightful to the student of antiquity, and so insupportable to the general reader.” The reviewer considers that “with a few inconsiderable exceptions,” the work is worthy of “the biographer of Nelson” (BC 21: 450). With the first volume covering the planting of Christianity among the Saxons, “the gradual establishment of Monkery,” and observations on “the fruits of Romish Supremacy, its art, its encroachments, its tyranny, and its corruption,” the reviewer has few quibbles. But he thinks Southey has misrepresented St. Dunstan, by following Foxe and Hume in portraying Dunstan as “a cruel, ambitious, hypocritical cheat,” whereas the earliest authentic narratives have convinced the reviewer that “Dunstan’s faults have been grossly exaggerated and his merits

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 105

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

106

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

materially under-rated.” Southey is also censured for his treatment of that other English saint, partnered with Dunstan in popular esteem before the Reformation. The British Critic thinks that the account of Thomas Becket “furnishes upon the whole the most splendid portion of these volumes,” but its reviewer doubts the need to allow the archbishop quite so much space. He would have preferred Southey to focus on the regularity with which “the Pope and the Norman princes played into each other’s hands, the one to make the Kings of England absolute, and the other the Bishop of Rome supreme.” The breach of this alliance, thanks to Henry VIII, was “the dawn both of ecclesiastical and civil freedom” (BC 21: 450–4). The British Critic devotes two full pages to a verbatim extract from the Book of the Church ’s unexpected tribute to the benefits conferred on Europe by the medieval papacy: We have but to look at the Abyssinians, and the Oriental Christians, to see what Europe would have become without the Papacy. With all its errors, its corruptions, and its crimes, it was, morally and intellectually, the conservative power of Christendom. Politically, too, it was the saviour of Europe; for, in all human probability, the west, like the east, must have been overrun by Mohammedanism, and sunk in irremediable degradation, through the pernicious institutions which have everywhere accompanied it, if, in the great crisis of the world, the Roman Church had not roused the nations to an united and prodigious effort, commensurate with the danger. (BC 21: 454 citing BoC 1: 284)

Even more surprisingly, Southey remarks of the eleventh-century Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) that “Christendom, if his plans had been accomplished, would have become a federal body, the Kings and Princes of which should have bound themselves to obey the Vicar of Christ, not only as their spiritual, but their temporal lord; and their disputes, instead of being decided by the sword, were to have been referred to a Council of Prelates annually assembled at Rome.” But Southey is quick to observe that such a scheme would have produced “as much benefit to the world as has ever been imagined in Utopian romance, and more than it has ever yet enjoyed under any of its revolutions” (21: 455–6 citing BoC 1: 287–8). The British Critic is pleased to find that “Wickliff is treated with due honour, and the wild opinions of his followers are carefully separated from the genuine lessons of the father of Reformation; a distinction which the adversary is prone to overlook” (21: 456).

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 106

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

107

The second volume of the Book of the Church begins with the reign of Henry VIII, the splendor of whose court (Southey says) “exceeded anything which had ever been seen in Europe.” It was also remarkable for learning: according to Erasmus “no school, no monastery, no university equalled it.” Henry’s patronage of literature was encouraged by Wolsey, to whom Southey gives considerable credit: “Under his administration, the disorders of the Clergy were repressed, men of worth and learning were promoted in the Church, libraries were formed, the study of Greek and Hebrew introduced at Oxford.” Wolsey did not reform the doctrines and practices of the Church, but he “removed its ignorance [and] reformed its manners.” Southey notes the irony that Henry VIII’s polemical skill in defending the Church, recognized by the papal accolade of “Defender of the Faith,” became accidentally “the cause of his defection from it, when he applied his casuistry to the purpose for which that art has usually been employed, that of making his conscience conform to his inclinations” (BoC 2: 5–6). Yet for all his “many revolting acts of caprice and cruelty,” and the mixed motives that led to his repudiation of papal authority, Southey applauds the way in which Henry “applied himself to the great business of weeding out superstition, and yet preserving what he believed to be the essentials of Christianity untouched.” Englishmen should be thankful to “that all-ruling Providence, which rendered even his passions and his sins subservient to this important end” (BoC 2: 103–4). Southey did not dwell sufficiently on Elizabeth’s reign to satisfy the British Critic’s reviewer, who would have preferred to see more space devoted to this heroic monarch, at the expense of pages “that are occupied with Danish mythology and Thomas a Becket” (BC 21: 458). Chapter XVI of the Book of the Church demonstrates that Southey is targeting Puritans as well as Papists. As in his Life of Wesley (1: 370–1), he condemns the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, which held that “the Almighty has placed the greater part of mankind under the necessity of committing the offences, for which he has predetermined eternally to punish them.” The doctrine became “the distinguishing tenet of the non-conformists,” producing “political, as well as doctrinal, puritans; and it exasperated the implacable spirit of dissent, by filling them with a spiritual pride as intolerant as it was intolerable” (BoC 2: 338). James I, “whom posterity has so unjustly depreciated,” wins Southey’s approval for abandoning the Calvinism of his Scottish upbringing, and for famously declaring that a Scottish presbytery “as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil”

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 107

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

108

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

(Tanner 67). Southey credits James with being “perhaps the first person who shook off the superstitious belief of witchcraft, and openly proclaimed its falsehood” (BoC 2: 339). And after a Socinian had been burned at Smithfield for heresy, and another (“who seems rather to have been crazed than heretical”) suffered the same fate at Lichfield, James determined “never to make another martyr.” Southey praises such royal commitment to toleration: The principle of toleration was acknowledged no where; that which existed in France, was but an armed truce, during which both parties retained their implacable animosity against each other. In this respect James was advanced beyond his country and his age. He saw in the Romish Church, much that ought for ever to prevent its reestablishment in these kingdoms, but nothing for which the bonds of Christian charity ought to be broken. (BoC 2: 340–1)

If the king’s intentions had not been frustrated by “the temper of the nation and the spirit of the times,” Southey supposes that England could then have been placed “upon that just footing with Rome, and with the Catholic parts of Christendom, from which the Protestant cause would had every thing to hope, and nothing to fear.” Any such hopes were extinguished by the Gunpowder Plot. Southey concedes that the English Catholics were not implicated, but considers that the opprobrium brought upon their Church was not unjust, because Guy Fawkes and his associates acted upon the same principles as the pope, when, “in his arrogated infallibility,” he “fulminated his bulls” against Elizabeth, “struck medals in honour of the Bartholomew massacre,” and commended the friar who assassinated Henry IV of France (2: 339–41). The British Critic found that Southey’s account of the Great Rebellion is “told with much spirit.” Archbishop Laud, who “began with attempting to reform the Church and lived to mourn over its ruins,” is admitted to have “had some share in provoking his own fate.” Yet, the reviewer insists, “the merit and abilities of Laud were of the highest class, and his faults have been exaggerated beyond the common lot of greatness.” As proof that Southey had redressed the balance, the British Critic allots nearly four pages to extracts from his account of Laud’s trial (21: 458–62). Southey himself devotes ten pages to the words of Laud’s dying address and to his public execution, quoting the archbishop’s profession of Protestant belief: “I desire it may be remembered, I have always lived in the Protestant religion, established in England, and in that I come now to die” (BoC 2: 446).

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 108

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

109

For Southey, “the martyrdom of Cranmer is not more inexpiably disgraceful to the Roman Catholics, than that of Laud to the Puritan persecutors.” And Southey notes that “on the same day that the ordinance of attainder” against Laud was passed, an Act was passed “by which the Liturgy was suppressed” (2: 453). Southey regards the Puritans’ hatred of the Anglican liturgy (which they called facetiously “the Lethargy of worship”) as being “as violent as it was unreasonable,” considering that there was, as yet, no difference over doctrine. The Puritans described the Book of Common Prayer as the product of men who were “belching the sour crudities of yesterday’s popery”; and they accused it of having brought the country to atheism. But it was those Puritans, whom Southey calls “blind leaders of the blind,” who had themselves “prepared the way for every species of impiety and extravagance.” They would not kneel at Communion, allow clergy to wear the surplice, bow at the name of Jesus, or use what Southey calls “the finest liturgy that ever was composed.” Their “factious scrupulosity brought on a civil war, which real grievances alone would not have provoked” (2: 457). The Presbyterians, having removed bishops, found that “a rabble of sectaries started up, so many and so various, that names for half of them have not been found in the nomenclature of heresy.” Thus, says Southey, “they who had broken down the fences complained when they saw what a herd of unclean beasts followed them into the vineyard” (2: 459). Predictably, Southey sees Charles I as the hero rising above such ecclesiastical chaos: “The Queen, who had always been an unfortunate adviser, and too often an evil one, urged him to give up the Church; for this would have been as much a subject of triumph to the Romanists as to the Sectarians.” But Charles stood firm, resting on his coronation oath and on “his own deliberate and well-grounded conviction that episcopacy was the form of Church government which had been handed down to us from the apostles” (2: 462–3). Recalling that the Puritans originally attacked the bishops “for not exerting the rigour of the law against the Papists,” Southey contrasts the “wisely tolerant temper” of the Anglican Church with the manner in which the Puritans “meddled with everything”—from abolishing maypoles to censuring “walking in the fields on the Sabbath day.” Cromwell, he admits, “relieved the country from Presbyterian intolerance, and he curbed those fanatics who were proclaiming King Jesus, that as his saints, they might divide the land amongst themselves” (2: 464–5). The Restoration might, in Southey’s view, have re-established the “wisely tolerant” policy of Charles I’s Church of England. The doomed king’s written advice to his son is cited, commending the

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 109

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

110

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Anglican Church as formerly established as “the best in the world,” not only Christian, but also Reformed, and “keeping the middle way between the pomp of superstitious tyranny, and the meanness of fantastic anarchy” (BoC 2: 468–9). Charles II’s Declaration of Breda promised “a liberty to tender consciences; and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom” (Gardiner 466). But, Southey explains, it soon emerged that parliament did not share the king’s sense of shame that “laws so severe as those against the Roman Catholics should continue to exist, after the political necessity of them had ceased.” Such sympathy as there was for Catholics, had been dissipated by what Southey calls “their imprudence.” Unable to agree among themselves, “they reviled the Marian martyrs in a strain which evinced how willingly they would have commenced another such persecution had the power been in their hands” (2: 271–4). The hardening attitude toward Catholics can be traced from the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 suspending the penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters, through the first Test Act (1673) requiring all holding public office under the crown to receive Anglican sacraments and to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance (in the form used in James I’s reign), to the second Test Act (1678), which was designed to reinforce existing Acts “for preventing the Increase and Danger of Popery in this Kingdom”—by requiring an additional declaration denying belief in transubstantiation (Costin and Watson 1: 324–5; 2: 39–46). Southey does not dwell on the “Popish plots” of Charles II’s reign. He ridicules the notion that London could have been set on fire by the Catholics, while accepting the reality of the Titus Oates plot in 1678 (BoC 2: 488). By contrast, Charles Butler, responding to Southey in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825), quoted John Foxe’s verdict: “The proceedings on the Popish plot must always be considered as an indelible stain on the English nation, in which king, parliament, judges, juries, witnesses, prosecutors, have all their respective though certainly not equal shares” (BoRCC 337–8). When he comes to the accession of the professedly Catholic James II, Southey focuses on the resistance of those bishops and other clergy who refused to read to their congregations the new 1787 Declaration of Indulgence (BoC 2: 500–26). He praises Archbishop Sancroft, who led clerical opposition to the Declaration. Instead of publicizing it, Sancroft’s admonitions to his clergy required them, at least four times a year, to “teach and inform the people, that all usurped and foreign jurisdiction had been for most just causes taken away and abolished in

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 110

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

111

this realm.” Urging obedience to the crown in “all things lawful,” and enjoining “patient submission in the rest, promoting, as far as in them lay, the public peace and quiet of the world,” the instructions also included a warning: “Forasmuch as those Roman emissaries, like the old Serpent, are wont to be most busy and troublesome to our people at the end of their lives, labouring to unsettle and perplex them in time of sickness and at the hour of death,” Anglican clergy must not wait to be summoned to sickbed or deathbed, but should visit the sick frequently and establish “the state of their souls,” and pray often “with them and for them” before reaching the extremity of death (BoC 2: 510–11). Sancroft’s instruction to his clergy recalls Southey’s complaint of two decades earlier, in Letters from Spain and Portugal, about the Spanish friars’ active promotion of deathbed conversions (LSP 1808 2: 189). By the time James II realized how determined Sancroft and his fellow-bishops were, it was too late: “The nation felt that under a king whose conscience was not in his own keeping, there could be no safety against the ambition of a restless Church which kept no faith, and held principles upon which, by the strictest reasoning, persecution becomes a duty.” Even for James to speak of “the Church of England as by law established,” instead of “the Protestant or Reformed religion,” was held against him. As Southey comments, “The papistical reservation was clearly understood, which looked upon the Popish Church as the lawful one” (BoC 2: 518). Southey ends the Book of the Church with a ringing endorsement of the Church of England, newly embedded in the Constitution at the 1688 Revolution: From the time of the Revolution the Church of England has partaken of the stability and security of the State. Here therefore I terminate this compendious, but faithful, view of its rise, progress, and political struggles. It has rescued us, first from heathenism, then from papal idolatry and superstition; it has saved us from temporal as well as spiritual despotism. We owe to it our moral and intellectual character as a nation; much of our private happiness, much of our public strength. Whatever should weaken it, would in the same degree injure the common weal; whatever should overthrow it, would in sure and immediate consequence bring down the goodly fabric of that Constitution, whereof it is a constituent and necessary part. (BoC 2: 528)

Like Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), Southey defends the Established Church as an essential political, cultural, and social element of the British Constitution and as an embodiment of the English sense of nationhood. As Geoffrey Carnall

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 111

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

112

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

remarked in Robert Southey and his Age (1960), Southey can be “more properly seen as a supporter of the Church Establishment than as an Anglican” (Carnall 399). If a generally complimentary response to the Book of the Church from the British Critic was to be expected, so too was denunciation from Leigh Hunt’s Examiner. The issue for October 17, 1824, declared: In hardihood of assertion, dogmatical arrogance, and bold contempt of historical truth, it stands almost without a rival. There is a tone of dignified assurance and lofty pretension which we cannot but admire. His sentences are so many oracles delivered with all the solemnity of an invincible demigod. You are presented with a sacred text-book, without note or comment, and when you call for proof, you are reminded of the “good old John Fox,” or referred to an article in the Quarterly Review. (660)

The same complaint about the failure to identify sources was made, not only by the British Critic (21: 463), but also by the bishop of London, William Howley, one of the first correspondents to congratulate Southey on publication. Writing on February 24, 1824, the bishop expressed “the high satisfaction which I have derived from your Book of the Church.” Predicting that it could not fail to be popular “from the beauty of its execution,” Howley hoped that it would “have the effect of turning the attention of many persons, who have hitherto been indifferent to such matters, through ignorance, to the nature of the dangers which the country has escaped, and the blessings of various kinds which have been secured to it, through the National Church Establishment.” He added the hope that the work might be published “in a reduced form for the benefit of the lower classes,” whose minds (he optimistically believed) “would be elevated by the zeal and virtue of the first Reformers” (L&C 5: 165). In a letter to John May on March 16, 1825, Southey reported that Howley had written to ask whether Southey intended to answer Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church and to demolish what the bishop called its “flimsy structure of mis-statements and sophistry” (L&C 5: 204–5). In 1828, Howley became archbishop of Canterbury. Southey knew Charles Butler, an eminent Catholic lawyer, who had presented him with a gift of his five-volume Philological and Biographical Works —which Southey much admired (Speck 196). The British Critic, when noticing in April 1817 an earlier publication by Butler—his Memoir of the Church of France — observed that, “of all the advocates of Catholic Emancipation, there are none whose works

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 112

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

113

are written with so much art, none whose representations are clothed in such designing fallacy.” And the reviewer adds: “Under the appearance of a most candid and open liberality, he conceals the deepest and most dangerous bigotry” (BC 7: 427). But reviewing the Book of the Roman Catholic Church in February 1825, the same journal describes Butler as “the best known and by far the most formidable of Catholic apologists” (BC 23: 176). Butler’s introduction to his Book of the Roman Catholic Church published in 1825 by Southey’s publisher, Murray, takes the form of a letter to a fellow-lawyer, Charles Blundell, of Lancashire. Butler assumes that Blundell already knows Southey’s Book of the Church, published the year before. Butler complains that “it abounds with the strongest criminations of the roman-catholic religion, and of the conduct of our roman-catholic ancestors. I do not recollect that a publication more offensive, either to the understandings or the feelings of the roman-catholics, has appeared within our memory.” He agrees that it is “legitimate controversy” to bring against the creed or conduct of Catholics “all that research or fair argument can supply.” But it is unjust to impute to Catholics as a whole “what, in justice, is only chargeable on individuals; or to estimate the writings of our ancestors in the dark ages, by the notions and manners of the present age” (BoRCC iii–iv). Butler deplores the fact the “immense mass of prejudice” raised against Catholics still survives in “uninstructed minds,” and even among the “liberal and informed.” Butler is sure that none of the latter category believes that the Great Fire of London in 1666 was started by Catholics, or that there was any truth in the supposed revelations of Titus Oates in 1678. But he also recognizes that where prejudice originally created by these fictions continues to linger, Southey’s Book of the Church is “admirably calculated to keep them alive” (iv–v). In pleading for what Butler calls “a proper style of controversy,” he reminds his readers that “in the greater number of the articles of faith, the English protestants of the established church are truly orthodox.” He considers that, where there is so near an approximation in religious creeds, “there certainly should be an equal approximation in Christian and moral charity.” As for himself, “What I consider to be the truth I must tell; but I hope to tell it in a manner, which will show sincere respect for those whose different notions it opposes” (3–4). Butler’s starting point is the creed of Pius IV, published in the form of a papal bull in 1564. As a statement of Catholic doctrines, it contains many beliefs that Southey had attacked or ridiculed: the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, communion in

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 113

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

114

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

one kind, purgatory, intercession of the saints, veneration of Mary, the power of indulgences, the primacy of St. Peter, and “all other things delivered, defined and declared by the sacred canons, and general councils, and particularly by the holy Council of Trent.” Butler insists on the overriding rule in all controversy between Catholics and Protestants: “THAT NO DOCTRINE SHOULD BE ASCRIBED TO THE ROMAN-CATHOLICS, AS A BODY, EXCEPT SUCH AS IS AN ARTICLE OF THEIR FAITH.” And he defines an article of faith as one that has been “delivered by divine revelation, and propounded by the roman-catholic church, as a revealed article of faith” (5–9, Butler’s emphasis). Butler agrees that “individual catholics have maintained unjustifiable practices,” but he demands “the production of the tenet, justly ascribable to the catholic creed, to which any such doctrine or practice may fairly be attributed” (13, Butler’s emphasis). Butler suggests that the small number of Catholics, compared with England’s total population, gives English Protestants a false perspective, and he quotes verbatim Milner’s shopping list of Catholic countries— running to two full pages of Butler’s text (15–17, citing Milner 1841: 188–9). Southey, at the end of his tenth chapter, had described the Catholic Church as “a prodigious structure of imposture and wickedness” (1: 320). Butler mildly asks: “Is it decorous to apply this opprobrious language to a religion professed in such extensive territories? ” (BoRCC 17, Butler’s emphasis). Butler follows the sequence of Southey’s chronological account, allotting five chapters (or “letters”) to the Anglo- Saxon church, one of which is devoted to a defense of Dunstan (BoRCC 58–72). The British Critic had objected to Southey’s abusive treatment of Dunstan (BC 21: 50). But the same journal now remarks that “the evidence on which we acquit the great monk, is fatal to the little monks who forged his injustice and his miracles.” The reviewer quotes at length what he calls Butler’s “apology for those rickety links of his uninterrupted chain.” The British Critic regards the apology as “a good defence of the credulity of Dunstan’s contemporaries, and it might be applied with equal effect to the Irish or Spaniards of the present day” (23: 191–2). The British Critic is as critical of Butler’s treatment of Becket, as it had been of Southey’s (21: 453–4). It accuses Butler of obscuring the central issue in Becket’s dispute with Henry II— the temporal power of the pope. The review notes Butler’s “skilful manner” in achieving that feat of obfuscation, and its own verdict is robust. While not presuming to justify Becket’s murder, the British Critic concludes that “a more turbulent or ambitious subject never disturbed a kingdom, and the triumph which his cause obtained

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 114

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

115

when Henry II did penance at his shrine, put the seal on the slavery of Englishmen, and made the Pope our master for three hundred years” (BC 23: 192–6). Responding to Southey’s account of “the Papal System,” Butler draws a distinction between transalpine and cisalpine views of papal authority. Historically, the transalpine camp attributed to the pope “the exercise, indirect at least, of temporal power, for effecting a spiritual good.” This in practice implied a papal right to absolve a monarch’s subjects from their “obligation of allegiance.” By contrast, cisalpine divines affirm that “the pope had no right, either to interfere in temporal concerns, or to enforce obedience to his spiritual legislation or jurisdiction, by temporal power”; and so had no right to deprive a sovereign of his sovereignty. The transalpine wing (says Butler) has since adopted the cisalpine view on this issue, but the two have come to differ on papal infallibility. The transalpines ascribe to the pope “the extraordinary prerogative of personal infallibility, when he undertakes to issue a solemn decision on any point of faith,” while the cisalpines hold that in spiritual matters “the pope is subject, in doctrine and discipline, to the church, and to a general council,” and is not personally infallible (BoRCC 124–5). As for the papal power of excommunication, Butler asks whether Catholics claim more for their church than Protestants claim for theirs: “Do not the ministers of your church claim the power of excommunication? ” And does not “every stone that you throw at our church equally hit your own?” Even Wycliffe and John Knox believed in the excommunication of kings (131–2, Butler’s emphasis). Southey’s portrayal of Wycliff and the Lollards attracts Butler’s censure. He explains that, with more space, he would offer Southey “some considerations on the Waldenses, Albigenses and the Hussites; on some decrees of the Council of Constance; and on the inquisition, with which the subject is connected.” Instead he refers his opponent to his Historical Memoirs (1: chapter 10), where he had expressed himself “fully on all these topics” (BoRCC 148). Butler recites what Southey had written of the Lollards: Undoubtedly the Lollards were highly dangerous at this time; if there were some among them, whose views and wishes did not go beyond a just and salutary reformation, the greater number were eager for havoc, and held opinions which are incompatible with the peace of society. They would have stript the churches, destroyed the monasteries; confiscated the church land; and proclaimed the principle, “that the Saints should possess the earth.” The public safety required that such opinions should be repressed.

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 115

8/22/2011 6:31:50 PM

116

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Indeed the Church would have deserved “the approbation of posterity” if it had proceeded “temperately and justly” in repressing them. But instead, the course that the church pursued was, says Southey, “equally impolitic and iniquitous, by making transubstantiation the test of heresy.” By insisting on the belief of a proposition, “which no man could believe, unless he disregarded the evidence of his senses, they gave the Lollards all the advantage, which men derive from the reputation and merit of suffering in the cause of truth.” No wonder Butler responds: “I cannot but dislike the manner in which you mention transubstantiation.” How far, he asks, do a man’s senses provide proof of the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the immateriality of the soul? (BoRCC 148–9 citing BoC 1: 349–50, Butler’s emphasis). In defense of the mendicant and monastic orders, Butler invites Southey to “collect the testimonies, not of the ribald press, not by superficial travellers, who often repay civilities by low ridicule, not of philosophic writings, but of impartial, intelligent and honourable men; and, I beg leave to add, of the catholic prelacy.” Had Butler forgotten that Southey had published his own traveler’s tales of Spain and Portugal— or remembered too well? (BoRCC 152–3). Butler is sure that verdict of history on the Franciscans will be “that they chiefly exerted themselves in the laborious part of the sacred ministry, in hospitals, in prisons, among the lower orders of the poor; that wherever there was a fire, an inundation, a pestilential disorder, a raging plague; wherever there was labour, or danger, and a total absence of reward, the Franciscans were sure to be found.” As for the charge that St. Dominic took an active part in founding the Inquisition, Butler insists that it is “positively denied” by Dominic’s best biographer, “and, I believe, by every other writer of his order.” He admits that, until the end of the seventeenth century, “the constitution and proceedings of that tribunal were very objectionable: this, after a serious investigation of the subject, I have often said, and now repeat” (153–4). He is incensed by Southey’s assertion that “the corruptions, doctrinal and practical, of the roman church, were studiously kept out of view by the writers, who still maintain the infallibility of the church” (BoC 1: 283). Is Southey not acquainted, Butler asks, with any medieval authors “who at the same time as they maintained the infallibility of the roman-catholic church in matters of faith, exposed, in the most unequivocal language, the corruptions of which had found their way into her, and even into her sanctuary?” To remedy his opponent’s ignorance, Butler lists relevant authorities, together with an extended extract from Cardinal Bossuet’s History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches published in 1688 (BoRCC 157–65).

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 116

8/22/2011 6:31:51 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

117

Butler next seeks to determine whether England benefited from the Reformation. He distinguishes between temporal happiness, spiritual wisdom, and morality. He invites Southey to contemplate the period between the start of the Reformation and contemporary England: What years of havoc, what disputed successions of the crown, what wars, what legal murders, what demolition of magnificent edifices, what destructions of manuscripts, of printed books, of sacred and profane monuments of art; what proscriptions, what confiscations, what calumnies, what imaginary plots, what other grinding oppressions, in every form, have often been found necessary to extirpate the antient creed, and to introduce and establish the Reformation? (173)

Against such a backdrop, it seems needless for Butler to deflate Southey’s complimentary assessment of Thomas Cromwell with the reminder that Henry VIII’s energetic dissolver of the monasteries had died professing the Catholic faith (201). Butler does notice Southey’s “candid acknowledgment” that the struggle in Edward VI’s reign was “a conflict, not between adherents of the old religion and of the new, but between men who fought for plunder, and those whose property was at stake” (204, citing BoC 2: 132). Similarly, Butler concedes that Mary’s bishops promoted persecution, though he exonerates Reginald Pole, cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, and Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham (BoRCC 211). But he had already recalled that the flames that consumed Cranmer “were those in which he himself had burned the Anabaptists and sought to burn the catholics” (208–9). While restating his own view that “these sanguinary executions cannot be justified,” he notes that it was the habit of the age among Protestant as well as Catholic rulers, and that “many who were executed in the reign of queen Mary for heresy, might have been executed for treason” (213). He contrasts the loyal conduct of the Catholic clergy at Elizabeth’s accession with the conduct of Protestant clergy and laity at the accession of Mary. And Butler reminds Southey that, at her coronation, Elizabeth swore to “maintain the laws, honour, peace and privileges of the church, as in the time or grant of Edward the Confessor.” On this basis (Butler claims), the Marian bishops did homage to Elizabeth, and when she broke her coronation oath by establishing Protestantism, the bishops “sighed, but they sighed in silence” (228–9). Butler applauds Elizabeth for removing from the litany the offensive supplication, “From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, deliver us, O Lord”; and also for retaining the use of wafers in

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 117

8/22/2011 6:31:51 PM

118

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the Eucharist (instead of reverting to common bread), while contriving liturgical ambiguity over Christ’s presence in the sacrament. But Elizabeth’s evident wish to make her new church as comprehensive as possible is attributed by Butler to her religious indifference (233). After summarizing six penal laws passed in Elizabeth’s early years, and pointing to the institution of the Court of High Commission in the very first year of her reign, Butler asks Southey whether, in his own justification of penalties for recusancy, he does not unwaringly adopt the most objectionable tenet of intolerance: that theological opinion is to be the test of civil allegiance? (239). Butler relies on Milner’s statistics of some 200 Catholics executed under Elizabeth, 15 of them for denying the queen’s ecclesiastical supremacy, and 126 for exercising priestly functions (BoRCC : 241 citing Milner 1841: 441). Southey had exonerated the body of English Catholics from involvement in the Gunpowder Plot (BoC 2: 341–2). Butler puts the number of plotters at 16—“and nine only of these were privy to the powder part of it.” He asks: “Who would have been the victims of the plot if it had succeeded? The roman-catholic as well as the protestant peers.” There were 20 Catholic peers with seats in the Upper Chamber. Who revealed the conspiracy? Lord Montague, a Catholic. “Who were particularly active in detecting and exposing it? The earl of Northampton and the earl of Suffolk, both roman-catholics” (BoRCC 280–1). The oath of allegiance, prescribed by James I, required Catholics to abjure “as impious and heretical, the damnable doctrine, that princes excommunicated, or deprived by the pope, might be deposed or murdered by their subjects, or any other whatsoever” (Prothero 259). Butler admits that, at the time, some transalpine clergy and the popes themselves, subscribed to that doctrine. But he is confident that “the opinion is now abandoned in every part of the world, except the precincts within the walls of the Vatican.” The English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics had already disclaimed it (BoRCC 286). Butler complains about Southey’s silence over the condition of Catholics during Charles I’s reign, and the “artifices” used to inflame public opinion against them (291). And on the eve of the civil war, when Charles was promising Irish Catholics the repeal of the penal laws, he “took the sacrament from archbishop Ussher, upon a promise that he would never connive at popery” (310n). Butler sees a similar breach of faith in Charles II’s decision not to implement the Declaration of Breda. This prompts a long footnote comparing Charles II’s “betrayal” with “the conduct of the British government, at the time of Irish Union (312–17n). Southey had acquitted the Catholics of starting the Fire of London (BoC 2: 488). “Why then,”

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 118

8/22/2011 6:31:51 PM

S ou t h e y a n d “smo o t h Bu t l e r”

119

asks Butler, “is the calumny perpetuated by a national monument with an inscription on it?” Milner had made the same complaint about the city of London’s monument in Letters to a Prebendary (189). Butler now asks whether any Catholic government authorizes a monument that “excites against one portion of the community the prejudices and animosity of the other” (BoRCC 320). Such prejudices and animosity underlay much of the penal legislation of Charles II, as Butler devotes two chapters to proving. His most notable instance is the Second Test Act (1678) excluding Catholics from sitting and voting in Parliament (BoRCC 321–36). Butler’s verdict on James II is a recapitulation of what he wrote in his Historical Memoir of the English, Irish and Scottish Catholics : “My opinion is, that, in theory, his project for effecting a general religious toleration, was entitled to praise; but that, as the public mind was not disposed to receive it favourably, it was unwise; and the means which he adopted for carrying it into execution was unconstitutional” (3: 91–2). Butler now adds that “none disapproved of his measures more than the catholics” (BoRCC 341). Butler’s concluding pages deplore Southey’s use of extreme language: “The words, ‘SUPERSTITION AND IDOLATRY’— are the burthen of ‘the Book of the Church.’ ” Such words (says Butler), when applied to a Roman Catholic’s religion, “are the most offensive words in the language” (343, Butler’s emphasis). Earlier, in his response to Southey, Butler had questioned the need for such vituperation: You write in an age of temper and philosophy;—when decency and politeness have banished polemic abuse from all the liberal parts of society; when oblivion of past animosities is universally recommended; when the mention of irritating subjects is avoided; when all denominations of Christians wish for good humour, for mutual forbearance and charity; when some of the most amiable and most wise of your contemporaries have advocated the abolition of the penal code against the roman-catholics; when those who think that the time for it is not arrived, avow their wish for its arrival . . . (216–17)

In the midst of this general disposition to unity, Southey, “a gentleman and a scholar” has “coolly and deliberately compiled a thousand pages, admirably calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord.” By giving prominence to “all that you think is likely to injure us, and concealing almost all that you think likely to do us honour,” Southey has “endeavoured to ruin our moral and religious character, and to hold us up to our fellow-subjects

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 119

8/22/2011 6:31:51 PM

120

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

as an abomination.” In this, Butler asks, “where is wisdom, where is good policy, where is charity?” (216–17) Now, on his final page, Butler insists that “this style of controversy YOU HAVE NOT LEARNED FROM US . In the most solemn manner, we have protested against all intemperate language, all rancorous and illiberal invective, all harsh and insulting expressions” (346–8, Butler’s emphasis). Coleridge’s verse hints at some sympathy with Butler: And tho’ he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre. Yet blames them both— and thinks the pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field? (Poems 458, Coleridge’s emphasis)

Southey himself seems to have recognized his opponent’s courtesy. After reading Butler’s book, he wrote to Henry Taylor: “I shall publish a vindication of the Book of the Church, in reply to Mr Butler, with proofs and illustrations. In this I shall treat him with the respect and courtesy he so well deserves, but I will open a battery upon the walls of Babylon” (L&C 5: 201).

9780230115132_07_ch06.indd 120

8/22/2011 6:31:51 PM

7

“Rom e’s Br a z e n Se r pe n t ”: Milner as Merlin

The British Critic for February 1825 reviewed Milner’s pseudony-

mous Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church alongside Butler’s more substantial volume. For the reviewer, Butler speaks in “the moderate and gentlemanlike phraseology” of the Catholic layman, while Milner “represents the bigoted popish priesthood and proves that the spirit of that body is unchanged” (BC 23: 176). Milner’s language is certainly combative, but hardly more provocative than Southey’s. And the anagrammatic pseudonym, “John Merlin,” is made even more transparent by Milner’s referring readers to his Letters to a Prebendary (1800) and End of Religious Controversy (1818). The British Critic quotes the somewhat supercilious opening words of Milner’s Strictures : “A degree of enthusiasm is requisite to constitute the character of a Poet; but no quality is more at variance with it than religious fanaticism” (BC 23: 176 citing Merlin 3). Milner continues: After writing D’Espriella’s letters in commendation of the Catholic Religion, and Wat Tyler’s Drama, to excite popular tumults against the Government, he has latterly celebrated and recommended the chief and most dangerous schismatics from the Establishment, the Wesleys, Whitfields [sic], and other associates; and now, in frantic style, and with the dying memorial of another schismatic, John Fox, he raves through the history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating the common source of Christianity, in order to court the heads of the present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it. (Merlin 3–4)

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 121

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

122

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Milner reminds his readers that “poet” in the original Greek means “a maker or inventor.” So he is not surprised that Southey makes use of poetic licence in writing history, “rather than weary himself in hunting out and bringing forward dusty records for the many extraordinary things he describes and tells” (Merlin 4). As in his earlier writings, Milner quickly stresses Catholic claims to continuity, insisting that Pope Gregory’s missionaries to the AngloSaxons “brought along with them from Rome, the same Christianity which is professed in it at the present day; namely, the Mass, the Real Presence, the Supremacy of the Pope, Prayers to the Saints for the Dead, Relicks, Crucifixes and Holy Water.” Moreover, Rome’s missionaries found “the Britons or Welsh, who had been converted in the second century, professing the self-same religion with themselves” (Merlin 5–6). Conceding that Southey does record the efforts of the Catholic clergy in “building churches and getting them endowed with rates and glebes and tithes,” Milner complains that, in other respects, the poet laureate hardly ever speaks of the clergy “but to charge them with the grossest ignorance, superstition and religious corruption.” He instances Southey’s charge that “Christianity in the days of Dunstan, was as much a system of priestcraft as that which, at this day, prevails in Hindoustan or Tibet” (Merlin 8–9 citing BoC 1: 98). Milner’s retort is equally acerbic, remarking that the charges of superstition and of corrupting New Testament Christianity are “what every sect of modern reformers bring against the others who have not advanced as far as themselves in the cause of irreligion.” Such alleged Catholic superstitions as the real presence in the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrament of penance, and prayers for the dead “are not corruptions,” says Milner, but rather “constituent parts of Christianity” (Merlin 8–10). Like an earlier British Critic reviewer (BC 21: 453–4), Milner objects to Southey’s treatment of Dunstan (Merlin 11–12 citing BoC 1: 88–113). Milner has this to say about Dunstan: “Besides being an illustrious ascetic, a restorer of clerical and monastic discipline, a model of prelatic virtues, he was a learned scholar, an exquisite mechanic in the most delicate kinds of work, a complete musician, and, what was of more consequence to his king and country, an accomplished Statesman and Prime Minister” (Merlin 11–12). Milner also objects to the bilious tone of some hundred pages that Southey (BoC 1: 143– 240) devotes to Dunstan’s fellow-Englishman, Becket—Milner’s “celebrated champion of the Church” (Merlin 17). He accuses Southey of working up “every legendary tale and every vulgar superstition into an avowed doctrine or a practice of the Catholic Church.” Had the

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 122

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

Milner as Merlin

123

poet laureate intended “to combat the Catholic Religion honourably and conscientiously, and not from his own imagination,” he would have cited the works of Peter Lombard, St. Bernard, and St. Thomas Aquinas (Merlin 20–1). It is Southey’s defense of Wycliffe that Milner finds most misleading. Southey’s verdict exposes the gap between their rival assessments: “The Roman Church has stigmatized him as a heretic of the first class; but England and the Protestant world, while there is any virtue, while there is any praise, will respect him with veneration and gratitude” (BoC 1: 334). Milner complains that, in the pages devoted to Wycliffe, Southey mentions only his denial of transubstantiation and the papal primacy, whereas a synod of eight bishops and nearly forty doctors condemned Wycliffe for doctrines “seditious no less than impious.” These ranged from asserting that “no Bishop or Priest being in mortal sin can ordain, consecrate or baptize” to the assertion that “tythes are mere alms, which the parishioners may hold or give to others by reason of the sins of their curates.” In spite of the longterm consequences of Lollardry, Milner notes that Southey celebrates all Wat Tyler’s rebels as “martyrs” who all suffered death in the cause of religion, “whatever their guilt might otherwise be” (Merlin 24–6). The laws used against fourteenth-century Lollards and their later survivors under the Tudors had, as Milner reminds Southey, been framed against the thirteenth-century “Albigenses Manichees, who were monsters of immorality and impiety rather than heretics” (28). Before Southey published Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ, addressed to Charles Butler, he was able to defend the Albigenses against Milner’s accusation of immorality. Writing in the Quarterly Review for December 1825, on the Vaudois or Waldenses, Southey explains that the names of Waldenses and Albigenses encompassed Spanish, French, and Italians; and that “adventurers from many other nations contributed to swell that force, which was sufficient to endanger the tyranny of Rome.” And he contradicts the claims of both Butler and Milner that the Albigenses were Manichean (QR 33: 153–8). The Waldenses or “Poor Men of Lyons” took their name from their founder, Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of late twelfth-century Lyons. His followers were known for their austerity and simplicity, and were distinct in origin from the Cathars or Bulgari, who undoubtedly shared the Gnostic dualism of third-century Manicheism, and had links to the Albigenses of Languedoc. Paradoxically, the rigid separation between the realm of pure spirit and the sinful world of the flesh— a separation that implied disregard of the fleshly elements— led to the antinomian belief that to the pure, all things are pure.

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 123

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

124

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Admittedly, the accusations of immorality came from opponents, but they explain Milner’s reference to “unnatural lusts” (Milner, 1841: 433). At the Reformation, the Waldenses (or Vaudois) were absorbed into Protestantism. When a seventeenth-century duke of Savoy mounted a campaign against them, assisted by French troops and Irish refugees from English Protestantism, Oliver Cromwell sought to put pressure on France and Savoy to stop the persecution. The victims are remembered in Milton’s sonnet “On the late massacre in Piedmont” (Poetical Works 84). John Ruskin would find a surviving Waldensian congregation in Piedmont in 1858 (Præterita 460–1). This is the background to Southey’s charge in the Quarterly Review for 1825 that Milner had “imbibed the spirit as well as the opinions of those by whom these persecuted people were hunted down” (QR 33: 142). The charge is echoed in Coleridge’s lines: “Enough of Milner! We’re agreed / Who now defends would then have done the deed” (Poems 458). In his 1825 Quarterly Review article, Southey repeats the claim that St. Dominic founded the Inquisition. He adds that “the inquisitorial exploits of St Dominic have ever been the special boast of the Dominican order,” and repeats the assertion three pages later (33: 153–4, 157–8), contradicting Butler as well as Milner. Dominic died in 1221, and the papal bulls generally credited with founding the Holy Office were not issued until 1233. Yet the Dominicans were undoubtedly used as agents of the Inquisition. And the first military crusade launched against the Albigenses in 1209, at Pope Innocent III’s urgent insistence, was supported by Dominic as the only hope, after his sermons and disputations of preceding years had failed. Dominic was canonized in 1234— only a year after the Inquisition was founded (Burl 22–5 and chapter 2). The Inquisition receives only brief mention in Vindiciæ, which (as Southey explained to John May in January 1826) “takes me only half thro Butler’s book” (Ramos 216). Butler in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church had conceded that the proceedings of the Inquisition were “very objectionable” (BoRCC 154), which Southey understandably regards as a masterpiece of understatement (Vindiciæ 418). Butler had urged him “as a Christian and a gentleman” to say on which side of the debate the balance of religious persecution lay—the Catholic or the Protestant (BoRCC 269). Southey retorts: “Put the Inquisition in the scale, Sir, and nothing can be found to counterpoise it, unless Hell be plucked up by the roots” (Vindiciæ 423). Southey’s persistent defense of the Vaudois/Waldenses/Albigenses is explained by his need to present them (like Wycliffe and the

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 124

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

Milner as Merlin

125

Lollards) as Protestants before the Reformation. Milner’s Strictures focuses on Protestant hagiography, as he censures Southey for his reliance on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Merlin 28–33). Milner does not deny that there were popular superstitions in Henry VIII’s reign, as will be found under George IV—“if anyone will take the pains to collect them from vergers, and clerks of cathedrals and other churches, and such-like ignorant people.” But that “the Prelates of the Church or the Superiors of our schools of literature, as the monasteries most certainly were, propagated them is a foul calumny, unsupported by one plausible argument” (Merlin 35). When citing rival statistics of martyrdom, Milner draws a distinction— already made by Butler— between treason and heresy. Cranmer, says Milner, together with “every other Protestant of distinction” had sided with Jane Grey against both Mary and Elizabeth, so that, if Elizabeth instead of Mary had succeeded Edward VI, “Cranmer would in all probability have suffered death even more speedily than he actually did” (Merlin 47). Cranmer, Milner recalls, had signed “six different retractions of Protestantism” within six weeks. He asks: “Is there in ecclesiastical history so unprincipled a Prelate as this boasted Apostle and Martyr of John Fox and Mr Southey?” (60–1). At Elizabeth’s accession, Milner finds Southey describing the Catholic bishops as “gaping to see the day when they might ‘wash their white rochets in her innocent blood’.” But he fails to mention that Southey was quoting Holinshed (Merlin 62 citing BoC 2: 253). For a response to Southey’s defense of Elizabeth’s persecuting policies, Milner (preserving the all-too-transparent cloak of anonymity) refers his readers to Letters to a Prebendary and the End of Religious Controversy. In Vindiciæ, Southey refers to these works of Milner, “wherein he asserts himself to have proved some of the rankest falsehoods that ever proceeded from the Jesuits’ manufactory of slander” (228). The so-called popish plots of Elizabeth’s reign, Milner claims, were “either fabrications of their enemies, or conspiracies of those enemies against the Catholics.” An exception was Babington’s plot to free Mary Queen of Scots “from her unjust confinement.” Milner insists that English Catholics remained loyal to Elizabeth, in spite of papal bulls “worded in the usual style, to satisfy the Princes and States of Christendom, who were scandalized and alarmed at the conspiracies and rebellions, at the piracies she publicly executed, and particularly at the Regicide she had with equal perfidy and cruelty committed on the Queen of Scots” (Merlin 66–7). At the Hampton Court Conference, called at the beginning of James I’s reign, the king put forth what Milner calls, “his newly

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 125

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

126

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

acquired spiritual supremacy, in a much higher tone than it had ever been claimed by Innocent III.” And Archbishop Whitgift himself pronounced that the king “spoke by the special inspiration of God’s spirit!” The result was a divided English church, and Milner notes that the rest of the Book of the Church was “more taken up with opposing the Puritans than calumniating the Catholics” (Merlin 73–5). Southey does attribute “the true spirit of toleration” to Oliver Cromwell. But what Milner calls the Protector’s “continued robbery of the Catholic laity and his butchery of Catholic priests” showed what toleration meant in England, while his “war of extermination” in Ireland “still more forcibly demonstrates what it was there.” Charles II’s Act of Uniformity (1662) excluded from the Anglican ministry all persons who had not received Episcopal ordination— thus debarring Presbyterians. Milner cites Southey’s admission that the Act was passed “with some clauses which the wisest statesmen and truest friends of the Church disapproved, but were unable to prevent” (BoC 2: 481, Milner’s emphasis). Southey’s words are used by Milner to suggest that “this champion of the Church is a Presbyterian or Methodist at heart” (Merlin 82). Reinforcing the imputation of unorthodox Anglicanism, Milner thinks Southey ought to have continued his narrative beyond the reign of James II to the point when “the damnable heresy of Socinianism” was “publicly preached up by the famous Bishop Hoadl[e]y and effectively protected by the Government” (Merlin 85, his emphasis). Milner excuses the brevity of Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church at 93 pages, by claiming that “the greater part of the Poet’s book is made up of those fanciful and inconsistent theories which characterize the Quarterly Review, and which therefore are undeserving of notice” (Merlin 80–1). Milner’s Strictures ends with a warning on the “conquests which the Methodists are making of your people by thousands and myriads in every part of the British dominions,” and on the danger of unregulated Bible study by “the young and ignorant.” The Bible alone is not enough: For is there a man so blindly bigoted as to believe that any such person will collect the Thirty-nine Articles, or any other system of Religion whatever from the mere perusal of the Bible? Or that he will learn a sacred regard for truth from the mere scriptural account of Abraham and Jacob, or of mercy from the wars of Joshua, or of chastity from the history of David and Solomon. I mean without a comment, or an interpreter. (Merlin 90)

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 126

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

Milner as Merlin

127

Catholic teaching, by contrast, was based on “a two-fold revelation, one written, the other unwritten; in other words, Scripture and Tradition.” From this two-fold revelation, the clergy “select and deliver to the body of the faithful such portions of God’s word as are necessary for belief and practice, broken and prepared for their digestions, in her catechisms and oral instruction.” Catholic teaching is thus “found to be the same in different ages and countries,” whereas Protestants (to quote from Ephesians iv 14) “are found to be at endless variance one with another,” and to be “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine ” (90–3, Milner’s emphasis). Milner’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward “the body of the faithful” was challenged by Southey’s supporter and correspondent, the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, in Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism (1825)—his answer to Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church. Objecting to the whole “abundance of ceremonies,” the seven sacraments, penance, purgatory and indulgences, and the worship of saints and images, Blanco White addresses the scriptural basis for the papal primacy and its claim to infallibility: Had the “Catholic” early Christians studied the scriptures “without the bias of such notions, they would have found that the divine author of Christianity has nowhere provided a remedy against doubt and dissent.” There were heretics even when the early church was still “under the guidance of the Apostles,” yet the New Testament mentions them “without allusion to any infallible method of ending these first disputes on doctrines” (White 87). And in recounting his own desertion of Catholicism, Blanco White describes how he concluded “that the certainty of the Roman Catholic faith” was based on reasoning in a circle: “for I believed the infallibility of the church because the Scripture said she was infallible; while I had no better proof that the Scripture said so, than the assertion of the Church that she could not mistake the Scripture.” It was also the Church that decided which texts were canonical— and therefore decided what the Bible was (White 9–10). Southey’s own reply to Butler and Milner in Vindiciæ would not appear until 1826, but he was in a belligerent mood when he wrote to Blanco White in April 1825: “It is long since such a battery has been opened on the Romish Church as I am bringing to bear upon it” (Thom 1: 410). Although Southey’s long-heralded Vindiciæ was directed primarily against Butler as the more persuasive of his Catholic antagonists, he did direct some sallies at Milner as “Merlin.” Noting that the Catholic Association’s formal vote of appreciation, thanking Butler for

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 127

8/22/2011 6:31:55 PM

128

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

what it called his “able refutation of the calumnies heaped upon the Catholic Church by the Poet Laureate,” included a vote of thanks to Milner, Southey declares that “whatever notice I may think proper to bestow upon his observations, will be included therefore in this reply” (Vindiciæ 14–15). When challenging Butler’s complaint that he treated the miracles of the Catholic Church “with contempt and ridicule” (Vindiciæ 95), Southey also turns on Milner: “The titular Bishop Milner may perhaps bravely profess his belief in these precious miracles, for one who has taken under his protection not only St Winifred, but St Ursula, and the whole company of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, may be valiant enough to defend anything” (Vindiciæ 106). And recalling that Milner charged him with having “falsified a synodical decree,” the poet laureate compliments Butler on not following “this ill-mannered man in his language” (Vindiciæ 228). Yet Southey himself now resorts to vituperative language worthy of the former Antijacobin Review. He explains that he had been referring to Milner by his title of bishop of Castabala “till I learnt from his present pamphlet that he had been translated to the see of Billingsgate” (Vindiciæ 228n citing AJR 32: 445–7). Southey suggests that Milner’s only reason for adopting a pseudonym was so that he might advise his readers (Merlin 64) to consult Dr. Milner’s “unanswerable” Letters to a Prebendary and the End of Religious Controversy (Vindiciæ 228n). Of the three Merlins known to history and fable, Southey dismisses any analogy with the Welsh Merlin who was “a poet, a prophet and a madman.” Charitably deciding that John Merlin was none of the three, he likens Milner rather to the “Merlin of Spenser and the Round Table Romances, the well-known enchanter.” Admittedly “Dr Milner works no miracles himself; he only testifies to those of St Winifred, and believes in those of St Dunstan and Co.” Spenser’s Merlin, though the son of the Devil, we are assured, was “a gentleman on his mother’s side,” but “the titular bishop writes as if he were without a drop of gentle blood in his veins.” As for the third Merlin, “the ingenious mechanist well known in his day,” Southey imagines him as a lay brother in a convent, with Milner as abbot, enriching the fraternity by making images “weep, sweat, speak, lift their hands and roll their eyes.” He considers Milner’s writings “worthy of Bishop Bonner,” burner of Protestants in Mary’s reign, though Southey pretends to believe that even Bonner would have shown more restraint than Milner had done in the “thoroughly malignant and scurrilous publication” which the Catholic Association had just commended and which had provoked the poet laureate’s response (Vindiciæ 228–9n).

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 128

8/22/2011 6:31:56 PM

Milner as Merlin

129

Such pleasantries are hardly what Butler would consider “a proper style of controversy,” and are closer to “Billingsgate” humor than anything of Milner’s. But the poet laureate is surely right to rebut Milner’s claim that “Southey himself avows the Moravians’ fundamental fanaticism of instantaneous conversion” (Merlin 11). In his Life of Wesley, Southey had questioned Wesley’s purported acceptance of the doctrine of instantaneous conversion, on the grounds that he had found no other kind in the Acts of the Apostles. Southey counters Wesley’s arguments by wearily explaining that, in New Testament times, all conversions were miraculous, because it was an age of miracles. Southey the castigator of alleged medieval miracles was happy to accept miraculous events in the Apostolic Age (Wesley 1: 159). He is soon censuring Milner for leaguing with Lingard in opposition to Carte and Rapin, Hume, Henry, and Turner— names that Southey describes as including “the most sagacious, the most impartial, the most laborious, and the most accurate of our historians.” Of Southey’s Protestant quintet, only Hume is still a recognized authority. John Lingard is not mentioned by name in the main text of the Book of the Church, though the Catholic historian himself thought it was an answer to his History of England (Haile and Bonney 204). Lingard’s history reached its eighth and final volume in 1830. The first three volumes, appearing in 1819, carried the narrative up to the accession of Henry VIII. The Quarterly Review noticed the third and fourth volumes in December 1825 alongside Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church, Milner’s Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church, the bishop of Chester’s Letter to C. Butler, Esq., Butler’s Letter to the Bishop of Chester, W. E. Andrews’s Review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Cobbett’s History of the Reformation (QR 33: 1–37). Earlier in the same year, the British Critic had remarked that “Dr Lingard is Mr Butler’s Apollo, and furnishes him avowedly with four-fifths of his facts” (BC 23: 199). Lingard’s own advertisement, prefacing the fourth volume of his history, published in 1820, explains his own approach as an historian. It is “to take nothing upon credit, to distrust the statements of partial and interested writers, and to consult every authentic document within my reach. Fidelity and research are the indispensable duties of the historian.” He asks readers to excuse “my occasional ignorance of motives and causes, my inexperience in that which is termed the philosophy of history, but which has appeared to me the philosophy of romance. When the ancient authorities are silent, I have preferred to leave the reader to the exercise of his

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 129

8/22/2011 6:31:56 PM

130

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

own judgment, than to palm upon him my own conjectures for real facts” (Lingard 4: v–vi). The synopsis of Elizabeth’s reign, which Lingard supplies in the advertisement to his fifth volume (1823), aptly conveys the tone of his judgments: The reader will observe the steps by which Elizabeth abolished the ancient, and introduced the reformed hierarchy and worship; the severities with which she repressed the discontent of the Catholics and the intemperance of the Puritans; her ambiguous, and often unjustifiable, conduct towards the unfortunate Mary Stuart; her intrigues with the Scottish, French and Flemish religionists; and her wars, the consequences of those intrigues, with their several sovereigns; the extension of the English commerce under her auspices; the triumphs of the English navy over the formidable fleets of Spain; the successive rise and fall of her different favourites; and the cares, the sorrows and the despondency of her declining age.

Lingard reports that he has “carefully compared the narratives of preceding writers; has perused with attention the many collections of state papers belonging to the period; and has frequently consulted the dispatches of the French, the Spanish and the Imperial ambassadors.” This has enabled him “to elucidate much that had been thought obscure, and to discover much that has been hitherto unknown” (Lingard 5: v–vi). Of Lingard’s eight volumes, only the first six had been published by the time Southey wrote Vindiciæ. The sixth volume (1825), carrying the narrative from the accession of James I to the beginning of the Civil War, begins with a defense of the two preceding volumes. Lingard claims to have “tried to hold with a steady hand the balance between the contending parties, and to delineate with equal fidelity the virtues and the vices of the principal actors, whether they supported the pretensions of the crown, or fought for the liberties of the people.” And having “no political partialities to gratify, he knows not of any temptation, which was likely in this respect to seduce him from the straight line of duty” (6: v). The last barb may have been directed at Southey, as Lingard told his publisher that the poet laureate’s Book of the Church had “plainly been written for a purpose, to please the High Church party” (Gilley in SCH 18: 422). On February 14, 1826, Southey promised Blanco White a copy of Vindiciæ “in the course of a week or ten days.” He was convinced that “though only half of what was intended is done, the man who resists its evidence must be proof against all facts, all logic and all sense of time.” He expects Butler to complain that he has “used too

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 130

8/22/2011 6:31:56 PM

Milner as Merlin

131

much vinegar, as you and I complain that he has used too much oil.” But Southey is “more apprehensive of having sinned at the outset in being too courteous, than in speaking plain truth in emphatic words as I advanced into the subject” (Thom 1: 424–5). He recognizes that his own self-vindication is appearing after powerful supporting batteries have already taken the field. He explains that he nevertheless decided to publish Vindiciæ, because he had already started writing it when the other replies in his defense appeared, and because Butler’s book contained personal criticism and “remarks affecting the fidelity of my statements” (Vindiciæ ix). Southey had omitted, from the second edition of the Book of the Church, Foxe’s inaccurate account of Gardiner’s death, though Butler accused him of having retained it. Southey offers this as evidence of Butler’s unreliability (x–xiii). The first edition had sold 3,000 copies; a second edition of 1,500 copies (also in 1824) sold out, and a third edition was published in 1825 (Speck 197). Southey insists that the Book of the Church is “strictly an historical work” and not intended as a contribution to the debate on Catholic rights. He had dedicated the work to a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, which he would not have done if the book “had borne upon that question in any other manner than as a faithful history of the English Church, and a faithful view of that system from which the Reformation delivered us.” He concedes that Vindiciæ “bears more directly on the question,” and he devotes several pages to stating what he would have said if he had been addressing the Emancipation issue (xiv–xvi). Southey begins Vindiciæ on a conciliatory note: “The English Romanists have produced few writers so tolerant and in general so equitable as Mr Butler.” But the effect of Southey’s compliment is marred by boasting of his own reputation for tolerance: “I dare affirm that no man has ever rendered more ample justice to the virtues and motives of those whose principles he has impugned, and whose actions he has condemned.” He cites his history of Methodism as proof (Vindiciæ 2–3). It seems doubtful whether the Dominicans, who attracted his especial scorn in his Quarterly Review articles of 1811, 1819, and 1825, would have agreed. Southey points to the months he spent in Spain and Portugal, where he had “seen what the Roman Catholic religion is,” and had experienced it, “not as it is represented by those of its advocates who write for Protestant readers, but as it is in practice” (5). Perhaps, if it had not been for that experience, he reflects, the Book of the Church “might never have been written.” It was, he says, while in Lisbon that one of the tasks he vowed to perform was “that of exposing this baneful system in its proper

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 131

8/22/2011 6:31:56 PM

132

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

deformity, in shewing to my countrymen such as it has been, is, and must continue to be, so long as it maintains its pretensions to be infallible” (8). So much for conciliatory language. Southey refers to Butler’s “own polished manner,” and agrees that a “conciliatory and unimpassioned tone might easily, as well as fitly, be maintained, if the controversial matter were merely theological or speculative; but I have to deal with historical facts.” It would (he argues) therefore be “dissembling, pitifully, were I to pretend respect for a Church whose corruptions and practices I have been led to investigate and expose.” How could he be expected to avoid the words “superstition” and “idolatry,” which so offended Butler (BoRCC 343), without betraying the cause of the Reformation? “It is because the Church of Rome is an idolatrous and superstitious Church that we have separated from her ” (Vindiciæ 16–19, Southey’s emphasis). As the editors of the Antijacobin Review, and the historian Sir Richard Musgrave, had done, Southey goes back to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and its decision that “the Pope may absolve subjects from their allegiance, depose princes and give their dominions to be enjoyed by them when they have exterminated the heretics.” He adds that the Council of Constance (1414) “pronounced that faith was not to be kept with heretics,” and that “your creed proclaims with the Council of Trent, that the Church of Rome is Mistress as well as Mother of all Churches” (24–5). As for the doctrine of exclusive salvation—that outside the Catholic Church no one can be saved— Southey asks: “Is it not the bounden and religious duty of those who hold this article of faith to persecute wherever they have any power?” And ought those who avow the doctrine “ever to be entrusted with political power in a Protestant kingdom” (27). Butler had appealed to the seventeenth-century authorities of Cardinal Bossuet and John Gother, and to Dr. Richard Challoner in the eighteenth century. Southey cites instead the curriculum of Maynooth College, the Irish seminary endowed by the British government in 1795, following suppression of the continental Catholic seminaries. He quotes the first article of the Rule of Faith taught at Maynooth: “The total and only Rule of the Catholic Faith, to which all are obliged under pain of heresy and excommunication is Divine Revelation, delivered to the Prophets and Apostles, and proposed by the Catholic Church in her General Councils or by her universal practice, to be believed as an Article of Catholic Faith.” Butler would be justified in appealing to the Maynooth rule, if the question concerned only his own belief or that of other “semi-reformed Roman Catholics.” But (says Southey) such definitions are irrelevant to the

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 132

8/22/2011 6:31:56 PM

Milner as Merlin

133

Book of the Church, which is “an outline of the Ecclesiastical History of England. It presents not a statement of what the Church of Rome may just now be pleased to put forth as its theory, but an historical account of what has always been its practice.” Thus the Roman Church “is answerable for all those abuses, corruptions, and crimes, which it could have prevented, but never attempted to prevent; it is answerable for all that it permitted, all that it adopted, all that it enjoined, whether it were acting from cupidity or from ambition; for the purpose of replenishing its treasuries and enriching its agents and dependents, or of extending and confirming its usurped dominion” (Vindiciæ 34–6). Butler’s insistence that the Book of the Church should have focused only on defined articles of faith is dismissed. Southey cannot agree that “Benedictinism, and Franciscanism, and Dominicanism, and Carmelitism, and Carthusianism, and Jesuitism, with their respective mythologies, their mummeries, and their superstitions, are no part of the Roman Catholic system.” Can the Catholic Church be exonerated when it canonizes Saints, dedicates churches to them, inserts their names in the Kalendar, introduces their legends into a form of service for their respective days, enjoins that they should be honoured and invocated, and that their images and relics should be venerated, and yet is not answerable for the fables which it has thus sanctioned, adopted and sanctified, and requires no belief in them? No belief in those to whom it erects altars? (Vindiciæ 40–1)

That is the constant theme of Southey’s defense of his Book of the Church: “It is to history that I look for what the Papal religion has manifested itself to be. I find its character in its actions” (Vindiciæ 41). He ends more than 40 pages of his introductory chapter of Vindiciæ with a statement of his professional aim as an historian: My desire, as an historian, has ever been to represent all persons and all parties in the truest light, not in the strongest; neither dissembling the errors nor palliating the offences of those whom I consider as entitled on the whole to the esteem and gratitude of posterity, nor withholding any thing that may abate our abhorrence for those who have rendered themselves infamous . . . . Judging of actions by the immutable standards of right and wrong, I have endeavoured to judge of men according to their age, country, situation, and even time of life, glad to discover something which may extenuate the criminality of the agent, even when I pronounce the severest condemnation of the act. (45–6)

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 133

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

134

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

However much Southey may have met his own exacting standards in writing his History of Brazil, his biographies of Wesley and Nelson, and his History of the Peninsular War, he did not show a similar objectivity in his portrayal of the Catholic Church. Like the “Whig” historians who followed him, his agenda precludes impartiality, and his reference to “the immutable standards of right and wrong” is echoed in Lord Acton’s boast, in his inaugural Cambridge lecture of June 11, 1895, of “the undying penalty that history has the power to inflict on wrong” (Lectures 24). Southey asks Butler “whether the times are indeed such that the Church of England exists but by sufferance, and that he who records its history or pleads its cause, must accommodate his language so as not to displease its enemies” (Vindiciæ 52–3). He pretends not to see why the Romanists are offended when the papal system is called a system of imposture: “The Protestants are not offended when they are called Heretics by the Papists; they receive the appellation just as they would that of Dogs or Kaffers from the Moors” (56). Butler had cited Milner’s worldwide list of Catholic countries in order to demonstrate the universality of the Catholic Church (BoRCC 15–17 citing Milner 1841: 188–9). Did so universal a faith deserve to be called a system of imposture? Southey’s answer is to resort to ridicule. He invites Butler to ask himself whether “Dr Milner’s exhibition of Siamese, and Tonquinese, and Chinese and Cochin-Chinese converts, of his Zanguebar and Monomotopan churches, with his Algerine, and Persian and Ethiopian Roman Catholics, is not much in the style of the representation of the human race, as got up by their orator Anacharsis Clootz for the National Convention.” Whatever their respective coverage of the globe, Southey is convinced that the moral and intellectual weight lies with Protestantism: Take, Sir, Italy and Spain, and Catholic Germany and France, and weigh them in the intellectual and moral balance with Great Britain and the Protestant Swiss Cantons, and the North of Europe! And let not the Vaudois be forgotten, our elder brethren in the gospel, poor though they be, and few in numbers, yet by no Protestant to be remembered without admiration, nor mentioned without respect and gratitude. Nor must our younger brethren beyond the Atlantic be overlooked, who are now co-operating with us in the great work of extending Christianity among the heathen, and spreading those Scriptures upon which it rests. (Vindiciæ 48–9)

Southey’s claim to a Protestant monopoly of the Gospel prompts Butler to ask whether there is a single significant duty or practice

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 134

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

Milner as Merlin

135

recommended in the New Testament that the Roman missionaries to Saxon England had failed to inculcate (BoRCC 30). Southey agrees that the missionaries did inculcate the practices and duties which the Gospel enjoins. They did this as Christians; but it was equally certain that, “as Romish Christians, they introduced as practices, and inculcated as duties, observances concerning which the Gospel is altogether silent; all of them unauthorized by its letter or its spirit, and some in plain contradiction to both” (Vindiciæ 59). Like Wesley, Southey accepts the miracles recorded in the New Testament. But when Butler (BoRCC 46) suggests that Catholics may disbelieve medieval miracles without ceasing to be a Catholic, Southey mocks his opponent’s contradictory position: “You boast of a perpetual succession of miracles in the Romish Church, as a perpetual proof that it is the true one. You give them up in detail, and appeal to them in the gross” (Vindiciæ 96–7). Southey does not consider Bede (cited by Butler) a reliable authority on miracles. He was a saint himself, and every saint whose life he describes (says Southey) performed miracles, except those he knew and lived with. “In short, miracles took place everywhere, except where he was present” (113). Southey claims that superstition and fraud were both involved. The credulity of the faithful was exploited, he thinks, “not merely by individual knaves for their own exclusive ends, but systematically by Religious communities for the benefit of their order, and of the Papal Church” (193). Southey refers readers to Blanco White’s Practical and Internal Evidences against Catholicism, calling it “a book that must convince every heart which bigotry and superstition have not rendered impenetrable” (218n). And instead of the Jesuit historians cited by Butler, Southey recommends the work of the Anglican archbishops Parker and Ussher, and of the seventeenth-century bishop, Edward Stillingfleet— a man “unimpeached and unimpeachable in character; of the soundest learning and the soundest judgment” (220). Some of the heaviest artillery in Southey’s attack on Butler is marshaled in his attack on clerical celibacy— a question debated in the Milner–Sturges confrontation of 1800. The debate was sustained by Blanco White’s obsessive preoccupation with the question, and it was still a live issue in 1830 when Coleridge censured compulsory clerical celibacy in On the Constitution of the Church and State (C&S 81). Southey’s attack on clerical celibacy first targets Milner, who praises “Pope Hildebrand” (Gregory VII) for stamping out simony and “completely remedying the incontinency of the clergy.” The pope (says Southey) was “as successful in the one attempt as the other, and the Romish Church proved itself about as immaculate in morals as

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 135

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

136

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

it was infallible in doctrine” (Vindiciæ 286). As Blanco White had already done, Southey links clerical celibacy to what he calls “those turpitudes of the confessional.” He tells Butler: “It is just possible, Sir, to be decorous while exhibiting some of the extravagances and follies which have arisen from the morality of the cloister and of the Romish Church; but it is not possible to be grave.” Yet it is evidently no laughing matter, as Southey links two somewhat different agents of licentiousness: “The Confessional, in its ordinary effects, has done more harm toward producing a corruption of manners than the Press itself, even where the Press is altogether free, and its freedom most abused.” And Southey invokes the pronouncement of a Piedmontese writer: “Nature has placed two barriers for the preservation of female virtue—modesty and remorse. By confession and absolution the priest removes them both” (Vindiciæ 341–3). Conflicting opinions on Thomas Becket provoke new exchanges of invective. Responding to Milner’s remark in Strictures (89) that “the Poet copiously discharges his bile upon this celebrated champion of the Church,” Southey retorts: “It is quite natural that I should appear bilious in the eyes of one who has the black jaundice” (Vindiciæ 345 citing Merlin 17). After some pages devoted to clerical immunities championed by Becket, Southey notes that even Butler (“who for your apparent liberality [has] obtained the applause of unwary Protestants”) asserts that Becket “perished for a faithful adherence to ecclesiastical duty” (BoRCC 89). Southey observes that, “if such be the duty of a Romish Prelate, then is the system which makes it so as irreconcileable with national policy as it is with religion, as inconsistent with the constitution of these kingdoms as it is with the gospel, as intolerable as it has every where shown itself to be intolerant” (Vindiciæ 363–4). Southey assures Butler that an effigy of the pope is no longer burned on the November 5th bonfires, but instead one of Guy Fawkes “as the representative of the Joint Stock Gunpowder Company for which he was agent and inspector.” Such reassurance is hardly consoling, however, when followed by a disobliging comparison between His Holiness and the Dalai Lama: The Pope of Tibet may in entire simplicity believe himself to be what all around him assure him that he is, because from childhood he has been trained and treated in that capacity, and so secluded from all intercourse with the world, that he supposes all men acknowledge his divinity. But the Dalai-Lama of Rome knows that his pretensions are disputed by half Christendom, and denied by it upon the authority of those very Scriptures which he produces as the charter of his power. (383–4)

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 136

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

Milner as Merlin

137

If the salvation of all the faithful depends (under God) on the pope, Southey asks whether it is possible that “these stupendous prerogatives should co-exist with imbecility, with vice, with flagitious profligacy— and with flagrant unbelief?” No, Southey tells Butler, “it is not through these broken conduits, through these sinks and sewers that we can be content to receive the waters of life.” Protestants drink instead at “the fountain-head of the Rock of Scripture from whence they flow pure, and will for ever flow” (395–6). Vindiciæ concludes by censuring the pope for “the sin of omission” with regard to both papal acquiescence in the Inquisition’s treatment of the Jews and papal failure to condemn the slave trade (400, 423–5). Hard-hitting and often vituperative as Vindiciae is, Southey seemed to be already in command of the field by the time it appeared in 1826. In a lead article at the end of 1825, entitled “The Reformation in England,” the Quarterly Review observed that so many writers had rallied to Southey’s defense that the poet laureate “will scarcely find an enemy to combat.” But while congratulating Southey on routing his Catholic adversaries, the Quarterly Review stresses the severity of the attack that had been launched on the Established Church. Noting that Butler had written “with an amenity of temper, and an excessive suavity,” the Quarterly Review finds it “difficult to repress emotions of abhorrence” when confronted with the “bitter, turbid and rancorous” effusions of Milner. Lingard (whose third and fourth volumes are under review) is described as having “studied the art of composition in the school of Hume and Gibbon,” learning to use “the consummate artifice, which they employed against Christianity, to the disparagement of the Protestant religion in this country.” Lingard “wears away the foundations rather by the perpetual droppings of insinuation, than a bold and regular attack, which may be fairly met and repelled” (QR 33: 4–6). The Quarterly Review marvels that Cobbett, “the best mob-writer of this or any day,” who had so successfully studied to “address himself to the common intellect of the people, should so entirely have lost his hold on the public mind.” A few “bigots” may read his History of the Protestant Reformation to “gratify their rancour,” but Cobbett “cannot enjoy the gratification of having done any serious mischief ” (QR 33: 9). Yet, Cobbett’s History, besides furthering the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, found a popular readership in the English-speaking world that Southey’s Book of the Church and Vindiciæ could not rival (Pemberton 133). In February 1825, nine months before the Quarterly Review’s article on the Reformation, the British Critic had already decided that the battle was won. Reviewing both Butler’s Book of the Roman

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 137

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

138

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Catholic Church and Milner’s Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church, the journal considers Southey’s success all the greater because “the Roman Catholics, on the point of making an unusual effort, intended to rest their controversial engines upon Lingard’s account of the Reformation.” They expected, with help from Cobbett, “to convince the world that the Reformation was a curse.” The Book of the Church had prevented that. Southey had “painted the cruelties of expiring Popery and the frenzy of triumphant Puritanism with an eloquence that excited universal admiration, and a pathos which found its way to every heart.” In his “glowing narrative,” the Established Church appeared in her true role, “observing the just mean between superstition and fanaticism on the one hand, and a latitudinarian infidelity on the other” (BC 23: 174–5). If English Catholics would “abjure Dr Milner, silence Dr Baines [whose Inquiry into the Religion of Christ was also being reviewed] and read no more of Dr Lingard,” while defying their vicars apostolic, they would deserve to be treated in the same way as “any class of seceders from the national church” (23: 205). The Edinburgh Review, in its November 1825 notice of Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church, took a more accommodating view. The reviewer hoped that “the proceedings of some of the Catholic leaders may not be allowed to prejudice the cause of emancipation,” which it had already described as “of vast and paramount importance, not merely as affecting Ireland only, but as involving the integrity, and for that reason, the fate of the British Empire” (ER 43: 163, 126). The Edinburgh Review urges Protestant critics “to let the Roman Catholic Church speak for itself, and to allow its dogmas to be learned from its councils, its professions of faith, its catechisms, its liturgies, and it most able divines.” And it asks “how loud and clamorous” would the petitioners against Catholic Emancipation be, “were doctrines to be fabricated and promulgated by Roman Catholic priests, as tenets of the Church of England, which were no where to be found either in the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Homilies, or the Protestant Liturgy?” The reviewer follows Butler in emphasizing the similarities between Catholics and Anglicans. Endorsing Butler’s argument, the Edinburgh Review recalls that, despite its defects, Catholicism “is a Christian Religion; that its main object unquestionably is to make men acquainted with their duties towards God and towards each other; that it was long the only religion of the Christian world, and that it is still by far the most generally diffused; and that in several Catholic nations there exists the highest state of intellectual cultivation.” And with arguments that

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 138

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

Milner as Merlin

139

Sydney Smith had used in 1807 and would be echoed by Coleridge in 1830, the Edinburgh Review insists that Parliament should not be concerned with such doctrines as transubstantiation, tradition, and the invocation of saints, which could be left to “those who are curious about such matters.” Commenting on Lord Liverpool’s speech in the last session of Parliament, the Edinburgh Review dismisses the noble lord’s assertion, that the obedience due by all Catholics to the pope implies a divided civil allegiance, as “utterly without foundation” (ER 43:127–9). It is this divided allegiance that Coleridge regards as the chief obstacle to Catholic Emancipation, which is perhaps sufficient reason for his ranking Jeffrey among campaigners for Catholic relief in Sancti Dominici Pallium (Poems 459). But the Edinburgh Review presumably gave further offense to the poets by showing that Blanco White, when reprinting Butler’s citation of a canon of the Council of Florence (1438–58), had omitted the italicized phrase: “Full power was delegated to the Bishop of Rome in the person of St Peter, to feed, regulate, and govern the universal Church, as expressed in the General Councils and holy canons ” (ER 43:135n citing BoRCC 121). The same article in the Edinburgh Review noticed Reports and Evidences upon the state of Ireland —the published evidence from a parliamentary inquiry during the previous session. Commenting on the evidence given in April 1824 by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, the Edinburgh Review quotes the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Murray, on the notorious third canon of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which he says: has no authority whatever in any part of Christendom; it never had any authority in those countries; and it was made for a particular purpose, which has long since ceased. It is exceedingly doubtful whether or not that canon was ever enacted in the Council of the Lateran—for no ancient manuscript records it; but, allowing it to have been enacted, it was done by the civil authorities of Christendom, who were there assembled. (ER 43: 141–2)

In a footnote, the Edinburgh Review adds the reminder that “the Council was held chiefly for the purpose of concerting measures for the suppression of the heresy of the Albigenses” (142n). The British Critic and the Quarterly Review were notoriously establishment journals (Sack chapter 9), but even in the pages of the Edinburgh Review, the ghost of St. Dominic broods over the Emancipation debate. And there is a chilling echo of the Albigensian

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 139

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

140

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

crusade in the Edinburgh Review’s assertion that efforts to raise the Irish population “from the abyss of poverty and degradation into which they have sunk” cannot succeed unless the question of Emancipation is settled. And settled it could not be, “otherwise than by the extermination of the Catholics, or the concession of their claims ” (43: 162).

9780230115132_08_ch07.indd 140

8/22/2011 6:31:57 PM

8

Su pp ort i ng Bat t e r i es: S ou t h e y De f e n de d

Both the Quarterly Review’s reviewer—“the late journalist” Southey

mentions in his preface to Vindiciæ — and the British Critic questioned whether the poet laureate’s self-vindication was really needed (QR 33: 4–6; BC 23: 652–3). In February 1825, nine months before the Quarterly Review, the British Critic listed Southey’s three principal champions: the Rev. Joseph Blanco White (Southey’s Spanish friend and correspondent), the Rev. Henry Phillpotts (rector of Stanhope and soon to be bishop of Exeter), and the Rev. George Townsend (newly appointed prebendary of Durham Cathedral). “Each of these,” remarks the British Critic, “has made a formidable breach in the new bulwark of the Roman Catholic Church, and unless some temporary defence is thrown up by the defenders, Mr Southey’s Vindiciæ will take possession of the fortress without opposition.” The reviewer decides that Charles Butler’s efforts have been counterproductive: “The religion of the Pope turns out to be worse than it was supposed to be, the Protestant champions are numerous and unanswerable; public feeling declares in their favour; and we are indebted for all this to Mr Butler.” As Butler himself ruefully admitted in his own Vindication of the Book of the Roman Catholic Church, published in 1826 but written before Southey’s Vindiciæ appeared: “If a multitude of Answers to a work be a proof of its merit ‘the Book of the Roman Catholic Church’ has pretensions to be thought meritorious” (Vindication xi). Apart from the three key antagonists identified by the Quarterly Review and the British Critic, Butler lists eight other publications critical of his Book of the Roman Catholic

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 141

8/22/2011 6:32:01 PM

142

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Church, together with “regular criticism” in the British Critic, the British Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Christian Observer, the Quarterly Review, the Quarterly Theological Review, the Westminster Review, “and probably in some journals which I have not seen” (Vindication lxxi). Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which from its founding in 1817 had supported Catholic Emancipation in principle, by 1825 had adopted outright opposition as its editorial line. This left only the Edinburgh Review among the big guns of the periodical press to support Butler. It concluded its 40-page notice of the Book of the Roman Catholic Church in November 1825 with an emphatic assertion that “those stories about the overwhelming power of the Pope, and the divided allegiance of Catholics, have no existence except in the distempered and prejudiced imaginations of those by whom they have been trumpeted forth” (ER 43: 161). Butler decides that his fire must be directed at Prebendary George Townsend’s Accusations of History against the Church of Rome (1825). Like Southey’s Book of the Church, Townsend relies on historical examples, with frequent reference to the 1215 Lateran Council and its decrees against the Albigenses. The Quarterly Review praises Phillpotts for his demolition of Butler’s “theological information,” and for his “learning and acuteness,” and it also wonders what answer can be given to “the affecting personal experience of Mr Blanco White” (33: 5). Butler’s answers to both Phillpotts and White appear in the prefatory letter to Charles Blundell that begins the Vindication (xx–lxxi). A copy of Blanco White’s Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism had reached Southey on May 21, 1825. He replied the next day: “I thank you for your book, as an individual and a friend: I thank you also as an Englishman and a Protestant. You have rendered, and at a very critical time, a most essential service to these kingdoms and to the Christian cause . . .. I have never been more affected than by parts of this volume— never more satisfied than by the whole of it.” Southey adds: “You will not be displeased to hear that Wordsworth, who is with me, is impressed by it just as I have been.” (Thom 1: 415)

Blanco White, formerly José Maria Blanco Y Crespo, shared with Southey the advantage, not enjoyed by other participants in the Emancipation debate, of having experienced Spanish Catholicism at first hand (White 3). Descended from an Irish Catholic family, his grandfather had escaped from Protestant persecution in County Waterford, and settled in Spain. White’s father went back to Ireland as a child, but later married a Spaniard. So the son’s upbringing merged

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 142

8/22/2011 6:32:01 PM

Southey Defended

143

“the two most powerful and genuine elements of a religionist— the unhesitating faith of persecuting Spain; the impassioned belief of persecuted Ireland” (7). After studying philosophy and theology at the University of Seville, and being ordained to the Catholic priesthood, White served as one of the king’s chaplains at Seville, where a crisis of faith left him “bordering on atheism” (9–10). Escaping to England from war-torn Spain, he was converted to Anglicanism. While claiming in his preface that he was not primarily concerned with the Emancipation debate, White sets out to “convince the conscientious of the papal communion, that a Roman Catholic cannot honestly do his duty as a member of the British Parliament without moral guilt” (viii). In Catholic works of devotion designed to keep the Catholic faithful true to their church, White recognizes “every feature” of the religion in which he was educated. But in works meant for the general public, he finds only “a flattered and almost ideal portrait of these to me well-known features, which unchanged and unsoftened by age, the writers are conscious cannot be seen without disgust by any of those to whom custom has not made them familiar.” Among contemporary Catholic apologists, Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church is, for White, “the most artful picture of the kind which has come to my hands.” He will not impugn Butler’s sincerity, yet his book demonstrates “the power of prejudice in distorting the clearest objects.” Such “varnished accounts of religious systems,” White decides, “must not be allowed to rivet religious prejudice, or stand as a lure to the unwary” (30–2). In his Book of the Roman Catholic Church, Butler had claimed that papal authority is of so spiritual a nature that it poses no threat to civil authority. Yet White argues that it is “as notorious as the existence of the Roman see” that the pope has “for a long series of centuries, actively claimed a paramount obedience, and thus actually interfered with the civil obedience of his spiritual subjects.” Contrary to Butler, White (32–6) alleges that the canon of the Council of Florence stating that “full power was delegated to the bishop of Rome in the person of St Peter, to feed, regulate and govern the universal church,” far from implying a limitation on papal power, as Butler (BoRCC 2nd ed. 121) claimed, “can convey to the mind of the sincere Catholic no idea of limitation.” White confesses himself “too well acquainted with the extreme flexibility, the deluding slipperiness of Roman Catholic theology.” But (as the Edinburgh Review pointed out) he had himself, when citing Butler, omitted the limiting phrase “as expressed in the General Councils and holy canons” (43: 135n). Distinguishing between transalpine and cisalpine positions as defined by Butler

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 143

8/22/2011 6:32:01 PM

144

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

(BoRCC 123–4), White describes the transalpines as believing that “he who has full authority to feed the flock, must also have it to preserve the pasturage safe and unobstructed,” and that the power to depose princes is within the “divine prerogative” of the pope. The cisalpines merely regard such claims as politically counterproductive (White 39–40). On the topical question of oaths of allegiance, White concedes that Catholics who swear oaths of allegiance are sincere in their intention to keep them. But he thinks it the duty of Catholic priests to deter their flock from taking oaths that would lead to excommunication by the Roman Church. Although “the most liberal opinion of the Catholic divines” is that the pope’s dispensing power cannot annul an oath, “this can only be said of a lawful oath,” and no human law can confer legality upon “an engagement to perform a sinful act.” White concludes that “the persevering silence of the Papal see” on this point is “an indubitable proof that the Pope cannot give his sanction to engagements made in favour of a Protestant establishment” (White 56–8). In Vindication Butler replies that, as far as the oath of supremacy and those against transubstantiation are concerned, “there never was a Catholic priest” who, when advising the faithful, “did not specifically declare, that a Roman Catholic would by taking them, absolutely abjure the Roman Catholic religion.” But this did not apply to the oath of allegiance, since Catholics recognize the pope only as spiritual head (Vindication xxxviii–ix). When writing On the Constitution of the Church and State, before the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, Coleridge argued that acceptance of the pope’s authority, whether in temporal or spiritual matters, amounted to recognition of an imperium in imperio — a government within a government (C&S 149). Admitting that there might be various reasons for questioning “the comparative fitness of individuals, or of particular classes, for the trust and functions of NATIONALITY,” there were “only two absolute Disqualifications, and these are, Allegiance to a Foreign Power, or the Acknowledgement of any other visible HEAD OF THE CHURCH, but our Sovereign lord the King; and compulsory celibacy in connection with, and in dependence on, a foreign and extra-national head” (C&S 81). Coleridge’s footnote (80n) refers to White’s Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism, and to Coleridge’s letter to White of June 1825, in which he expresses “the delight I have received from the unexpected confirmation of my own convictions” (CL 5: 485). Both White and Coleridge agree with Southey on the damaging impact of clerical celibacy. White observes that the supposition that

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 144

8/22/2011 6:32:01 PM

Southey Defended

145

virginity “by its intrinsic merit . . . has a mysterious value in the eyes of God,” is one that can hardly be made without resorting to “some part of the ancient Manichean system” (White 124). St. Paul had ruled that the Church should admit no widows to its services who were below the age of 60, yet (White complains) the Roman Church “allows boys and girls of sixteen to bind themselves with perpetual vows; the latter are confined in prisons because their frailties could not be concealed; the former are let loose upon the people trusting that a superstitious reverence will close the eyes or seal up the lips of men, on their misconduct.” It is hardly surprising to learn that White’s Spanish mother kept her son away from monks and friars because of “the vague suspicions of which even the most pious Spanish cannot quite divest themselves” (126–7). Admitting that his own feelings on the subject are “painfully vehement,” White adds: Those who made, and those who still support the unnatural law, which turns the mistaken piety of youth into a source of future vice; ought to have learnt mercy from their own experience: but a priest who has waded (as most do) through the miry slough of a life of incessant temptation—falling and rising, stumbling, struggling, and falling again, without at once casting off Catholicism with Christianity; contracts, generally, habits of mind not unlike the guards of oriental beauty. Their hearts have been seared with envy. (White 132)

And, replying to the claim that the cares of married life interfere with the priestly vocation, he asks: “Do not the cares of a vicious life, the anxieties of stolen love, the contrivances of adulterous intercourse, the pains, the jealousies, the remorse, attached to a conduct in perfect contradiction with a public and solemn profession of superior virtue— do not these cares, these bitter feelings, interfere with the duties of priesthood?” (134) Blanco White is pleased to find that Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church stigmatizes the tradition of persecution as “detestable.” But he is surprised that a man “who thus openly expresses his detestation of that doctrine, should still profess obedience to a see, under whose authority the inquisition of Spain was re-established in 1814.” For White, as for Southey, the Inquisition is abiding evidence of a “persecuting church” (White 51). Butler responds that, of his own numerous published works—“perhaps too numerous: they now fill twelve octavo volumes”—there was only one in which he had not “in the most strong and unqualified terms, advocated civil and religious liberty” (Vindication xxx). When writing on the Inquisition in his Historical Memoirs, Butler had remarked that “as a systematic

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 145

8/22/2011 6:32:01 PM

146

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

perversion of forms of law to the perpetration of extreme injustice and barbarity, it holds, among the institutions outraging humanity, a decided pre-eminence” (xxxi citing Memoirs 1: 107). Catholics recognize no papal authority, Butler insists, “ to sanction intolerance, no authority to enforce his spiritual power by any temporal means.” He draws a contrast between the Inquisition, whose object was “to prevent the introduction of a new, and, as experience showed, a revolutionary religion,” and Queen Elizabeth’s persecutions, which were designed to “eradicate the ancient and the actual religion of the country, in direct opposition to the wish of the whole kingdom.” Butler professes not to understand why White should write a book “the evident tendency of which is to raise popular prejudice against us; to perpetuate laws under which we suffer . . .” (Vindication xxxi–iii). Butler himself was not above scoring debating points, as he does when seeking to combat White’s attack on the Catholic doctrine of exclusive salvation (White 61). Butler explains that a person “receives on his baptism, justifying grace and justifying faith,” that he loses justifying grace “by the commission of any mortal sin,” and loses justifying faith by wilfully committing mortal sin against the Catholic faith. Butler concludes that such severity can hardly be objected to “by a Protestant of the Established Church of England, as the Athanasian creed and its damnatory clause, form part of her liturgy; or by a Protestant of the Established church of Scotland, as the Protestants of that church, in their profession of faith of 1568, say, that out of the church there is neither life nor everlasting happiness” (Vindication xxxv–vi, Butler’s emphasis). Such polemical sallies are, however, outclassed by the provocative title of White’s sixth Letter: “Rome the enemy of mental improvement: the direct tendency of her prayerbook, the breviary, to cherish credulity and adulterate Christian virtue.” And his parting words to Butler are scarcely less challenging: “Preserve, with God’s blessing, so much of your tenets as may appear to you consistent with his word; but disown a church which, by her miracles, libels the Gospel history with imposture; and whose monkish piety disfigures the sublime Christian worship into drivelling imbecility” (White 217). Henry Phillpotts, rector of Stanhope (and from 1809, prebendary of Durham), begins his Letters to Charles Butler (1825) by expressing himself “much gratified with the tone and temper” in which the Book of the Roman Catholic Church was written. He remarks that, as a controversialist, Butler is at his most characteristic when “smoothing the asperities of controversy, and deprecating its violence.” Some critics

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 146

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

147

think that Butler is happy to see his cause supported by others, “in language which you would yourself be ashamed to use.” Phillpotts is evidently thinking of Milner’s Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church, and attributes Butler’s complaisance to “the veneration you are accustomed to pay even to the foibles of an Apostolic Vicar.” Phillpotts explains that he does not intend to venture into “the historical matters on which you are at issue with Mr Southey,” nor to “weaken the effect of Mr Southey’s powerful eloquence in vindicating his own statements by obtruding any feeble efforts of mine.” He would focus instead on the theological part of Butler’s subject, and especially on his tenth Letter entitled “View of the Roman-Catholic System” (Phillpotts 1–3). Butler had suggested that theological differences between Catholics and Anglicans were slight (BoRCC 2–3). Phillpotts responds that if that were true, Anglicans must admit that “our separation from you was, and is, schismatical; that the Fathers and Martyrs of the Reformation were not only in error, but in sin.” Anglican clergy could not “permit it to be believed, that any approximation to the real doctrines of the Church of Rome is regarded by them as even possible” (6). Phillpotts notes that Butler’s reply to Southey’s chapter entitled “View of the Papal System,” substitutes “Roman-Catholic” for “Papal.” This (says Phillpotts) implies an universality for the Roman church that it cannot justify. The term “Roman-Catholic” can be used only as “English Catholic” might be used—to denote geographically “a branch of the Catholic or Universal Church.” Phillpotts adds, somewhat patronizingly, that most Anglicans “rejoice to think, that the corruptions in your communion, grievous as they are, do not amount to a departure from the foundation, to an utter abandonment of essentials.” Indeed, Anglicans recognize Butler’s church as “still a part, though I am compelled to repeat, a most corrupt part, of the Catholic Church” (15–16). In his attack on the “corruptions” of the Church, Phillpotts (17–19) objects to Butler’s insistence that “no doctrine should be ascribed to the Roman-Catholics as a body, except such as is an article of their faith” (BoRCC 2nd ed. 9). As Southey would claim in Vindiciæ (34–6), Phillpotts holds that “the Church itself is answerable for all those doctrines, which having been promulgated by high authority within it, by popes or councils, or writers under the immediate direction of such authorities, and having been long and extensively acted upon, are still undisclaimed” (Phillpotts 19). The rector’s list of objectionable doctrines and practices predictably includes: the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary (38), the invocation of the saints

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 147

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

148

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

(58–9), the reverence shown towards relics and images (62–91), belief in purgatory and the associated granting of indulgences (113–20, 158–95), communion in one kind (261–4), and— on grounds shared with Southey and White— the sacrament of penance (196–205). In Vindication, Butler’s challenge to Phillpotts focuses on what Calvin said about prayers for the dead. Citing extracts from the Latin text of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Butler concludes that he has proved his claim in the Book of the Roman Catholic Church that Calvin “confesses explicitly that, during 1,300 years before his time (1,600 before ours) it had been the practice to pray for the dead in the hope of procuring their relief” (BoRCC 105). Butler does not deny that Calvin “reprobates the doctrine,” but now simply concedes that Calvin, while agreeing that the habit was ancient, “contends that the practice, however ancient, was contrary to the word of God, and thus, though ancient, was unjustifiable (Vindication xlix). Butler’s second challenge to Phillpotts is a defense of the sacrament of penance. It was a subject on which Phillpotts, like Southey and White, found it difficult to write without (as he admits) “expressing more warmth of indignation against the doctrine of your Church, than it would perhaps, in addressing you, become me to exhibit” (Phillpotts 196). The corrupting influence of the confessional, Phillpotts finds, comes from its telling those into whose young bosoms the first ideas of impurity never perhaps intruded, without exciting a thrill of terror, that they must dwell on the thought from which their better mind recoils; that they are to register it faithfully in their memory, and in due time give utterance to it in the presence of one, whose sex ought to inspire them with dread, even if his character be as holy as his office— on these, and consequences scarcely less mischievous than these, I forbear to enlarge. (Phillpotts 202–3)

The rector had “looked into” one of the most popular Catholic devotional books, called the Garden of the Soul. He had found “sentiments of piety as warm and as just, as the expression of them is beautiful.” But he had also read “one page— prescribing a course of self-examination previous to confession— to which I cannot even allude without disgust.” Indeed, he believes that nothing “more loathsome, or polluting, could be found in the journal of a brothel” (Phillpotts 203). Butler does not answer these charges directly, but (as in the case of prayers for the dead) points to the practice of the early church. He quotes what he himself had said to Southey in the Book of the Roman Catholic Church: “that in the Greek church, and

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 148

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

149

in the numerous oriental churches of the Nestorians, Eutychians, and Monothelites, who separated from the Church of Rome in an early age of Christianity, Auricular Confession is retained and practised.” This was proof of its early admission into the church. And in matters of doctrine and practice, “is not such early antiquity always respectable?” (Vindication liv citing BoRCC 110, Butler’s emphasis). Here and throughout the prefatory pages, Butler seems more concerned to defend himself against misrepresentation and accusations of prevarication than to refute his adversaries’ charges against the practices and teachings of his church. Phillpotts’s Letters to Charles Butler also targets Southey’s other main antagonist, John Milner. Phillpotts begins by referring to the pseudonymous author of Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church, who writes “under the ingenious anagram of John Merlin: and, in the person of that old Deceiver, scruples not to indulge in a certain licences of language, which decorum would forbid him to adopt in his proper character” (2). Phillpotts describes Milner’s End of Religious Controversy (1818) as “the grand storehouse, from which a main portion of the facts and evidence” of Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church “appears to have been drawn” (9). He points to Butler’s citations from Milner on “Catholicity” (11–12), on whether a seventeenth-century bishop of Winchester had acquitted the Catholic Church of idolatry (58–9), on relics and miracles (66), on the Council of Trent (69–70), on purgatory (114), and on indulgences (158–61, 164). Phillpotts invites Milner to “strike out at once from your Breviary, your Missal, from every book of public worship belonging to you, those Prayers, and Hymns, and solemn Offices, to the Virgin Mary and the rest of your Saints, which form at present so large a portion of your Devotion,” and which compel every true Protestant, “to revolt against the worship of your Church, as being, in those particulars, a compound of folly, blasphemy, and idolatry?” And to clinch the terms of unconditional surrender, Milner is asked whether he will “deny to the Pope, not only all temporal, but also all immediate spiritual jurisdiction, beyond the limits of his own See?” (Phillpotts 264, his emphasis). Might English and Irish Catholic clergy perhaps accept the four Gallican Articles of 1682? These (a) denied the pope any power to interfere in temporal matters; (b) exalted the authority of General Councils above that of the pope in spiritual matters; (c) asserted the inviolability of the traditional “rules, customs, institutions and observances” of the French Church; and (d) refused to accept the infallibility of papal pronouncements on points of faith, unless “attended

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 149

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

150

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

with the consent of the Church.” Milner’s response to Gallicanism is characteristically uncompromising. Phillpotts calls him “your own English Pope,” and quotes Milner’s 1809 Supplement to his pastoral letter: “We are very far from finding fault with partisans of the [Gallican] Articles, but we think we see in these Articles the germ of all the present mischief, and, to be brief, we are determined not to subscribe to the Articles ” (Phillpotts 306–7, his emphasis). He recalls that Butler commended Milner’s End of Religious Controversy as “the ablest exposition of the doctrines of the Roman-Catholic Church, on the articles contested with her by Protestants; and the ablest statement of the proofs by which they are supported, and of the historical facts with which they are connected, that has appeared in our language” (Phillpotts 10 citing BoRCC 192, 2nd ed. 194). It was precisely the historical accuracy of Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church that Prebendary George Townsend (also of Durham) set out to challenge in his Accusations of History against the Church of Rome (1825). But for all his preoccupation with theological issues, Phillpotts devotes his last two Letters to attacking historic claims to papal supremacy, which he defines as “the monstrous claims of the Pope to a preeminence, not of rank merely, but of authority and jurisdiction over the greatest Princes of the earth—his right to depose them for heresy and favouring heresy—his consequent right to absolve subjects from their allegiance.” Phillpotts nevertheless concedes that these claims “are now, it seems, disclaimed by all who live beyond the boundaries of Italy” (271). In his final Letter, Phillpotts entertains his readers with a comparison, in parallel columns, of the wording of Clement XIV’s bull Dominus ac Redemptor dissolving the Society of Jesus in 1773, and Pius VII’s bull Solicitudo omnium of August 1814 restoring the Jesuit Order (312–14). And like all the leading Protestant propagandists in the Emancipation debate, Phillpotts reverts to the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215: That the secular powers shall be admonished, and, if necessary, be compelled by ecclesiastical censures, to make oath that they will, to the utmost of their power, strive to exterminate from their territory all Heretics, declared to be such by the Church, and further, that if any temporal lord, being required and admonished by the Church, shall neglect to purge his territory from all taint of heresy, he shall be excommunicated by the Metropolitan and other provincial Bishops; and if he contemptuously omit to give satisfaction, it shall be signified to the Holy Pontiff, in order that he may thenceforth proclaim his vassals

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 150

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

151

absolved from fealty to him, and may expose to Catholics his territory to be occupied by them, who having exterminated the heretics, may possess the same without contradiction. (Phillpotts 275, his emphasis)

Phillpotts sees no “ground of hope that the spirit of Rome is grown at all more tolerant, less ferocious, or less ambitious,” as it is “declared by its own advocates to be unaltered and unalterable.” History provides the proof: “Twelve hundred years have now passed over the heads of men, since this spiritual tyranny first showed its portentous form; during that period, states and empires have disappeared from the face of the earth; but Rome, Papal Rome, is still the same . . .” (309–10). George Townsend’s Accusations of History similarly focuses on the 1215 Lateran Council in a ten-page section of his fourteenth Letter (Townsend 161–9). It begins with the uncompromising words: “The doctrine of persecution, which sometimes disgraced the Reformers, has long been given up by the Protestants. Their faith on this subject is unobjectionable. The Church of Rome alone still teaches the doctrine of persecution for differences in religious opinions.” Butler’s Vindication (83) seizes on Townsend’s conclusion to the same paragraph: “I impeach the Church of Rome of the crime of still sanctioning persecution, and thereby maintaining a doctrine which is alike hostile to their own petitions for admission to power, and to the common rights and happiness of nations” (Townsend 162). Townsend’s assertion, Butler claims, was “completely overthrown” by his own reminder— on an earlier page of Vindication —that the canons of the fourth Lateran Council “were not decreed by the council, but only propounded to it by the Pope, and members of the council separated without having come to any resolutions upon them.” Only those canons of the Council that are accepted by the Church can be considered as decrees of the Church (Vindication 38–49). Yet Townsend had gone so far as to argue that the persecuting canon of the Council, directed against the Albigenses, amounted to an article of faith (162–30). Like Southey, Townsend uses the practices of the thirteenth century as a reason for denying Catholics political power in the nineteenth. He writes of the Catholic campaigners for Emancipation: “Misled by the seducing cry of liberality and candour,” they imagine that “patience under necessary disqualification, is a pledge of the future right use of power,” while refusing “to reject the opinions of the dark ages.” Like Phillpotts, Townsend throws down the gauntlet to Butler and his fellow Catholics: “Repeal the acts of your Popes. Confess the fallibility of your Church. Grant to those who differ from you, an exemption

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 151

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

152

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

from its asserted jurisdiction. Offer your undivided allegiance to your Prince. Annul the decisions of Constance, and Lateran, and Trent; and then, and then only, we may kneel at the same altar, take the same oath, and meet in the same senate” (Townsend 170–1). That Townsend’s intervention in the Emancipation debate was triggered by Southey’s Book of the Church is shown by the appearance of Southey’s name some 30 times in the first 100 pages of Butler’s Vindication. Episodes that particularly attract the attention of both Southey and Townsend are Becket’s confrontation with Henry II, and papal attempts to suppress not only the Albigenses, but also the Lollards and Waldenses. The British Critic, reviewing Southey’s Book of the Church, had applauded the section devoted to Becket, while wondering whether the archbishop deserved to occupy quite so many pages of text (BC 21: 453). The same journal soon complained that Butler’s treatment of Becket, spread over ten pages in the Book of the Roman Catholic Church, “takes us at once into the middle of the dispute, turns away our eyes from the real object of the fray, and then a few bold queries, fortified with an appeal to Dr Lingard, suffice to set the business at rest.” Yet, says the reviewer, “the point to be decided in the reign of Henry II was the temporal power of the Pope” (BC 23: 192). Townsend makes the same point: “The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome had by no means been fully established.” The nations of Europe were split into supporters of the pope and the emperor, the Guelfs and Ghibelines, “the respective advocates of the rights of Princes, and of the authority of the Pope.” According to Townsend, Becket’s own correspondence shows that “not only the King, and the whole body of the Barons, but even the Bishops, Abbots and Clergy, openly condemned his behaviour as highly rash and criminal; they charged him with being the sole disturber of the peace of the kingdom” (70–1). Townsend concludes his critique of Butler’s defense of Becket’s championship of clerical immunities and papal power, with this reproach: “You will allege that these were the dark ages. I again answer that the duty of spiritual allegiance to the Bishop of Rome is [not] the opinion of a dark age only; but it is maintained by the Romanists of England at present.” Although the papacy of the 1820s is “weak and apparently harmless,” the fear of what a future “aspiring and ambitious Pontiff” might attempt “has shaken our empire to its centre” (94). Butler replies: “The account of this controversy in my letters to Dr Southey was abridged from the account which I had several years before given of it in my Historical Memoirs of the English, Irish and Scottish Catholics” (Memoirs 1: 17–28). After “much reading and much meditation upon the subject,” Butler’s

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 152

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

153

verdict is decisive: “The archbishop was completely in the right and the monarch completely in the wrong” (Vindication 26–7). Townsend’s contribution to the debate on the Albigenses is simply stated: “I shall be able to prove to you, by comparing some of the opinions of Manes (Burl 8–9) with those which are now received, both among Romanists and Protestants, that there is actually more of Manichæism in the Church of Rome, than in the Church of England” (Townsend 124). Accordingly (like Southey), he denies that the Albigenses were Manicheans, as Milner and Butler had claimed. In Townsend’s view, the opinions that the Persian Manes or Mani taught in the third century, “like all heterodox systems of that age, were a mixture of heathenish or natural religion; of Christianity and Judaism; of tradition and invention.” But the teachings attributed to Manes were “undoubtedly taught by the Docetæ, the Gnostics, the Marcionites, and other sects, in the first and second centuries.” So, when persecution of heretics began in the Church, “every heretic was called a follower of Manes; and every novel, or commonly rejected, opinion, was called Manicheism.” That was how, Townsend argues, the Albigensians were dubbed Manicheans. He lists “the various errors which are the offspring of an age of ignorance, which have long been rejected by the Protestants, and which are common to the Manichæans and the Romanists.” He instances vows of poverty, celibacy, and virginity, laws respecting “the use of flesh, and eggs and milk,” the requirement to “practise certain abstinences, and to humble the body, that they may strengthen the mind,” and receiving only the bread in the Eucharist. And whereas Protestants reject the books of the Apocrypha, “the Romanists receive them, as did the Manichees.” If the heretics added apocryphal writings of their own, they were only following “the same conduct of the Romanists, in receiving tradition instead of Scripture.” Townsend expects Butler, in his next edition, to retract the charge of Manicheism “against the ancient Albigenses and the modern Protestants” (Townsend 125–30), while Southey in Vindiciæ would soon claim that “celibacy of the clergy was part of the Manichæan system” (Vindiciæ 316). Butler denies in Vindication that he believes the political opinions of the Manicheans were “the real preludes to the doctrines of liberty and equality, so frightfully propagated in our times.” He somewhat evasively responds that he merely observed that “the great point for investigation is, whether these sectaries did not, by their disorganizing tenets, prelude to the doctrines of liberty and equality,” and that he wished Southey himself to conduct the investigation (63, Butler’s emphasis). In the Book of the Roman Catholic Church, Butler barely

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 153

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

154

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

mentions the Albigenses, Hussites, and Waldenses, but refers readers to his Historical Memoirs. He does, however, challenge Southey on the Lollards (BoRCC 148–50). And in Vindication, Butler tells Townsend: “Most sincerely do I condemn the persecution of the Lollards, and every other persecution, either by Catholics or non-Catholics, with which the annals of history are stained.” He says the same of the persecution of the Waldenses, but adds that he withholds a final judgment, as he has not seen a Roman Catholic account of the persecution (Vindication 63–4, Butler’s emphasis). In December 1825 Southey would write on the persecution of the Waldenses (QR 33: 134–76). Meanwhile Townsend challenges the claim of a medieval chronicler that Wat Tyler’s rebellion originated in Lollard teaching. Wycliffe’s works, Townsend decides, contain “nothing to countenance the accusation.” Indeed, Wycliffe defended the king’s jurisdiction and supremacy, both civil and ecclesiastical, “loyally and learnedly.” According to Townsend, Wat Tyler’s rebellion took place when Wycliffe’s opinions began to circulate, and so “the vulgar declamation of the unsettled teachers of the rabble, as well as their rebellious conduct, were falsely imputed to the reformer” (Townsend 132). In his Book of the Roman Catholic Church, Butler had described an episode during the French Revolution when “the fatal cart conveyed the superior of a convent, and all her cloistered family, to the guillotine,” singing in unison (as they went) “the litanies of the Virgin Mary,” until the very moment of execution. At the end of his account of this poignant scene, Butler asks, “Was it not good for a nation that such celestial beings should reside among them?” (155–6). Townsend cannot agree: Let me not seem harsh, if I inquire, whether active virtue, as well as passive resignation, would not have been as ornamental to the sufferers, and more useful to society? Would not the cause of virtue, religion, morality and order, have been more promoted by the good example which these excellent women might have set, as mothers, daughters and sisters, in social life, than by their learning the Litanies of the Virgin in the cloister, and singing them on their way to the scaffold? (141)

Butler’s Vindication defends the role of convents in providing for women who are “in those scanty circumstances, which make poor and uncomfortable sisters, and poor and uncomfortable aunts, and either prevent marriage, or occasion poor and uncomfortable marriages, and thus fill the world with beings that are wretched in themselves and a

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 154

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

155

burden to the state” (65). This echoes Southey’s advocacy of the need for Protestant nunneries to provide for English women widowed by the Napoleonic wars (QR 22: 90–5). Butler appends more than three pages of footnotes (65n–69n) in praise of the public’s reception of the refugee French religious orders, arriving in England in the early 1790s. Noting Townsend’s commendation of Milton for assigning the friars to his Paradise of Fools —“Eremites and friars / Black, white and grey, and all their trumpery”—which the prebendary considers “their proper place,” Butler defends the dedication of the mendicant orders. The friars are (he says) “incessantly employed in the service of the poor: in preaching to them, in teaching them their catechism, in attending them on their sick beds, and preparing them for their passage to eternity.” Was there anywhere an epidemic illness, a fire, or a flood? Friars would be sure to be there. “In hospitals, in prisons; amid the wounded and the dying in the field of battle, friars were always found. Those who had no other friend, always found one in a friar” (70–1). By contrast, it was the friars’ proselytizing at sickbeds, in the hope of effecting eleventh-hour conversions, that Southey had condemned in the 1819 Quarterly Review (22: 87–8). Southey’s Vindiciæ would end its account of the pre-Reformation English Church with the reign of John, which he regarded as the high point of papal power (368–79). He intended to challenge Butler’s view of the Reformation, and his accusations of Protestant persecution, in a second volume. In a letter to his publisher, written probably late in 1825 and held by the University of Rochester Rare Books Library (A 5727 1: 6), Southey declared: “In the course of a fortnight I expect to wind up the volume of Vindiciæ so that it may be followed by a second, or not, as we think best when it is seen how this fares.” And in March 1826, he tells Blanco White that “as yet I have only chastised my opponents with whips—the scorpions are in reserve.” He invites White to “think what a chapter Transubstantiation will afford—what mines of relics to be worked— and what an exposure to be made of those Romish treasons which the present Romanists so impudently affect to deny.” Southey goes on to promise that “among the materials of my next volume, if I pursue the subject, there will be a life of Father Parsons, and one of Fox the martyrologist.” The volume, “if I make it,” will prepare the way “for an historical sketch of the Monastic Orders, a work which I have had in mind ever since my last residence in Lisbon in 1801” (Thom 1: 428). The second volume of Vindiciæ never appeared. The first volume did not sell well. In January 1829 Southey told a correspondent that Vindiciæ “never produced me so much as a single paper in the Quarterly Review” (L&C 6: 22).

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 155

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

156

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Townsend had already filled the gap. On the Reformation, he finds only two real points of debate: “Are the doctrines of the church of Rome supported by Scripture and antiquity? Shall the Pope or the Monarch be supreme over the people?” For Townsend, “the Reformation was the decision of the reflecting part of Europe on this important matter” (Townsend 146–7). Butler can scarcely be expected to agree that the Reformation was an unmixed blessing. The pope’s spiritual supremacy was “wrested from him, in many parts of Europe, by the Protestant reformer^s; but these, instead of establishing evangelical liberty, strove, equally by the sword and the pen, to substitute themselves and their creeds, in the chair of authority. Their attempts filled Europe both with war and debate.” As for spiritual wisdom: “Place to our account the superstition, which You can justly impute to us, and to yours, the actual socinianism, deism, infidelity, a general indifference to religion— then gravely say, You really claim any increase in true religion” (Vindication 72, 75–6). Butler refers readers to an Edinburgh Review article of 1816 on the history of the Church of Scotland, subtitled “The toleration of the first Reformers” (27: 163–80). Townsend devotes one-fifth of his text to the reign of Elizabeth (174–238). He reckons that Butler’s fifteenth Letter in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church is “the most important of all which you have addressed to Mr Southey.” He observes that the final establishment of the Reformation, in Elizabeth’s reign, is “justly considered by both our Churches, as the greatest event in our national history.” Recalling Butler’s recognition of Elizabeth’s “indulgence to Romanists” (BoRCC 233), Townsend records: “You agree with Mr Southey in praising the moderation which induced her to order the omission from the Litany of the petition: ‘From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, O Lord deliver us.’” (174, 179; Cranmer’s actual wording is “Good Lord deliver us.”) Prebendary Townsend denies that Elizabeth’s persecuting policies were directed against Catholics as a body. He agrees with those who saw her as “a mere politician, who had little regard for religious principles of any kind” (181). He complains that Butler ignores the continental political climate of Elizabeth’s reign: “You do not tell your readers that civil wars were raging on the Continent, and almost in England, on the subject of religion; that on the Continent, the opposite opinions of the Protestants and the Romanists were embodied in the shape of armies; and that in England, their open collision could only be prevented by the most consummate prudence, and by occasional severities” (Townsend 174, quoted in Vindication 87).

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 156

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

Southey Defended

157

Butler responds, a little lamely, that as “both Dr Southey’s work and mine are addressed to the well informed . . . there was no obligation upon me to state the facts which you specify.” His Book of the Roman Catholic Church was “not offered as a history of the times, but as a defence of the Catholics against certain charges of Dr Southey.” Butler offers a three-page extract from his Historical Memoirs to meet Townsend’s point (Vindication 88–91). As Townsend embarks on his defense of Elizabeth’s record as a persecutor, there are echoes of earlier polemical clashes. Butler refers him to “the fifth section of my fifteenth letter to Dr Southey,” and also to Milner’s fourth letter to Dr. Sturges. Butler repeats his earlier judgment: “If You compare the different persecutions, either in the provocations of them, or in their length or their atrocity, You will not find the Catholics more guilty than the Protestants” (Vindication 92). Townsend devotes 60 pages (174–238) to alleged Catholic plots during Elizabeth’s reign. Butler’s Vindication allots some 30 pages (92–124) to an inquiry as to whether the “persecuting laws” of Elizabethan England “can be justified on any general principles of morality and civil justice.” Did any such principles, Butler asks, entitle Elizabeth to enact “that the adherence of two-thirds of her subjects to the ancient religion of their country, was a crime against the state?” (93, Butler’s emphasis). Butler’s principle is to judge disloyalty only by overt act: “Wait, I say, in each case, till a criminal act should be done by the dissident, before You fix guilt upon an individual. Wait, I say, till numerous criminal acts shall be done by these dissidents, before you fix guilt upon the body” (96). Townsend had observed that fines of one shilling or even twenty pounds were “not so terrible as fire and faggot,” claiming that “no prince in Europe at this time defended or sanctioned the laws respecting religion, with sanctions as mild as these.” Butler retorts that to consign by Act of Parliament “two-thirds of a nation to fire and faggot was impossible,” and so Townsend could hardly give Elizabeth any exceptional credit “for abstaining from this attempt, or think it proved an increase in liberality” (Vindication 102 citing Townsend 193). Butler agrees with Townsend that severe laws were justified against those who asserted that Elizabeth was not a lawful sovereign. All who denied her legitimacy were indeed guilty of high treason. “Yet,” Butler insists, “of such acts the Catholics in England were innocent” (Vindication 102–3). Townsend responds with a topical analogy. Would Butler, he asks, infer, that the government and the nation were not endangered by the prevalence of jacobinical principles, when thousands of the people

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 157

8/22/2011 6:32:02 PM

158

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

would have hailed the sanguinary jacobins as their deliverers. So it was with the war with Spain, in the reign of Elizabeth. The Romanist noblemen and gentlemen would not see their country ravaged by the Spaniards; and the address which they published at that time, is one of the most beautiful and affecting compositions of the age—yet there was still danger in the country when thousands would have welcomed the Spaniards with thumbscrews and instruments of torture (Vindication 136–7, citing Townsend 236).

Townsend was probably referring to the petition from Sir Thomas Tresham and his fellow Catholics (Rowse 460). Butler turns the Jacobin analogy, which Townsend had first used some 50 pages earlier, against him: “The Jacobins and Romanists,” you say (Townsend 197), “were the avowed enemies of England; both excited the nations of Europe against its sovereign; both were supported by large numbers of the people, among whom will always be found thousands and tens of thousands who hate the existing government, whatever be its form, principles or excellence.” Butler simply denies that the Catholics were the enemies of England: “They remained firm in their allegiance, true to God, and true to their queen” (Vindication 109). Turning from Armada to Gunpowder Plot, Butler recalls that Southey had dismissed the conspirators as “a few bigots” (BoC 2: 341). And he quotes James I’s own description of the conspiracy, in Discourse on the Gunpowder Treason, as a “tragi-comedy; a tragedy to the traitors, but a comedy to the King and all his new subjects.” Townsend, Butler believes, is “the first person who has asserted that a large portion of the Catholic body was engaged in it” (Vindication 147). He rebuts Townsend’s claim that in the Historical Memoirs he had sought to applaud writers “who have attempted to prove that the Gunpowder Plot was the invention of [Robert Cecil] lord Salisbury.” Butler quotes his own verdict from Historical Memoirs, where his investigations have not led him to find “a single fact, which can render Cecil justly suspected of having been privy to the plot, previously to a short time preceding its discovery” (Butler 148–9 citing Townsend 247). The disclaimer, however tortuously expressed, is unambiguous, and is broadly confirmed by Antonia Fraser in the Gunpowder Plot (chapter 10). Could the plot nevertheless be blamed on the whole body of Catholics? Townsend thinks so. First, because the conspiracy was “justified upon the principle taught by the Roman Catholic church”—for which he appeals to the third canon of the 1215 Lateran Council (Townsend 249). Butler’s response is understandably dismissive: “I have demonstratively shown, in my ninth letter, that this canon, if it ever existed, was not a canon of a general council; and that

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 158

8/22/2011 6:32:03 PM

Southey Defended

159

its authority, if it ever had any, had ceased long before the event in question.” He does acknowledge, almost in Townsend’s words, that “the deposing doctrine was taught in the reign of James I, by several Roman Catholic priests, Jesuits and instructors, to such an extent as justified the suspicions and jealousy of the existing government, and made measures of precaution necessary” (155). Nevertheless, Butler protests at two of Townsend’s accusations against the Jesuits, “both of them atrocious and both groundless.” The first is that “the infernal plan was resolved by the Jesuits to be lawful and meritorious.” He defies Townsend to produce “the slightest evidence that warrants this charge,” and he appeals to “the account of the trial published by the Government.” As regards the guilt of the Jesuit Garnett, Butler, as a good lawyer, declares: “So far as Sir Edward Coke supported his charges [at Garnett’s trial] by evidence, I admit them without hesitation. Nothing that rests on his own assertion has any weight” (Vindication 158–9). He explains that both editions of his Book of the Roman Catholic Church were published before the appearance of the most recent volume of Lingard’s history, adding that the Catholic historian’s latest volume mentions, “from manuscripts in his possession, some circumstances unfavourable to Garnet, which until his publication of them was unknown.” Butler sees this as “a strong proof of Dr Lingard’s historical candour and truth.” Butler still considers Garnett’s “equivocations” as less reprehensible than those of Archbishop Cranmer, but concludes: “I do not justify Garnet; I only commiserate him” (163–4). Townsend recognizes that many of the so-called Catholic plots of Elizabeth’s reign were rumored rather than real. But the reality of the Gunpowder Plot made rumors more credible. As he says, “If the Gunpowder Plot had never been planned, that of Titus Oates would never have been believed” (Townsend 298). Townsend had begun with a brutally dismissive verdict on Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church: “Whether the work be regarded as a defence of his Church, or a more faithful survey of our past controversies; or, even as a reply to Mr Southey, it must be considered a complete failure” (Townsend 2). More courteously, halfway through his Accusations of History, Townsend summarizes the argument that Southey sustains over two volumes in the Book of the Church, and would bluntly reiterate in his preface to Vindiciæ. Addressing the Catholics, Townsend writes: We acknowledge your patience, your loyalty, your many virtues; and we confess with sorrow the faults of many of the chief friends of the Reformation.

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 159

8/22/2011 6:32:03 PM

160

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Your various excellencies [sic] entitle you to every respect; and we would grant you every privilege and all due honour. Political power we cannot grant, because the same history which relates your good qualities as subjects, asserts your opposite qualities as legislators. (159)

Within two years, Townsend’s confidence that Catholics would remain excluded from the legislature began to seem misplaced. In April 1827 George Canning became prime minister. Thirty years before, as a devoted Pittite, Canning had used his weekly AntiJacobin to publish witty parodies that satirized the social-conscience radicalism of Southey’s youthful poetry. From the Irish Act of Union onward, Canning campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, successfully carrying his own motion in the House of Commons in 1812 to investigate Catholic claims. He supported Grattan’s unsuccessful Catholic Relief Bill in 1819 and steered his own Relief Bill through the Commons in 1825—though it was doomed to defeat in the Lords. The first half of 1827 had seemed propitious for Emancipationists. In July the British Critic commented on what it called “the rapid succession of accidents affecting the Catholic question” (4th series 2: 166). The death of the duke of York, the resignation of Lord Liverpool following a stroke, and his replacement by Canning, all pointed toward Emancipation. Yet during the first week in August, Canning died while still in his fifties. In January 1828, the duke of Wellington headed a new ministry, with Robert Peel as home secretary and leader of the Commons. Both men had served as chief secretary for Ireland; both had opposed Catholic Emancipation; and both would see an Emancipation Bill pass into law in a little over a year.

9780230115132_09_ch08.indd 160

8/22/2011 6:32:03 PM

9

Ev e of E m a nc i pat ion: Th e Q U A R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

A mong the significant deaths of 1826–7 was that of John Milner.

Writing in the Quarterly Review for March 1826, Southey derided the Catholic bishop for describing Vie et Révélations de la Soeur Nativité (1817) as “very wonderful for its sublimity, energy, copiousness, learning, orthodoxy and piety.” Milner had assured the French nun’s confessor (who edited and published the revelations) that no one could “have a greater veneration for the Revelations of his spiritual daughter than I have; or be more anxious to see them in print, for the edification of the good and the conversion of the wicked” (QR 33: 375). Southey allows the nun’s account of her visions to speak for itself—thus condemning herself in Protestant eyes—but he seizes this new opportunity to censure the ascetic practices of monasticism, “borrowed from eastern superstition, for the misery of their poor votaries, the corruption of Christianity, and the degradation of human nature.” Noting that “watching and fasting, haircloth and self-flagellation, formed a part of this spiritual regimen,” Southey records that Sister Nativity was known for “laying thistles and nettles in her bed; and one day she was surprised in the act of sipping gall mixed with other things equally loathsome” (QR 33: 377). Southey reports one of the nun’s alleged visions in which Christ conveyed through her a message to the abbess that “the nuns should leave off the linen shifts in which they had for some time indulged, and wear flannel ones again in conformity to the rule of their order” (399). Southey quotes the confessor, Abbé Genet, as crediting Sister Nativity (who died in 1798) with having “probably contributed more

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 161

8/22/2011 6:32:06 PM

162

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

than all other persons” to the defeat of Napoleon and the coming of peace. Southey is exultant: Yes, reader, the Abbé Genet thus modestly insinuates an opinion that the restoration of the Bourbons has been brought about by Sister Nativity’s merits, and more especially by this year of heroic fasting! The part which Spain and Portugal, and Russia and Germany, and England may have acted is comparatively insignificant; the retreat from Moscow a bagatelle—Leipsi[g] a feather in the scale—Waterloo not worthy of remembrance, Blucher and Wellington may hide their diminished heads. What are their campaigns to Sister Nativity’s twelve months of bread and water? Buonaparte has been overthrown, not by bullets and bayonets, but by lentile broth, eaten without butter! (QR 33: 406)

Sister Nativity (as befits a nun) condemned, as works of the devil, “balls, dancing of every kind, cards, plays, public amusements, novelreading, patches, paint, and all the implements of coquetry.” False hair “she absolutely prohibited for women, as a breach of the baptismal vow,” but she permitted periwigs for the male sex “because men had frequently occasion to uncover their heads” (408). The confessor/editor had thought of calling his account “New Apocalypse,” a title that Southey pretends to approve, ironically suggesting that the abbé’s story has every right to receive the same credit “which that church has given to so many of the same class, resting on no better authority.” Southey reaffirms that “it is by a series of impostures that the corruptions of the papal church have constantly been supported, legends having been invented, miracles got up, and inspiration pretended for every false doctrine, every pretension of the priesthood, every usurpation of the popes, every scheme of the monastic orders; and this from the earliest times.” And, as confirmation that Catholic Ireland overshadows the Emancipation debate, Southey ends with Francis Plowden’s boast in the Case Stated [1791], so frequently repeated by the Antijacobin Review: “If any one says, or pretends to insinuate, that modern Roman Catholics differ in one IOTA from their ancestors, he either deceives himself or wishes to deceive others ” (QR 33: 410 citing Plowden 17, Southey’s emphasis. Cf AJR 24: 121; 27: 340; 38: 353, etc). Milner died in April 1826, a few weeks after Southey’s attack on him in the March Quarterly Review. But before that, Milner had been attacked from beyond the grave, by Dr. Samuel Parr’s posthumously published Letter to the Rev. Dr Milner (1825). Found among Parr’s papers at his death, the 43-page pamphlet had been intended for

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 162

8/22/2011 6:32:06 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

163

the Gentleman’s Magazine, but was never published because “afterthoughts enlarged its dimensions” (Letter to Milner iv). Parr, a formidable controversialist and noted Latin scholar, became known as “the Whig Johnson.” Headmaster of Norwich School in his thirties, he was appointed a prebendary of St. Paul’s in 1783, but was debarred from further preferment by his Whig politics. Warden Huntingford of Winchester, later bishop of Hereford and supporter of Southey (chapter 10 below), was one of Parr’s correspondents. The Huntingford archive reveals that Parr addressed him as “My most worthy and learned friend,” and described his election as warden of Winchester College in 1789 as “an event which gives me cordial joy.” In his will, Parr bequeathed a ring to “the Right Reverend Doctor Huntingford, the kind hearted and learned Bishop of Hereford” (Huntingford MS 137A: 8, 13, 132). Dr. Parr’s views on Catholic relief had softened while Warden Huntingford’s had hardened. In the 1790s, Parr had already abandoned his opposition to Catholic Emancipation. As he explained in 1819 to Lord Holland: “Till the year 1793 I held the principle of a test, but avowed disapprobation of a sacramental test, because it makes religion the stalking-horse of politics.” Parr agrees that “in the constitution of the Church of Rome there is a direct tendency to intolerance,” and points to the example of Spain. He continues: No wise statesman will ever trust the priesthood with power . . . Bishop Milner, the great advocate of the Romanists, is a persecutor of the very worst order; but how does this reach the question before your House? You are not going to increase the power of the priesthood— you are going to extricate the laity from a part of the priestly power—you are going to soften the angry passions to which the priests appeal—you will enable and encourage the nobility and gentry to be on their watch against their pastors, and to employ their secular influence in relieving their inferiors from bondage. (Parr Memoirs 2: 666)

Parr advises Lord Holland to take his stand upon “the difference of times—there is no Popish Pretender— there is no danger of Popery— the Catholics are not very numerous in England or Scotland; a civilized age is unfriendly to their doctrine and their discipline.” The union with Ireland ensures that English and Scottish members “must out-number and outweigh the votes of Catholics.” The current danger to the Established Church, Parr is convinced, is from Methodists not Papists. The policy of the Anglican Church should be “to conciliate the Papists and Unitarians, and to get their aid against the Methodists, within the Church and without it” (Parr Memoirs

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 163

8/22/2011 6:32:06 PM

164

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

2: 668). In his posthumously published Letter to Milner, Parr does not repeat the disobliging reference to his opponent that he had used when writing to Lord Holland. He now graciously concedes that Milner has vindicated the Church of Rome from “the imputations of impiety, idolatry and blasphemy, in the worship of glorified saints, and in their adoration of the sacramental elements.” He explains that he is content to speak of Milner’s views on the sacraments as “erroneous and unscriptural only.” But Parr has often had occasion “most sincerely and seriously to disapprove of the acrimonious language, which has been unnecessarily and unbecomingly employed by some of your opponents; and, I add, not less unnecessarily and unbecomingly by yourself” (Letter to Milner 10–11). Parr provides a list of allegedly dubious assertions made by Milner, while leaving it to “many learned, sagacious, and truly pious members of the Church of England to discuss the accuracy of your statements and the validity of your arguments” (11–24). Parr’s summary of Milner’s shortcomings is brief: “The strongest language which I choose to employ against you, is, that in my serious opinion, Reverend Sir, you have sometimes fallen into error, when you contend for doctrine; and that you have often fallen into uncharitableness when you speak of persons, whether they be living or dead, illustrious or obscure” (Letter to Milner 27). No such courtesy can be found in Southey’s writings for the Quarterly Review. The sustained irony of his article on Sister Nativity prompted Charles Butler’s Reply to the Article in the Quarterly Review, for March 1826, on the revelations of la Soeur Nativité (1826). Writing to John May in April 1827, Southey explains that “there ought to have been a paper of mine in the last QR, in answer to Mr Butler upon Sister Nativité.” As he has not seen proofs, he assumes that Murray’s editor, John Gibson Lockhart, has “thought proper to omit it.” Southey is “not without suspicion that he intends to reject it all together— if he does, my connection with the Review will be at an end, for I will not submit to such treatment.” He is “as little pleased with Murray as with his editor” (Ramos 221–2). Perhaps it was to mollify Southey that Murray paid him an extra £50 for the article on “The Roman Catholic Church—Ireland,” which he contributed to the Quarterly Review of October 1828 (SL 4: 121). Southey, like both Peel and Wellington, had some personal experience of Ireland. In October 1801, thanks to John Rickman (who was private secretary to the chief secretary of Ireland), Southey took up the post of private secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer of Ireland, though he held it for less than a year. He arrived in Dublin nine months after the Irish Act of Union, and six months

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 164

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

165

after Pitt’s resignation over George III’s refusal to sanction Catholic Emancipation. In 1805, rather surprisingly, Southey suggested to Charles Wynn that an Irish Catholic Establishment might be best for Ireland— a concession that would embarrass Cuthbert Southey when editing his father’s letters (L&C 3: 21–3). Southey had hoped to visit Ireland again. Early in 1824, in a postscript to another letter to Wynn, he wrote: “The Bishop of Limerick has invited me to visit him. I shall wait until the next rebellion is over” (SL 3: 409). And in 1825 he tells John May that he was “strongly advised not to go by a man who knew the country well, and said he would not insure any man’s life there for three months.” There was “a sort of cut-throat anonymous letter” denouncing Southey as an Orange Boy “in the foulest and most ferocious terms,” and so for his wife Edith’s sake he would not go (L&C 5: 205–6). The British Critic of April 1826 devoted its lead review to a Digest of evidence collected by the parliamentary committee of 1824–5 on the state of Ireland (BC 2:1–38). The committee had assembled what the British Critic calls “a vast quantity of the most authentic and valuable information,” which laid bare the condition of Ireland for “public inspection.” The reviewer considers that the value of the collected information lay “more in the ascertainment of the real and substantial evils under which the people labour, than in the detection and exposure of those groundless assumptions which have so long furnished a scheme for the demagogue and the incendiary” (BC 1–2). Southey quotes from the Digest in his 1828 Quarterly Review article, which noticed no fewer than eight publications (QR 38: 535–97, titles listed 535.) Two were on the coronation oath, one of them by Henry Phillpotts, rector of Stanhope and prebendary of Durham, but soon to be bishop of Exeter. Southey gives particular attention to Dr. William Phelan’s History of the Policy of the Church of Rome in Ireland. Phelan was also part-author of the Digest of evidence given to the parliamentary committees, and published the evidence he had himself given to the House of Commons committee. In early April 1828, Southey had told his uncle, Rev. Herbert Hill, that Phelan had written to him pessimistically: “In my sanguine moments I have almost hoped that the knowledge I had acquired might become instrumental to the good of my country. But these hopes have left me. Providence seems to have decreed that the salvation of Ireland shall be wrought out by some immediate act of its own overruling and inscrutable sovereignty.” Southey comments: “Who indeed will stand in the breach, however willing and eager and able to defend it, when they know that the ground beneath them is

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 165

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

166

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

undermined, and that the governor is ready upon the first summons to hang out the white flag? The system is to concede everything” (SL 4: 108–9). In October 1828, the month when his Quarterly Review article on Ireland was published, Southey told his brother Tom that he was thinking of emigrating: “Without a shock things will hardly be settled here, and one would rather hear of the earthquake at a distance, than have one’s roof and chimneys come rattling about one’s ears.” Meanwhile he is confident that his “Catholic paper” in the Quarterly “is well-timed and will do much good” (SL 4: 120–1). Southey did not know that Wellington had already decided on the urgent need for an Emancipation Act. What gave new urgency to the question of Catholic Emancipation was the successful marshaling of the Catholic vote in the Clare byelection of July 1828, when Daniel O’Connell was elected to the Westminster Parliament—though disqualified as a Catholic from taking his seat (BEM 15: 282–4). Now, in August 1828, the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine prints a letter from a correspondent who had witnessed the scenes of excitement and exultation when the result of the Clare election was declared. “I shall not fatigue you,” he wrote, “by describing how the rabblement shouted and tossed up their sweaty caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that, for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.” Amid all the uproar, he could not forget that “the expressed intention not merely of existing acts of Parliament, but of our blessed constitution itself, was to exclude Roman Catholics from sitting or voting in either House of Parliament” (BEM 24: 219). The Clare election had changed the parameters of debate. According to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ’s correspondent, even those “who supported [Emancipation] a fortnight ago, must conscientiously abjure it now.” It could no longer be claimed that the removal of “the real substantial grievance” would “disarm the agitators of the only weapon which enables them to unite these men in endeavouring to thwart the law of the land.” No one could now maintain “that the same degree of excitement could not be produced to pull down the Union, to restore the forfeited estates, or to confiscate the property of the Church in Ireland, as has been lately exhibited for an object purely and confessedly fanciful.” The Irish 40-shilling freeholders should be deprived of the vote: “It is certainly a fearful thing, that those who are utterly destitute of property, or any thing else to lose, should obtain even a temporary control over those who possess all.” Did the gentlemen of England believe that “if rotten-hearted temple-robbers be allowed to crowd the benches of Saint Stephen’s [the pre-Pugin

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 166

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

167

House of Commons], and mouth at you to your beards, any sane man can deem his own property a whit more secure than that of an ecclesiastical corporation?” (BEM 24: 220–3) Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s editor excused his correspondent’s somewhat hysterical tone, reflecting “the heat and lively indignation natural to one writing from the scene of such actions as disgraced the Clare Election.” But the report from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ’s London correspondent was hardly more moderate: It is really is an afflicting thing to behold in a part of the United Kingdom, within a few hundred miles of us, thousands of people driven along like cattle by Popish priests— thousands of men so destitute of knowledge, so abandoned of reason, so lost to principle and decency, that they turn their backs on all natural ties and connexions, insult those to whose protection they owe their existence, and yoke themselves like beasts to the chariot wheels of a noisy bully, and an utter stranger, merely because the Popish priest tell them it is the cause of God and religion . . . (BEM 24: 223)

These words appeared in August 1828. By then the duke of Wellington, in his first year as prime minister, had decided that O’Connell must be allowed to take his seat in Parliament if violence was to be prevented in Ireland. On August 1, Wellington wrote to George IV, warning him that “a rebellion is impending,” and asking royal permission to consider the whole state of Ireland while preserving the utmost secrecy. It would take six months to reach the point of bringing in an Emancipation Bill. Before then the duke would have stopped Peel from resigning, as only he could successfully steer the Bill through the Commons. He would also have threatened the king with his own resignation as prime minister, and have fought a (very gentlemanly) duel with Lord Winchilsea, who accused the duke of duplicity in carrying on “his insidious designs, for the infringement of our liberties, and the introduction of Popery into every department of the State” (Longford 169–70, 186–93). Southey’s article on Ireland in the October 1828 Quarterly Review thus came too late to influence events. But it marshals the arguments against Emancipation that the Book of the Church was not intended to advance (Vindiciæ xiv). His review for the Quarterly Review offers a Musgravian reminder of Irish rebellions from Elizabeth’s reign onward, for which Southey turns to Dr. Phelan’s History. Describing Phelan as “one of the ablest and wisest of those who have written with reference to the existing position of Irish affairs,” Southey follows

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 167

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

168

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

him through the successive crises when Ireland exploited the mother country’s vulnerability. For Elizabeth, threatened by Spain and “continually harassed by conspiracies at home,” it was from Ireland that she “apprehended most danger, and suffered most injury.” When the outbreak of Charles I’s civil war was imminent, “rebellion and massacre ensued” in Ireland, and it was on Ireland that James II chiefly relied “for the strength which might enable him to subvert both [kingdoms]” (QR 38: 537). The American War of Independence (says Phelan) was used by the Irish gentry to gain greater independence for the Dublin Parliament, which itself was overawed by “an armed association”—his name for the Irish Volunteers. “The dragon’s teeth,” Southey observes, “which were then sown in a land prepared for them, produced their proper crop during the French Revolution.” Then too, “in a time of increasing embarrassments, pressing difficulties, and adverse fortunes, the nearest and greatest danger with which England was assailed, was on the side of Ireland.” That crop was “trampled down,” but it has “sprouted forth again”; and the fields are now “white unto harvest” (QR 38: 538–9). Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association had been suppressed in 1825, yet The Times reports ironically that “Mr O’Connell can wield five or six millions of the Irish people at will: with Mr O’Connell, however, the peace of the country is safe!” (QR 38: 540). Southey similarly mocks the claims that everything O’Connell’s supporters do is within the law. The same could be said of Guy Fawkes: Guy Faux and his associates had a right to hire a vault under the House of Lords; there was nothing but what was quiet and lawful in this. They had a right to purchase gunpowder, like any other freeborn Englishman; they had a right also to deposit any part of their property in the vault— as many barrels, for instance, as they pleased— and to cover the barrels with faggots; this was also lawful, and nothing could be done more quietly. Moreover Guy Faux had an undoubted right to go into the aforesaid vault when he pleased, at any time or season, whether the king and the peers of the realm were or were not assembled in the chamber above; and he had a right also, an undoubted right, to carry a dark lantern with him.

Each step had been taken quietly, and nothing unlawful had been done. But “it was in the ulterior measures—in their object, that the treason lay”(QR 38: 545). Southey likens O’Connell’s Irishmen to “the firemen of Constantinople, who are accused of sometimes discharging oil from their engines instead of water” (545–6).

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 168

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

169

Catholic Emancipation, Southey holds, is irrelevant to the condition of Ireland. He cites a speech attacking the Catholic Association in 1825, when (he says) Ireland’s peasants were “too truly described, not only as the most ignorant and the most deluded in the world, but also as ‘the most ready for any work of blood.’” What was the cause? Not because the Roman Catholics are excluded, by the constitution of these kingdoms, from seats in Parliament, and from some forty offices, but because no other peasantry throughout Christendom is at this time so grievously and grindingly oppressed by the landholders; and because their aptitude for becoming the instruments of mischief and murder is, as it were, the original sin of the race— their unhappy inheritance— the national crime and the national curse. (QR 38: 542–3)

The proposed admission of Catholics to Parliament could be a blessing or a curse: “a blessing indeed, if it could heal the wounds of Ireland, eradicate the old inveterate cancer, and give to that poor country a tranquillity which it has never known; but a curse if it should inflame those wounds, and an evil which would bring all other evils in its train, if it should undermine and subvert the constitution of these kingdoms” (549). In the remaining 50 pages of the review, Southey marshals his formal case against Emancipation, challenging the arguments advanced on grounds of toleration, justice, civil rights, and political expediency. He defines toleration in narrow terms: “To tolerate is to allow that which is not approved—to suffer that which is not and ought not to be encouraged.” Toleration is “such allowance, such sufferance— nothing more.” Dissidents should not expect or demand more, since more would be “inconsistent with the fundamental principles of any constitution whereof religion is a part.” In a piquant foretaste of more modern times, Southey expects that those who talk of suppressing Orange Club processions will agree that, “precisely on similar grounds, the Roman Catholics should be prohibited from carrying in public the host and the images of their saints.” Processions of that kind, he tells his readers, “are not tolerated even in the United States.” Southey admits that the behavior of Dissenters did more lasting damage to the Protestant cause “than could have been brought about by all the Catholic powers, and all the artifices of the Church of Rome.” But at least the Dissenters “acknowledge no foreign jurisdiction: their allegiance is imperfect but it is not divided.” They thus posed no danger to the state (550–1). Southey accepts the repeal of

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 169

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

170

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the Test and Corporation Acts, which had been agreed by Parliament in May 1828. He argues that the first Test Act of Charles II’s reign (1673) affected Dissenters “incidentally, not by design, the act being expressly intended ‘for preventing dangers that may happen by Popish recusants.’” And he adds the sardonic comment that if Protestants, “however blameless, however amiable, however virtuous and pious,” must be excluded from the kingdom of heaven, Catholics should surely not complain, “as of a grievance and injustice,” because the British Protestant government excludes them from seats in the legislature. Southey quotes with approval Burke’s defense of the Test Acts in his speech on the Acts of Uniformity: “The matter does not concern toleration but establishment” (552–3 citing Works 6: 292). Following Burke, Southey argues that the exclusion suffered by Catholics “is consistent with the general system of society.” The lower orders who lack education are “disqualified from familiar intercourse with those whom fortune has placed far above them.” Similar disqualifications apply: The man who is below a certain standard in his stature, is disqualified for a grenadier, though he might be as brave as Tydeus. A Quaker is disqualified by his opinions for the army or navy, and from very many of the common offices and ways of life. The whole society of Bible Christians who have published a “New System of Vegetable Cookery,” adapted to their anti-carnivorous principles, are disqualified for the beef-steak club, and even for partaking of a parish feast. (QR 38: 555–6)

Even the pope, “if he were Turkishly inclined, and wished to remove from the malaria of Rome to the delightful climate of Constantinople, could not exchange the tiara for the turban, and become Grand Mufti, unless he qualified as a Musselman.” As the Protestant faith is “an essential part of the British constitution,” Southey considers that when men “covet and desire seats in the legislature, it is much more reasonable for us to require that they change their opinions, than for them to demand that we should change the constitution of these kingdoms” (555–6). Southey summarizes the Emancipationists’ arguments from political expediency in three sentences: “Give the Roman Catholics what they ask, and we shall then be a united nation. Till they have obtained it, the question will never be allowed to rest. It may be granted with safety; it cannot be safely withheld; and it must be granted at last.” He adds belligerently: “The marrow of the whole argument is here, and now we will break the bones of it.” Pointing to the incompatibility

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 170

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

171

of the supporters of Emancipation, Southey notes “how little principle of cohesion there is between the gold, and the brass, and the iron, and the clay, of which this brittle confederacy, like the image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, is composed.” William Pitt had linked the issue of Catholic Emancipation (which Southey calls “a gross abuse of terms”) to the Irish Act of Union. In doing so Pitt had “entailed upon these kingdoms far greater evils by this part of his conduct, than by engaging in the war with revolutionary France” (557). Yet Pitt himself had objected to the term: “I disclaim the very words in common use, the emancipation of the Catholics, or Catholic emancipation. I have never understood that subject so; I never understood the situation of the Catholics to be such; I do not now understand the situation of the Catholics to be such as that any relief from it could be correctly so described.” Further concessions to Catholics could not be urged “as a claim of right,” but “on the ground of liberality alone, and political expediency.” In Pitt’s view, Catholic relief could not be considered in isolation, but must form part of a “comprehensive system of security” (557–8 citing the House of Commons record in Parl. Hist. 35: 1118). Responding to proposals for a crown veto on Catholic episcopal appointments, Southey recalls that the British and Irish Roman Catholics have “twice consented to the veto, twice retracted that consent, after they had authorized their advocates in Parliament to signify it, and to bring in a bill founded thereon.” He cites evidence, given by the titular Catholic archbishop of Dublin to the parliamentary committee, to show the unrealistic expectations that seem to have secured the pope’s consent to the veto: “that it was not at all improbable, that in the event of emancipation being granted, the Catholic bishops might be allowed to take their seats in the House of Peers ” (559 citing Digest 2: 209, Southey’s emphasis). Southey endorses Lord Eldon’s observation that “during the many years which have elapsed since this question has been contemplated, no man has yet found out what securities he could propose on the part of Protestants, which the Roman Catholics would give as the price of what they were to receive.” But Southey goes further, arguing that no securities, “proposed or accepted” by the Catholics, could be relied upon, since “they are not to be bound in their dealings with a Protestant state by any declarations or oaths, however solemn; and this is no secret part of their system, for it has been decreed and pronounced by popes, canons and councils, that no such oaths and declarations are binding” (559–60). Peel, as prime minister, had recently recalled the changed circumstances since the Irish Act of Union, when “religion, we were told,

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 171

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

172

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

was, even on the Continent, only a volcano burnt out, that could never be rekindled.” Peel quoted Samuel Whitbread’s House of Commons speech in 1812, ridiculing fears of Catholicism: “Look at Paris: was there any fear that religion would be revived at Paris? Was it to be expected that Buonaparte would revive religion? Could the Pope excite any apprehensions? Why, he was Buonaparte’s prisoner, and must remain subservient to him. Was there any apprehension of the Jesuits being restored?” (566). Yet only two years later Bonaparte had been exiled to Elba, the Bourbons were back in France, and the Society of Jesus had been reestablished. Dr. Doyle, the Catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, in his evidence before the parliamentary committee, had assured his interviewers: “I think, if emancipation were carried, that the whole of the Catholic population would consider their grievances at an end.” Yet Southey appeals to the Digest to show that Doyle had earlier told the committee: Catholic Emancipation will not remedy the evils of the tithe system; it will not allay the fervour of religious zeal, the perpetual clashing of the two churches . . . it will not check the rancorous animosities with which different sects assail each other. It will not remove all suspicion of partiality in the government were [the Emperor] Antoninus himself the Viceroy: it will not create that sympathy between the different orders of the State, which is ever mainly dependent on religion. (QR 38: 566–7, Southey’s emphasis.)

Southey finds “so many and such flagrant proofs of this selfcontradiction in his evidence” that no court of law would have given weight to Doyle’s testimony. But he pretends to think that Doyle may have felt his conduct justified “upon the system of morals which he learned at Salamanca and which is inculcated at Maynooth.” Southey is sure that Doyle knows that Catholic Emancipation “can no more produce unanimity, or even tranquillity in Ireland, than it can change the weather.” But Doyle also knows that Emancipation would “enable the Roman Catholics to occupy a position from which they could command the citadel,” and that on that position they might plant their batteries, and demand the surrender of the Protestant Church Establishment in Ireland” (568). Military metaphors drawn from siege warfare abound in Southey’s antipapal rhetoric. He contrasts the pre-Union period, when “in these kingdoms time had done much toward abating the acrimony of religious differences.” Satisfied with victory, “we had laid down our arms willing, as far as possible, to let the points of difference pass out of mind, and look only to those in which we were agreed.” It was

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 172

8/22/2011 6:32:07 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

173

(says Southey) the Romanists who renewed the war, “when Milner planted his batteries, Lingard opened his mines, and the corps of sappers commenced their operations under Mr Butler, and the Baddeleys and Andrewses cast their stinkpots over our walls” (569–70). Thomas Baddeley, a Catholic priest in Manchester, had written A Sure Way to find out the True Religion, which reached a seventh edition in 1847. William Eusebius Andrews was author of Historical narrative of the horrid plot and conspiracy of Titus Oates, called the Popish Plot (1816), and a three-volume Critical and historical review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1824–6). Southey attacks those who “call upon us to dismantle our defences, throw open our gates, and admit the Roman Catholics into the citadel of the constitution” (574). The last quarter of Southey’s review re-echoes much of the invective of his earlier writings. He concludes his urgently argued case against Catholic Emancipation with the reminder that in Ireland religion and politics are indistinguishable. Catholic Emancipation might be argued on grounds of political expediency, “but it comes to a question of religion at last.” The multitudes that “the Irish demagogues have put in action” are in earnest because nationalism combines with religion. If it were not that they suppose that Emancipation would mean freedom from tithes, taxes, and rents, “they would care as little for the men who have raised the storm, as those men care for them, or their religion, or their country.” Southey is convinced that “for the political question they would go no farther than a riot,” while for the religious question, “they would take the field in rebellion” (572–3). Even if, as Doyle claims, the Catholic clergy withheld the rites of the Church from those they knew to be planning rebellion, it was a hollow threat. According to the anonymous Captain Rock Detected (also noticed in Southey’s review) the peasantry believed that “all Catholics who opposed the British government in arms were entitled to the benefit of a plenary indulgence ” (Southey’s emphasis). The poet laureate tells his readers: “This little book may be received with perfect confidence. No person is better acquainted with the state of the Irish peasantry and people than this very able author” (573n citing Rock Detected 260). The author is thought to be Mortimer O’Sullivan, Phelan’s collaborator in the Digest. Southey’s remaining pages repeat the judgments of the Book of the Church and Vindiciæ. Probably with Butler in mind, he warns: “We must not form our judgment of the Roman Catholic religion from the representatives of those English Roman Catholics who have a purpose to serve by keeping its distinctive characteristics out of sight; and who have moreover from their childhood breathed the free air

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 173

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

174

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

of a Protestant country.” Anyone who thinks “the Romanists have anywhere abated one jot of their pretensions, or in any one point relaxed the rigour of their intolerance” is grievously deceived. Ireland is admittedly an extreme example: “In no other country are the ecclesiastical students so jealously and so effectually secluded from the humanizing influence of society, and nowhere does the Romish religion exist in more unmitigated and malignant form, both among priests and people” (574–5). Yet Southey is not impressed by the cisapline model of the Gallican Church in France: “The French bishops have been as remorseless as the Spanish Inquisition, and the Most Christian kings as deeply dyed in the blood of their heretical subjects, as the Most Catholic.” They violated charters and solemn treaties, because “they were taught by their confessors, and by their councils and their popes (in whom they were also taught to believe infallibly) that to break faith with infidels and heretics was, in itself, a meritorious act of faith.” Anyone disposed to contradict those claims is invited to “inquire into the history of the French Huguenots and of the Spanish Moriscoes.” Even if there were “in any part of the world” an example of the Catholic Church “purifying itself, and by degrees approaching to the spirit of Christianity,” Southey declares, “it is not in Ireland that the faintest dawn of any such amelioration can be perceived” (576). Transferring his attack to the Irish hierarchy, Southey quotes verbatim from Phelan’s History of the Church of Rome in Ireland: For the last fifty years, the Roman Catholic bishops have been engaged, with little intermission in treating with various members of the government, both in England and Ireland: in every instance they have over-reached or eluded them, and held on their sinuous course of aggrandizement without sustaining one decisive defeat. They have received with equal freedom and treated with equal dexterity, the overtures which were made to them from time to time, by aspirants after place and declaimers upon patriotism. They have intrigued with all parties; they have cajoled and vilified, used and amused them as suited their purposes, yet never given their confidence to any. (577–8)

In 1793, when Irish Catholics were given the vote, Phelan charges their bishops with having “crushed the rising spirit of their gentry beneath a mass of nominally enfranchised paupers”— the 40-shilling freeholders. The Catholic clergy’s former aristocratic rivals had been largely removed “by forfeiture and the reformation,” and the bishops— now “absolute masters of the ignorant, the fanatical and the disaffected”— could afford to “treat the timid restiveness of the more

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 174

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

175

educated with a contemptuous and taunting composure.” Phelan calls the bishops a hierocracy “swaying a corporate mass of five millions of people with a plenitude of dominion which might be envied at Constantinople” (Phelan 110–11). It is this “hierarchy or hierocracy,” Southey recalls, “which is now known by its own avowal, to have carried on a treasonable communication with the Pretender, so long as a Pretender existed.” And when Britain was at war with Napoleon, the same hierarchy “volunteered its acceptance of the Concordat by which the Pope confirmed him in his possession of the throne of France.” So Southey sees even the papal concordat with Napoleon as part of a Catholic alliance against Protestant England. How then can the king and his Protestant government expect, from Catholic prelates, allegiance, obedience, and cooperation “in the great work of bettering the condition of the Irish, and pacifying Ireland?” We may look for this, says Southey only “when men gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles—when the Ethiopian shall change his skin and the leopard her spots!” (579). Southey quotes the Anglican archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, on the seeming incompatibility between the consecration oath of the Catholic bishops and their oath of allegiance to the crown. Dr. Magee could not see “how both oaths can safely be taken by the same person.” Southey concedes that in 1791 His Holiness had excused the Irish bishops and archbishops from swearing to “persecute and impugn” with all their power “heretics, schismatics and rebels.” Instead, Irish bishops were permitted to use the form of oath current in Catherine the Great’s Russia—from which the “obnoxious clause” had been excised. But Southey sees this as only a tactical retreat: “The scarlet-coloured beast drew in its horns when Catherine would have aimed a blow at them.” But the principle was not renounced, though “its avowal was suspended, by indulgence, in an heretical kingdom, where the sovereign, most properly, would no longer suffer it to be made” (580–4). Ireland occupied a special place in the papal patrimony. Adrian IV, the only English pope, had sent a ring to Henry II to invest him with Ireland, newly conquered by the king. Southey quotes from Adrian’s bull: “There is, indeed, no doubt but that Ireland, and all the islands in which Christ, the sun of righteousness, hath shone, and have received the doctrine of the Christian faith, do belong to the jurisdiction of St Peter and of the Holy Roman Church” (585). As the Shorter Cambridge Medieval History relates, even Innocent III declared that he exercised jurisdiction outside the papal states only in certain cases (casualiter) (2: 943). Yet Southey says it was so much in the interest of medieval clergy to uphold the papal claim of supreme dominion, that

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 175

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

176

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

“various opinions were invented, and various fables in support of them, to explain how Ireland became the peculiar patrimony of the popes.” One such fable was that “in the ages of paganism, it had been properly called the Island of Saints, or the Holy Island.” According to Southey, Doyle, who knows “as well how to mystify in one way as another, uses the fable as if he believed it.” Doyle had said that “when it pleased God to have an island of saints upon earth, He prepared Ireland from afar for this high destiny.” And, in language at least as extravagant as Southey’s, Doyle likens English persecution of the Irish Catholics to that of Nero, Domitian, Genseric, or Attila and “all the barbarities of the sixteenth century.” Doyle’s view of the Anglican Established Church of Ireland is uncompromising: “The most heart-rending curse which providence has permitted to fall on land-occupiers in Ireland, is THE CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT; this like the scorpion’s tail, is armed at all points, and scourges the peasant through tithes, and church-rates, till it draws his very blood” (QR 38: 586–7). Southey dismisses the suggestion that Catholic bishops and their clergy would be reconciled to the Protestant state, if the state would formally recognize them and take responsibility for paying their stipends. He thinks they would accept it “as the Danes took tribute, without abating their hostility.” Meanwhile he conjures up a picture of a new influx of friars and monks: “They have them in Ireland already, of all colours and varieties, ‘black, white and grey,’ Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and what not; all bound, by their order and their oath, to obey their respective generals . . . residing at Rome.” The friars, “who are the caterpillars of Popery, would swarm over the land as soon as opportunity invited them, and the caterpillars would eat what the cankerworms left” (590–1). The Jesuits, whose mission in Brazil and Paraguay Southey had defended (chapter 4), had been permitted “to set up their standard” in Ireland. In what country, he asks, “could their pestilent order be so mischievous as in Ireland at this time?” The Jesuits are notoriously bound by an oath of obedience to the pope, and “they are required by their founder to say white is black, and believe it to be black, if the Romish Church should think proper to pronounce that it is so” (591). Southey’s footnote, quoting from St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, seeks to prove that this is no “false and calumnious assertion” (QR 38: 591n). As he moves toward his uncompromising conclusion, Southey appeals to speeches made in the House of Commons by Sir Robert Inglis in May 1828, and listed as one of the eight books under review. “Has anyone,” asks Southey, “persuaded himself that the character of this corrupt church is changed—that it has corrected its practices,

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 176

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

177

abated of its bigotry, or lowered its pretensions?” If so, let him note Sir Robert’s proofs “of its existing prohibitions, of the unrelaxing tyranny which it at this day exercises over the human mind. Let him see what are its feelings and practices at this time abroad and at home, far and near—in the New World and in the Old—in France, among the most enlightened of the Roman Catholic people, and in Ireland, among the most ignorant” (592, Southey’s emphasis). In France, they send for a relic of the Virgin Mary’s dress to secure a happy delivery for the duchess of Berry; the papers tell of a crucifix at Migné that “emitted a marvellous light,” and in France also, “the Revelations of Sister Nativité were got up—let it not be forgotten—with the concurrence of the English Roman Catholics.” In Ireland, the island of saints, “there are holy wells at which multitudes annually assemble, coming from far and wide, bareheaded and barefooted, that they may crawl on their knees round these wells, which are generally near some old oak, or upright hewn stones” (593). This catalogue recalls Southey’s recital of superstitious practices he first encountered in Spain and Portugal more than 30 years before (chapter 2). Southey returns to Sir Robert Inglis’s speech censuring the continuing pretensions of the Catholic Church: “The Church of Rome has still the same grasping, dominant, exclusive, and intolerant character: it is weaker, indeed, than it was, but it carries with it every where the same mind.” The strong man (like Samson), says Inglis, is “shorn and bound,” but if you “admit him into the sanctuary of your temple,” beware lest he should “pull down the temple of the constitution upon you, and bury you, and your idols, and himself, in one common ruin!” (QR 38: 595). Inglis, educated at Winchester, Oxford, and Lincoln’s Inn, had been private secretary to Lord Sidmouth (Henry Addington, Pitt’s successor). Inglis would defeat Peel as MP for the university seat of Oxford in 1829, on the issue of Catholic Emancipation, and continue to represent the university until 1854— opposing not only Emancipation, but parliamentary reform, Jewish relief, repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Maynooth College grant as well. Southey certainly chose his allies from conservative circles. Did he himself believe that Catholics could ever be admitted to Parliament? Southey answers: Not while the Roman Catholics remain what they are, while their creed binds them to their canons, and canons bind them to a persecuting spirit, and instruct them that faith is not to be kept with heretics. Not while the clergy swear allegiance to the see of Rome. Not while the Church of Rome claims to itself the attribute of infallibility, and

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 177

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

178

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

proclaims that salvation is exclusively confined to those of its fold . . . (QR 38: 596–7)

The only security that Southey can envisage, which might justify admitting Catholics to the legislature, is a general council of the church “which should revoke certain doctrines as formally and authentically as they were decreed at Trent, at Constance, and in the Lateran.” He insists that “an authentic disclaimer of whatever is unchristian or pernicious is necessary— decreed by a council, and confirmed by the pope” (597). Southey’s long article for the 1828 Quarterly Review, on Ireland and the Catholic Question, is as important as any of his major attacks on the Catholic Church. It is only here that he confronts the question of Catholic Emancipation head-on, and attempts to marshal his arguments in a coherent sequence—while recapitulating much of the general criticism he had written during the three preceding decades. The irony is that the article was published barely six months before the Emancipation Act became law. Writing to John Rickman on November 1, 1828, Southey confesses that even the 60 pages of the Quarterly had not allowed him enough space. “There is so much more to be said,” he writes, “which was not said for want of room, that if it would avail anything I would have a pamphlet ready for the meeting of Parliament.” He asks Rickman to send him the first seven reports on education in Ireland—“the eighth and ninth I have.” He adds that he has “a good deal in prospect concerning that country,” and is thinking of writing “a view of its history from the English conquest” (SL 4: 121). Acknowledging, on November 17, the safe arrival of the Irish reports, Southey tells Rickman: “I shall find them very useful, if only as enabling me to show how beneficent this Government has been in its institutions toward Ireland, and how that beneficence has ever been defeated by the Irish themselves.” And he ends the letter: “I do not think of enlarging the Irish paper in the ‘Q.R.,’ but of reproducing what is in the ‘[Edinburgh] Annual Register,’ recast and with much new matter, for I have so much to say on that subject, and am much in the humour for saying it” (SL 4: 125–6). Southey had a genuine concern for the Irish people, but, as his letters to Rickman show, he placed his faith in long-term measures. And the last page of his 1828 Quarterly Review article reinforces the point. There was a “straight road” to solving the Irish question: To restrain treason, to punish sedition, to disregard clamour, and, by every possible means, to better the condition of the Irish peasantry, who are not more miserably ignorant than they are miserably

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 178

8/22/2011 6:32:08 PM

Th e QUA R T E R LY a n d I r e l a n d

179

oppressed. Give them employment in public works— bring the bogs into cultivation—facilitate, for those who desire it, the means of emigration. Extend the poor laws to Ireland— experience may teach us how to guard against their abuse—they are benevolent, they are necessary, they are just. Lay that impost in such a proportion upon the absentees as may, in some degree, compensate for their non-residence. Do they deserve to be spared?

Southey repeats this advice in his final injunction on fair treatment of the Irish: “Better their condition thus; educate the people; execute justice; and maintain peace— and Catholic Emancipation will then become as vain and feeble a cry as Parliamentary Reform has become in England.” Let everything be done for the poor “that can improve their condition, physically, morally, intellectually, and religiously; and let us ‘stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage’” (598). Southey’s social program for the betterment of Ireland was indeed what was needed, but neither Catholic Emancipation nor parliamentary reform would wait. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (supporter of Catholic Emancipation for the first seven years of its existence) had from 1824 adopted a stridently hostile line. In March 1824, it declared that Emancipation would consolidate the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and “would therefore secure to the people an eternity of the present ignorance, depravity, party madness, slavery and wickedness.” It concluded that the conversion of the Irish to Protestantism “would be the most invaluable benefit that could be gained both by themselves and the empire at large” (BEM 15: 282–4). As late as January 1829 the British Critic was urging the duke of Wellington to treat Ireland “as he would an army placed suddenly under his command, that army being ill-conditioned, ill-officered, ill-paid, ill-clothed, illfed, half-mutinous, and in correspondence with the enemy.” Catholic Emancipation must come “before the fabric of the British Constitution is finished,” but the British Critic believed that “it must be postponed from day to day, and from year to year, and from age to age, rather than be effected in a manner which will endanger the very Constitution itself” (BC 5: 154, 171–2). Within a month, Peel would introduce a Catholic Emancipation Bill into the Commons. It was coupled with a Bill removing Irish 40-shilling freeholders from the franchise— a huge concession for O’Connell to make, and one that would come back to haunt him. But it allowed Wellington “to couch Emancipation in terms of a defence of aristocratic rule” (Bartlett 242).

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 179

8/22/2011 6:32:09 PM

9780230115132_10_ch09.indd 180

8/22/2011 6:32:09 PM

10

A f t e r t h e Ac t : S ou t h e y, C ol e r i dge , a n d A ngl ic a n E ngl ish n ess

The Catholic Emancipation Bill passed its third reading on April 4,

1829, and received the royal assent on April 13. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the year before, had been supported by all the bishops, though William Van Mildert of Durham was decidedly reluctant. Now in 1829, more than half the bishops in the House of Lords and three archbishops voted against Catholic Emancipation (Clark 534–5). Whatever the precise nature of Southey’s Anglicanism, he evidently had the big battalions of the Established Church on his side. William Howley, who as bishop of London had offered Southey the use of Lambeth Palace library in preparing his reply to Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church (SL 3: 476), had become archbishop of Canterbury in 1828, and he now voted against the Emancipation Bill. Charles Blomfield, who had commended Southey’s Book of the Church in his pastoral charge when bishop of Chester, was now bishop of London. But Henry Phillpotts, who had been four or five years ahead of Southey at Westminster School (L&C 6: 51) and rallied to his defense in 1825 (chapter 8), shared the Tory leadership’s conversion to Emancipation. Perhaps not altogether coincidentally, he became bishop of Exeter in 1830. Phillpotts sent to the duke of Wellington, at the start of his administration in January 1828, a copy of his own Letter to an English Layman . . . on the Coronation Oath, which Southey would notice in his review for the Quarterly article later that year (QR 38: 535–98). Phillpotts explained to the duke that the

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 181

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

182

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

300-page pamphlet did not rule out concessions to the Catholics if they could offer “real and adequate security for our Church.” Admitting that a conciliatory policy would undermine the British constitution (which required that concessions should not be made), he nevertheless warned Wellington and Lord Chancellor Eldon that circumstances “make it certain that, ere it is very long, concessions will be made” (Clark 529). The most forthright endorsement of Southey’s stance came from the bishop of Hereford and warden of Winchester College, in a private letter (hitherto unpublished) postmarked January 22, 1826, and addressed to Southey at Keswick: “The Bishop of Hereford begs leave to avail himself of this opportunity, for presenting his respects to Mr Southey, and returning him thanks for his ‘Book of the Church’; a Work, in Time, seasonable; & in Matter, awakening to all but those, who have drunk deep in the poisonous cup of spiritually intoxicating, & literally sense-bereaving idolatry” (Southey Archive, Bristol Reference Library). George Isaac Huntingford, previously bishop of Gloucester (chapter 3), was an arch conservative on the Episcopal bench. The historian of Winchester College writes of Huntingford’s time as warden: “Whether it was the French Revolution in his first year of office or the [1832] Reform Bill in his last, or the proposal that tea and coffee should be allowed in College, it was all one to Warden Huntingford; all were innovations, none would do” (Firth 89–90). I did not find any acknowledgment from the poet laureate in Huntingford’s correspondence, but Southey did write to another bishop, George Henry Law of Bath and Wells, on March 21, 1829, while the Bill was going through Parliament, to seek his assistance in presenting a petition to the House of Lords. The bishop presented the petition two days later (Speck 208–9). Both Southey and Coleridge had hoped to publish before the Emancipation Bill became law. In March 1829, Coleridge told Henry Nelson Coleridge that he had only half-a-dozen pages to write before finishing On the Constitution of the Church and State, but that “such has been the condition of my mind and body that I have only wasted an extravagant quantity of paper writing and re-writing and nothing to my mind” (CL 6: 587–8). The book, together with its appendix (“Aids towards a Right Judgment on the late Catholic Bill”), did not appear until December 1829— so late that the title page carries 1830 as the publication date. Coleridge could thus admit that the terms of the Act had “agreeably disappointed my fears” (C&S 11). The preface to Southey’s two-volume edition of Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society is dated March 1829. That month

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 182

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

183

he wrote to George Tickner that he was expecting “by every post” the final proofs of Colloquies (L&C 6: 38). A month later he reported: “Murray is withholding my ‘Colloquies,’ that the public may be in a quieter state of mind for receiving them.” He guessed this was Murray’s motive, and did not “expect much sale for a book in which severe but salutary truths are told in a Christian spirit.” Colloquies was “sure to offend many powerful parties and bodies of men, and is not sure of pleasing any” (SL 4: 136). By September, writing to John May, Southey was more specific: “I will tell you Murray’s opinion of the Colloquies. The sale, he says, would have been tenfold greater if religion and politics had been excluded from them” (L&C 6: 73). It is easy to understand Murray’s misgivings. The first page of the preface to Colloquies gives ironical expression to Southey’s distrust of the Emancipation Bill only four days after Peel moved in the House of Commons to consider the laws against Catholics: “Recent circumstances have produced no change in the author concerning the Roman Catholic Question; no one however can more sincerely wish that timid councils may be proved by the event to have been wise ones; that government may gain strength by yielding to menaces; and that the Protestant Constitution of these kingdoms may be secured by abandoning the principles upon which it was established” (Colloquies 1: xi). He denies that he had shifted his ground on the Catholic question. His friends could testify to the fact that “my opinions respecting the Roman Catholic claims to seats in Parliament and certain offices in the state have always been the same. I have ever maintained that the Romans ought to be admitted to every office of trust, honour or emolument, which is not connected with the legislative power; but that it is against the plainest rules of policy to entrust men with power in the State whose bounden religious duty it is to subvert, if they can, the Church (Colloquies 1: xiii–xiv). He reiterates his conviction that the Bill would do nothing to remedy “the wrongs and sufferings of the Irish people.” He had always condemned the condition “to which their landlords, their middlemen and their priests have reduced them, and the state of barbarism in which the British Government, by the grossest neglect of its paramount duty, has suffered them to remain.” He had “at all times felt, and spoken, as a man who abhors oppression and earnestly wishes for every possible improvement in the spiritual and temporal condition of his fellow creatures” (Colloquies xiv–xv). The imagined dialogues or “colloquies” with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, which provide the literary framework of the two volumes, maintain a courteous and well-mannered tone,

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 183

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

184

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

but Southey’s continuing criticism of the Catholic Church is evident enough. Colloquy XI entitled “INFIDELITY— CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT” refers back to More’s words at the end of the preceding colloquy, which opens Southey’s second volume: Nothing but religion, you said, can preserve our social system from putrescence and dissolution. This I entirely believe; and therefore a melancholy and a fearful apprehension comes over me when I contemplate the present state of the Christian world. Throughout Papal christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates the understanding, and at which the reasonable heart revolts. And in reformed countries I see the Church abroad, for the most part, starved by the government and betrayed by the clergy; and, at home, assailed by greater danger than has at any time threatened it since the accession of Elizabeth, when the nation was delivered from bondage. (Colloquies 2: 89)

Southey had conceived the idea of Colloquies back in 1817, when he was at work on his Life of Wesley. He confided to Grosvenor Bedford, in November 1817, that “a notion laid strong hold upon me, of producing something in distant imitation of Boethius. In which, instead of his Philosopher, I should introduce Sir Thomas More; and pass from the ostensible occasion of the book, by easy stages, to a view of the new prospect before us . . .” (SL 3: 81). In the 1829 dialogue format, Southey (in the person of Montesinos) and More discuss the Reformation. Southey speculates on what his own reactions would have been at the time. Much, he thinks, would have depended on his age “ whether I should have died at the stake to promote the Reformation, or should have exerted myself as you did in opposing it.” He decides that, had More been 20 years younger, he “would have been a reformer.” The Reformation, Southey admits, “brought with it so much evil and so much good— such monstrous corruptions existed on the one part, and such perilous consequences were certainly foreseen on the other—that I do not wonder at the fiery intolerance which was displayed on both sides” (Colloquies 1: 246). Sir Thomas sagely observes that “the very qualities which enable men to acquire power in distempered times render them, for the most part, unfit to be entrusted with it.” Yet Southey is sure that the costly battle was worth the winning: “The result of our Reformation is of such transcendant good, that it has been well purchased. We have gained by it a scriptural religion; a system of belief which bears inquiry; and an ecclesiastical establishment, which is not merely in all respects consistent with the general good, but eminently and essentially conducive

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 184

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

185

to it” (1: 247). Sir Thomas is made to describe the Anglican Church as “an Establishment positively good, and comparatively excellent; if not the best that can be conceived, incomparably the best that the world has ever seen.” Yet in spite of its adaptability to changing circumstance, More reminds Montesinos that the Anglican Church “has been subverted once, and was preserved from a second only overthrow by a political revolution, which has shaken the foundation of civil obedience.” So it is not surprising that More and his fellow Catholics, who “foresaw this tendency in part, withstood to the utmost of our power so perilous a change.” More warns of the long-term consequences of “those perilous errors, political as well as religious, which springing up with the Reformation, accompanied its course, disgraced its progress, prevented its universal extension, impeded its beneficial effects, aggravated its evils, and at length drew upon this poor country the guilt and the miseries of rebellion and revolution.” The venom, More adds, is not yet spent, nor has “the plague” yet been buried. Montesinos is quick to agree that there is certainly “at this time a more formidable combination acting against the church than has ever in any former age assailed it” (1: 248–50). Montesinos readily responds to More’s request for details of this “combination against the establishment,” distinguishing between Catholics, Dissenters, and unbelievers: The Roman-Catholics aim at supplanting the Establishment; they expect to do this presently in Ireland, and trust ultimately to succeed in this country also, a consummation for which they look with as much confidence, and as little reason, as the Jews for their Messiah. No branch of the Dissenters can hope to stand in place of the Church, but all desire to pull it down, for the sake of gratifying an inherited hatred, and getting each what it can in the scramble. The Infidels look for nothing less than the extirpation of Christianity. (Colloquies 1: 252–3)

More and Montesinos agree in condemning contemporary political science, which has been erected by “shallow sophists upon abstract rights and imaginary compacts, without the slightest reference to habits and history; but in ignorance of the one, and contempt of the other” (Colloquies 1: 254). Southey, through Montesinos, is emphatic that the spirit of Catholicism has not changed: “No, by St Bartholomew, and Dr Lingard! No by St. Dominic, and Dr. Doyle! No, by the Holy Office! By the Irish Massacre, and the Dragonnades of Louis XIV! By their Saints and by our Martyrs! Persecution is so plainly a duty upon

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 185

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

186

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the Roman-Catholic system, that the live bonfires of the Inquisition were called Acts of Faith ” (Colloquies 1: 255). The dialogue is inevitably overcast by the shadow of Ireland. More, noting that “ some of your statesmen” urge Catholic Emancipation as a way of “tranquilizing Ireland,” asks whether it is the wisdom or the sincerity of the advice that Montesinos doubts. The reply is in Southey’s characteristic tones: “I deny the wisdom; and in the greater part of those by whom the advice is supported, I doubt the sincerity” (Colloquies 1: 262). The next 30 pages are dominated by Ireland, echoing much of what Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review, and repeating almost verbatim the warning that if “a rebellion were raging from Carrickfergus to Cape Clear, no sentence of excommunication would be fulminated by a Roman-Catholic prelate” (QR 38: 579). Now in Colloquies he likens those ministers who recommend concessions to the Catholics to “ the man who, if a cobra-capella were erecting itself upon its coils in hostile attitude against us, its head raised, it eyes fixed and fiery, its head dilated, the forked tongue in action, and the fangs lifted in readiness to strike, should advise us to court the serpent with caresses and take it into our bosom” (Colloquies 1: 293–4). In the second volume, a discussion begins with the complaint that “cheap learning is no longer to be obtained.” It notes that the endowments of grammar schools “which were formerly the portion of poor scholars, have become objects of competition for the sons of the wealthy” and ends with criticism of the universities (Colloquies 2: 130–3). Oxford and Cambridge, in spite of the recent repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, still required subscription to the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church— at Cambridge before graduation and at Oxford before a student could matriculate. The two English universities were the nurseries of Anglican clergy, and, according to More, were suffering from “the decay of sound learning by which your Church was raised and defended.” No longer were Oxford and Cambridge colleges “seats of learning in the old and veritable sense; no longer the abode of men whose lives are devoted to the quiet pursuit of knowledge, and who find in that pursuit its own reward.” Montesinos agrees: “It is a humiliating confession, but I fear that in no other country is learning deemed so little loved and followed for its own sake as in England” (Colloquies 2: 135–6). Where should a new English university be built? Montesinos suggests that “Durham as the fittest place in the North of England, unless Hexham may be deemed more preferable.” Sir Thomas responds that “on the score of antiquity Hexham has greater claims and as an ancient seat of learning,” which was “grievously injured” by the dissolution of the

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 186

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

187

monasteries” (Colloquies 2: 145). Southey could not then have known that, within two years of the publication of Colloqiues, he would be considered for the chair of history at the newly founded University of Durham (L&C 6: 182–3). The presumed inadequacies of the older universities admittedly meant that an Anglican ordinand might well seem ill-equipped for his vocational duties: his study of the evidences and doctrines of Christianity might be no more “than was required for passing an examination.” He might be motivated by “vanity, half-knowledge and love of display,” which, in any other profession, could have made him “run with all sails set, upon the shallows of infidelity.” But Montesinos claims that the Anglican ministry is so structured as to “strengthen, to stablish, and to quicken his belief, not to shake, or torpify it.” He is not called upon to deal in legends that he cannot believe. “Instead of these, he delivers in our fine liturgy the doctrines of Christianity pure and undefiled; its proofs are before him in the Bible, opening more and more upon the willing mind, the more it is perused.” He is not required to “act in any thing which he suspects or knows to be a juggle, such as the exhibition of relics, the worship of wonder-working images, and the performance of miracles. He is not exposed to the pollutions of the Confessional.” His professional library is neither full of “extravagant and impious fictions,” nor of “books of casuistry which sophisticate the understanding and defile the heart; nor of rhapsodies of idolatrous and carnal devotion.” Instead, he can consult the “works of our English divines, who, with erudition and philosophy and eloquence, which have not been, and cannot be, surpassed, vindicate the authority of Scripture, expound its truths, and apply its all-important doctrines” (Colloquies 2: 117–18). This idealized and propagandist picture is predictably in stark contrast to the portrayal of the infidel Catholic priest, the exercise of whose office tends only to confirm him in his unbelief (Colloquies 2: 114–15). The Cambridge University Library catalogue lists the subject of Colloquies as “social problems.” Southey’s two volumes certainly focus on the ills of nineteenth-century Britain: the degradation of the Irish population, the educational needs of poor scholars, the impact of industrialization (much of it water-powered), and the campaigns of Michael Sadler and Lord Shaftesbury to improve working-class conditions, together with experiments like cooperative societies and Robert Owen’s New Lanark model factory—which reminded Southey of a monastery. His correspondence at the time reveals the same social preoccupations: evils of the manufacturing system (L& C 6: 68–9),

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 187

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

188

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

the need for a national system of education (6: 122–3), cholera and the condition of the urban poor (6: 174–5), and the reform of the poor law (6: 231). But Colloquies is also a defense of the Established Church and what Southey perceives as the excellence of its inherent characteristics, and a continued attack on what for 30 years he had regarded as the Catholic threat to the integrity of church and state. By the time the first two volumes of The Doctor appeared anonymously in 1834, George IV had died and been succeeded by William IV. Lord Grey and the Whigs had replaced the duke of Wellington’s Tory ministry, and the Reform Act of 1832 had given the middle classes the vote. The Doctor appeared in changed times, though started 20 years earlier, and is a very different work from Colloquies. Cuthbert Southey had some difficulty in explaining exactly what it was his father had written, calling it “the most extraordinary and perhaps the most original of my father’s works” (L&C 6: 225). Cuthbert thought it had grown out of an earlier project, The Butler, in which Southey had unsuccessfully tried to interest Grosvenor Bedford (6: 335). But, as Cuthbert explains, “The Butler was to have been pure nonsense, relieved only by occasional glimmerings of meaning, to deceive the reader into the idea that there was meaning in all the rest, while the nonsense in The Doctor bears only a small proportion to the other portions.” (The “nonsense” would include the Story of the Three Bears.) The Doctor, in the form of a novel, was started in 1813, after which it was “occasionally taken up as an amusement.” Cuthbert Southey considers that the earlier parts were written at a time when his father’s spirits “rose higher than they did in later years.” Eventually running to seven volumes, of which only the first five appeared in Southey’s lifetime, the Doctor was published anonymously, partly because of the uncertain public reception it would receive. The author’s identity was scrupulously concealed, unlike Scott’s authorship of the Waverley novels—“a secret and no secret” (L&C 6: 338). Southey seems to have succeeded in keeping the secret from his cousin, Herbert Hill junior, remarking in 1836: “That the writer has at first or second hand picked up some things from me is plain enough; if it be at first hand, there is but one man upon whom my suspicion could rest, and he is very capable of having written it, which is no light praise.” The hint of self-congratulation is reinforced by Southey’s verdict that the author does not possess his own “multifarious sort of knowledge, nor are his opinions altogether such as he himself would be likely to express” (L&C 6: 293). The opinions—not least on Catholicism— should have given the game away.

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 188

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

189

The poet laureate, who had been expelled from Westminster School for his article in the schoolboy Flagellant, accusing his teachers of sadistic corporal punishment, now names the great floggers among headmasters: the sixteenth-century Nicholas Udal of Eton, the seventeenth-century Richard Busby of Westminster, and the eighteenth-century Samuel Parr of Norwich, and James Bowyer of Christ’s Hospital, headmaster of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. The hero of the Doctor, Daniel Dove, escaped such discipline: “Nor was any of that inhuman injustice ever exercised upon him to break his spirit, for which Dean Colet [sixteenth-century headmaster of St Paul’s] it is to be hoped has paid in Purgatory;— to be hoped, I say, because if there be no Purgatory, the Dean may have gone farther and fared worse” (Doctor 1: 96). And when listing the pros and cons of “Eton or Westminster, Winchester or Harrow, Rugby or the Charter House, no matter which,” Southey recalls that Charles Wesley’s son, who followed his father to Westminster, though “born and bred in Methodism” ended up a Catholic (1: 108–9). The anonymous Southey is soon condemning the ceremony of blessing church bells, “which with other practices of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church, has been revived in France” (1: 296–9). Similarly, Daniel’s Leyden love affair with the burgomaster’s daughter provides opportunities for a joke at the expense of Catholics: “As for any hope of ever by any possibility obtaining a return of his affection, a devoted Roman Catholic might upon much better grounds hope that Saint Ursula, or any of her Eleven Thousand Virgins would come from her place in heaven to reward his devotion with a kiss” (Doctor 2: 164 echoing Vindiciæ 106). Volumes 3, 4, and 5, published between 1835 and 1838, revisit familiar themes: monastic “perverted piety” and “that intense selfishness which the law of monastic life inculcates” (3: 62), St. Dominic, “canonized founder of the Friars Predicant, and patron saint of the Inquisition” (3: 120–2), and the Inquisition again, as “that hellish tribunal which called itself the Holy Office” (3: 144). The Inquisition reappears in the fifth volume, when Southey refers to the papal doctrine of exclusive salvation, which (he says) holds that “all other Christians of every persuasion, all Jews, all Mahometans, all heathens are goats; only the Romanists are the Sheep of God’s pasture— and the Inquisitors, we may suppose, his Lambs!” (5: 259). Well might Cuthbert Southey call the Doctor “a receptacle for odd knowledge and strange fancies, and a means of embodying a great deal—both of serious and playful matter—for which a fitting place could not easily be found in other works” (6: 225–6).

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 189

8/22/2011 6:32:13 PM

190

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

Colloquies was a different matter. Isaac D’Israeli (father of the future leader of the Tory party) wrote to Southey soon after first publication, as Southey records in a letter to Murray: “D’Israeli has written to congratulate me on having produced Colloquies, which he is pleased to call the most important work of modern times” (NL 2: 338). Murray published a second edition in 1831. The link with the Disraeli family is important, because of Benjamin Disraeli’s patronage of the Young England movement, whose young Tory politicians would acknowledge a debt to Southey’s ideas. But first Southey suffered a famously scathing attack from the 30-year-old Macaulay in the pages of the Whig Edinburgh Review. Macaulay summarily dismissed Southey as excelling the rest of humankind in “the faculty of believing without a reason, and the faculty of hating without a provocation” (ER 50: 528). Of Southey’s prose writings, Macaulay considered that “the Life of Nelson is beyond all doubt the most perfect and delightful of his works,” while the biography of Wesley “will probably live.” But the reviewer decides that “the History of the Peninsular War is already dead— indeed, the second volume was dead-born.” And, although the Book of the Church contains “some stories very prettily told,” the rest is “mere rubbish” (ER 530–1). The Edinburgh Review attacks Southey on two fronts in its review: his nostalgia for a preindustrial age, and his insistence that Anglicanism (as the established religion of the state) must be the basis of English government and society. The conversations between Southey (as Montesinos) and Sir Thomas More, “or rather between two Southeys,” are described as “equally eloquent, equally unreasonable, and equally given to talking about what they do not understand” (ER 536). Southey’s complaints about living and working conditions in industrial cities are caricatured. He is accused of thinking that “the extermination of the whole manufacturing population would be a blessing, if the evil could be removed in no other way” (538). And Southey’s principles of government are ridiculed as “rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steamengines and independence” (540). Macaulay cannot agree that life was better for Englishmen and their families in More’s time, when the northern counties were “constantly the scene of robberies, rape, massacres and conflagrations,” or when “seventy-two thousand persons suffered death by the hands of the executioner during the reign of Henry the Eighth.” And there is no denying Macaulay’s claim that “ the advice which the poor labourer can now obtain, in disease or after an accident, is far superior to what Henry the Eighth could have commanded” (ER 558–9). Yet, if we accept Southey’s explanation

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 190

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

191

in a letter to Grosvenor Bedford in November 1817, his intention in Colloquies was “to show that we are rapidly approaching a crisis in society (if, indeed, we have not actually reached it), as critical as that which the restoration of letters and the discovery of printing brought with them in the days of Sir Thomas More” (SL 3: 82). Macaulay is partly accurate in his predictions of life in England in the 1930s, a hundred years on, when “a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our times, will cover these islands,” when “ machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house,” when there will be “no highways but railroads, no travelling but by steam” (ER 563). Less than ten years later, Southey himself marveled, in a letter to Rickman in April 1838, at having accomplished the 78-mile rail journey from Birmingham to Warrington in four hours, including “stopping at the different stations” (NL 2: 478). But Macaulay’s luckily unfulfilled vision that “cultivation, rich as that of a flower-garden will be carried up to the very tops of Ben Nevis and Helvellyn” (ER 50: 563), is almost as romantic as Southey’s vision of early Tudor England. It is easy, from a modern standpoint, to see Macaulay’s as the voice of the future. Philip O’Connell dismisses Colloquies as “a portentous reactionary analysis of British society” and a “naively impressionistic view of British social conditions” (O’Connell 3–5). Chapter 5 of O’Connell’s Romanticism, economics and the question of “culture” (“Robert Southey and the Infection of Commerce”) published in 2001, is nevertheless required reading. But the Southey-Macaulay contest over what Esther Wohlgemut calls “picturesque history,” is not so easily settled in the Whig historian’s favor as Macaulay rather arrogantly assumes. The Edinburgh Review’s notice of Colloquies is at its most bruising in its censure of Southey’s championship of the Established Church as the government’s agent of education and moral instruction. Macaulay mocks More’s claim that “nothing is more certain, than that religion is the basis on which civil government rests,” and that it is “the first and plainest rule of sound policy, that people be trained up in the way they should go” (ER 50: 547). Macaulay asks whether there is “any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead people in the right way, than the people to fall into the right way themselves.” Where Southey complains that public opinion is usurping the function of government, Macaulay responds: “What are laws, but expression of the opinion of some class which has power over the rest of the community?” Laissez-faire principles should apply in religion as in economics: “The question is not between human opinion, and some higher and more certain mode of arriving at truth,

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 191

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

192

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

but between opinion and opinion—between the opinion of one man and another, or of one class and another, or of one generation and another.” To say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best—which sounds like Coleridge’s idea of a clerisy— leaves open the question of “whose opinion it is to decide who are the wisest and best” (ER 50: 547–9). Macaulay asks what kind of Anglican Church Southey would like to see: Let us take that form of religion, which he holds to be the purest, the system of the Arminian part of the Church of England. Let us take the form of government which he most admires and regrets, the government of England in the reign of Charles the First. Would he wish to see a closer connexion between church and state than then existed? Would he wish for more powerful ecclesiastical tribunals? For a more zealous king? For a more active primate? Would he wish to see a more complete monopoly of public instruction given to the Established Church? Could any government do more to train the people in the way in which he would have them go? (ER 50: 551)

Macaulay the historian reminds his readers: that the experiment of training the people in the established forms of religion has been twice tried in England on a large scale: “once by Charles and Laud, and once by the Puritans.” He claims that “the High Tories of our time still entertain many of the feelings and opinions of Charles and Laud, though in a mitigated form; nor is it difficult to see that the heirs of the Puritans are still amongst us” (ER 50: 553). Southey is accused of inconsistency in requiring the government to act against the spread of atheism, while attempting to deny Catholics seats in Parliament on the grounds that “those who formerly held the same opinion were guilty of persecution” (554). Macaulay considers that the real security of Christianity lies “in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, and in the consolation which it bears in the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave” (ER 50: 555). According to the reviewer, those who want the church to be supported by the power of the state are as guilty as those in Roman times who mocked the kingship of Christ: “They bow the knee, and spit upon her; they cry Hail! and smite her on the cheek; they put a sceptre into her hand, but it is a fragile reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the wounds which their own hands have inflicted on her; and inscribe

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 192

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

193

magnificent titles over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and pain” (555). It is a magnificent rhetorical image, but Macaulay’s confident conviction that truth will emerge from the conflict of opinion, as “its sublime theology confounded the Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason with reason” (555), may seem as utopian to the fanatic-ridden twenty-first century as it did to Southey and Coleridge in 1830. Colloquies received kinder treatment in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as Southey acknowledged. The review (BEM 26: 611–30) quoted long extracts from Southey’s text and endorsed his view of the role of the Established Church: “The state which neglects to provide for the public worship of God, and the religious education of its people, abandons its most important duty.” Should it be left to public opinion to decide which form of Christianity suits the nation best? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s answer is emphatic: “On this subject the business of Government should be not to gratify a popular appetite, but to promote a moral end” (BEM 626). And Fraser’s Magazine challenged Macaulay’s views even more robustly, attributing them to the arrogance of youth (Craig 2006: 113–14). Meanwhile, connections between Southey and the D’Israeli/Disraeli family went well beyond a congratulatory letter. W. A. Speck has recently traced the links in “Robert Southey, Benjamin Disraeli and Young England” (Speck 2010). Isaac D’Israeli, described by Southey in 1822 as “a man I generally dine with when I visit London,” invited him to Bradenham, the family home, in 1836. The invitation does not seem to have been taken up, as Benjamin Disraeli concluded his letter of July 1838, recommending George Smythe to Southey’s notice, with the hope that Bradenham “may yet be honored by the presence of one whom we all revere.” Disraeli described Smythe as “one of the most promising of our rising generation on whose good principles so much depends” (Speck 2010: 199–200). Smythe would become a leading member of the Young England movement— the somewhat pretentious name for a small group of young aristocrats who sat as backbench MPs in Peel’s second ministry (1841–6). They opposed what they saw as Peel’s favoring of the manufacturing interest at the expense of the traditional landed interest, which was now so reliant on the protection of the Corn Laws. Peel was himself the son of a manufacturer— albeit an enlightened one. The best-known member of the Young England group in Parliament was Lord John Manners, who admitted that the party was not based on any particular principles, but was a “hotchpotch” (Whibley 1:

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 193

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

194

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

145). He has achieved mild notoriety through the oft-quoted couplet from his England’s Trust : “Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die / But leave us all our old nobility.” Less dramatically, if unhistorically, Manners pictures medieval England in the age of chivalry as a land where Each knew his place— king, peasant, peer or priest— The greatest owned connection with the least: From rank to rank the generous feeling ran, And linked society as man to man. (Braun 79)

It somehow seems in keeping with Young England’s romantically nostalgic ideals that George Smythe should earn the distinction of fighting Colonel Frederick Romilly in what was allegedly the last duel to be fought in England. The third member of the trio of Old Etonians was Alexander Cochrane-Baillie, grandson of Admiral Lord Cochrane and himself destined to become a baron, who spent a total of 30 (though not continuous) years in the House of Commons. In 1830 Manners and Cochrane-Baillie were 14 years old, while Smythe was not even in his teens, but in the 1840s they were taken up by Disraeli, and were written into Coningsby (1844), with Smythe in the title role. Sybil, or the Two Nations, which followed in 1845, contains in its title the term that would come to describe the social divide of Victorian England. Disraeli’s notes, cited by Braun in his assessment of the novels, confirm the belief that the imperfectly educated English gentry are prevented from making a useful contribution to society “by their obvious unacquaintance with the wants, feelings and difficulties of the working classes” (Braun 86). Disraeli’s own knowledge of the working classes, like Southey’s evidence of conditions among Ireland’s rural poor, was derived from the reports of government commissions; but for both men the concern seems to have been genuine. Disraeli was 12 years older than the oldest Young Englander, and 30 years younger than Southey. Disraeli and his three protégés shared Southey’s nostalgia for the England of pre-Reformation days before (as he and they imagined) the birth of commercialism, with greed and all the degradation of human relationships that went with it. Manners and Smythe were invited to Keswick in 1838, by the Rev. Frederick Faber, and Smythe is credited with claiming Southey as “a founder of Young England” (Whibley 1: 260). Speck emphasizes that the remark is not documented, though he cites other evidence that Smythe approved Southey’s ideas (Speck 2010: 199). The connection

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 194

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

195

between Southey and Young England is not straightforward. Southey might, in a letter to Grosvenor Bedford in February 1829, dismiss Robert Peel as a man in whom “there was more Peel than Pith” (SL 4: 130). But it was Peel (during his first premiership of only 100 days) who wrote to Southey in 1835 offering the hope of a baronetcy. An accompanying private letter asked whether there was any way of “marking my gratitude as a public man for the eminent services you have rendered, not only to literature, but to the higher interests of virtue and religion.” Southey declined the baronetcy, but gratefully accepted an additional pension (L&C 6: 253–60). Lord John Manners might quote with approval from the Book of the Church, and use a quotation from Colloquies as an epigraph for his own pamphlet The Monastic and Manufacturing Systems, published in 1843—the year of Southey’s death. Disraeli might include references to the poet laureate in his first two novels, moving from “the most philosophical of bigots” in Vivian Grey (1826) to “that virtuous man whom Wisdom calls her own” in the Young Duke (1831). Southey might write a Gothic novel while still a schoolboy at Westminster, and set most of his epic poems in medieval times (Speck 2010: 195–98). But he did not share Young England’s nostalgia for the pre-Reformation Church. The vision of England shared by both Southey and Coleridge, and latterly by Wordsworth too, was one in which the Anglican Church was confirmed as the embodiment of national identity—Englishness made visible and corporate. Strangely, it was Wordsworth (so often portrayed as a devotee of the religion of Nature) who was the first of the three poets to mount a defense of the Established Church. Published in 1822, two years before Southey’s Book of the Church, what became Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets in the 1837 edition, eventually numbered 102 poems, divided into three sections, of which the last was “From the Restoration to the Present Times.” The sonnets had little to do with theology. In a recent biography, Wordsworth: A Life, Juliet Barker describes them as “a celebration of the Church of England as a unifying force for moral good and its clergymen . . . as a civilizing and elevating influence, particularly in rural communities” (Barker 545). Wordsworth recognized that the sonnets demanded a readership “pretty well acquainted with the history of this country” (Later Letters 1: 119). He explains that Ecclesiastical Sketches, as they appeared in the 1827 edition of his poetical works, were prompted by debates on the Catholic Question in Parliament. That Southey was simultaneously working on a prose history of the church in England seems to have been purely accidental. Wordsworth records: “When this work

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 195

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

196

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

was far advanced, I was agreeably surprised to find that my friend, Mr Southey, had been engaged with similar views in writing a concise History of the Church in England” (Poetical Works 2: 528). On the perhaps doubtful testimony of Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth as early as 1812 defended the Church of England to the point of saying that “he would shed his blood for it” (Robinson 1: 389). If Wordsworth ever made the remark, he must have known that he was unlikely to suffer martyrdom for the Church of England. Barker thinks the Ecclesiastical Sonnets are missing “not so much engagement with the subject as William’s emotional presence” (Barker 545). David Edwards, in Christian England, cites Wordsworth’s Christian belief as holding that “religion, true or false, is and ever has been the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves” (Edwards 152). The titles given to sonnets appearing in the 1827 edition—“Papal Abuses,” “Transubstantiation,” “Waldenses,” “Wycliffe,” “Monastic Voluptuousness,” “Saints,” “the Virgin,” “Cranmer,” and “Gunpowder Plot”— do mirror Southey’s concerns quite uncannily. In 1822, while Southey was promising Blanco White “an epitome of our religious history, written for the purpose of making the rising generation feel and understand what they owe to the Church of England” (Thom 1: 380–1), Coleridge had secured Murray’s agreement to a book of his own. His proposal was for “an interesting POCKET VOLUME” comprising a selection of “the beauties of Archbishop Leighton,” late-seventeenth-century divine of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Southey’s Book of the Church was published first, in early 1824, while Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection appeared the next year, in 1825. In his preface to the first edition, Coleridge defines, as Christian faith, that which includes “every article of belief and doctrine professed by the first [Protestant] Reformers in common.” And in his comments on Aphorism XIII, he declares: “My fixed Principle is: that a CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT A CHURCH EXERCISING SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY IS VANITY AND DELUSION.” He believes that “when Popery is rushing in on us like an inundation,” the nation will find that it needs the national church. He adds: “I say Popery : for this too I hold for a delusion, that Romanism or Roman Catholicism is separable from Popery. Almost as readily could I suppose a Circle without a Centre” (Coleridge 1831: 293n). We know how loose Southey’s attachment to Anglicanism had been in December 1811, when Shelley found him still a Unitarian in theology, as he told Elizabeth Hitchener (Shelley Works 8: 223). Less than six months later, Southey himself wrote to Grosvenor

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 196

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

197

Bedford: “It would be impossible for me to subscribe to the Church Articles. Upon the mysterious points I rather withhold my assent than refuse it, not presuming to define in my own imperfect conceptions what has been left indefinite. But I am convinced that the overthrow of the Church establishment would bring the greatest calamities for us and our children” (L&C 3: 338–9). And Southey ended the Book of the Church with a paean to the Established Church: (BoC 2: 528). Coleridge, in the Constitution of the Church and State saw Church and State as “two poles of the same magnet,” and the magnet was “the Constitution of the Nation” (C&S 30). Southey wrote similarly of “the principles of our two-fold constitution” (Vindiciæ 43). Both poets saw the function of the national church as the promotion of the nation’s political, cultural, and social unity. But what kind of Anglicans were they? In 1835, Southey was recommending to Charles Wynn two alterations to the Anglican prayerbook. He wanted a second more suitably expressed marriage service, and the removal from the liturgy of the Athanasian creed: “For tho I could most conscientiously subscribe to the Article in which the doctrine of the Trinity is stated, I know that that creed does harm, and I am certain that it can do no good” (NL 2: 420). So it sounds as if Southey had abandoned his Unitarianism at last. Coleridge’s notebook records on Christmas Day 1827: “Received the Sacrament—for the first time since my first year at Jesus College.” After being (as he puts it) “33 years absent from my Master’s Table,” Coleridge decides: “The administration & Communion Service of our Church is solemn and affecting— & very far to be preferred to the Romish, which may excite awe & wonder in such as believe in the real transmutation of the Bread & Wine . . . ” (Coburn 5: 5637). Yet in a later notebook entry he asks: “Am I, or is the non-existence of Christian Community, in fault— God knows how much I feel the want of Christian fellowship! But where shall I find it? Among the Methodists?” It was not enough for him to go to a church, as if to a theatre, without getting to know his “fellow-goers” (Coburn 5: 5704). It was perhaps natural, given the times, that Coleridge and Southey should define their Anglicanism in opposition to Roman Catholicism. But their differing response to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 justifies Coleridge’s gentle poetic questioning of Southey’s brusque treatment of Butler: “What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield / Against such gentle foes to take the field?” (Poems 458). In his “Aids towards a Right Judgment on the late Catholic Bill,” appended to On the Constitution of the Church and State, Coleridge is

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 197

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

198

S ou t h e y : H i s t o r y, P o l i t i c s , R e l i g i o n

satisfied with the assurances that Catholics were required to give under oath, before taking their seats in Parliament (C&S 11). In the mid-1970s, Southey’s biographer, Kenneth Curry, wrote that “the greatest flaw in Letters from England to a reader of the present day is the excessive number of letters devoted to religious groups” (Southey 79). Introducing the one-volume 1951 edition, Jack Simmons made a similar judgment: “To a modern reader the one fault of the Letters is that they contain too much religion, so as to overweight the book” (Simmons xxi). A decade after Simmons, Geoffrey Carnall’s study of what he called “the development of a conservative mind,” carried an appendix devoted to Southey’s religious opinions from 1811 onward (Carnall 215–20). Sheridan Gilley in the mid-1970s, was already relating the Book of the Church to Southey’s sustained defense of the Anglican Church as what he saw as “the embodiment of the nation’s highest spiritual achievement, the guardian of its civilization and culture, and thereby the guarantor of its freedom” (Gilley 415–16). The question as to whether the Established Church was in a fit condition to fulfill the role that Southey envisaged, was one that divided even conservative opinion (Pocock 191). Southey was correct at least in fearing that the church establishment was being undermined. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), which Southey supported for all except Catholics, and the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) were only the beginning. In November 1833, he was still predicting, in a letter to Rev. J. Miller, that “ the Church will be assailed by popular clamour and seditious combinations; it will be attacked in Parliament by unbelievers, half-believers and mis-believers, and feebly defended by such of the Ministers as are not secretly or openly hostile to it. On our side we have God and the right” (L&C 6: 222). In 1837, church tithes were commuted to cash rents, and in 1841, John Henry Newman’s notorious Tract 90 claiming that the 39 Articles contradicted “Popish” errors, but not Catholic doctrine, opened a gulf in Anglicanism. Nor was Ireland “tranquilized” by Catholic Emancipation. In her speech from the throne at the state opening of Parliament in 1843, Queen Victoria deplored “the persevering efforts which are being made to stir up discontent and dissatisfaction among my subjects in Ireland, and to excite them to demand a Repeal of the Legislative Union” (Martin ii). The young Gladstone, in his State in its relations with the Church — which reached a fourth edition in 1841— paid tribute (1: 26) to Coleridge’s description of the Established Church as “the sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite of the world, the compensating

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 198

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

A nglic a n Englishness

199

counterforce to the inherent and inevitable defects of the State as State” (C&S 114–15). Although Southey lived until 1843, his developing dementia from 1839 onward cut him off from church politics. He also missed the outburst of anti-Catholicism provoked by Peel’s increase in the Maynooth College grant in 1845. The issue was soon displaced by the tragedy of the Irish famine and by Peel’s response to it in repealing the Corn Laws. But the “no Popery” agitation resurfaced in the unsuccessful attempt, in the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, to prevent the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England. When in 1870, the year of the definition of papal infallibility as an article of faith, Gladstone proposed the repeal of the Act, he declared that he would have kept it, if it had provided any safeguard against “the extravagant pretensions put forward by the Court of Rome” (Gladstone papers). Gladstone had already disestablished the Anglican Irish Church (1869), thus severing the ecclesiastical union, if not the political one; and in 1872 he removed the university tests, thus opening even Oxford and Cambridge to non-Anglicans. Yet in the last years of the century, a female novelist, Mrs. Humphry Ward, wrote a successful novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale, in which the lovers were kept apart by their religious faith— Catholic against Protestant (Ward 1898). More than a century later, it is the right of Anglican bishops to sit in the legislature that is now being called into question, while the terms of the monarch’s coronation oath are again under debate. It is difficult to see how “established” the Established Church can now claim to be. In November 2010, I stood on Lambeth Bridge among cheering crowds, and watched Pope Benedict XVI travel the short distance, from his conference with the archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, to address the gathering in Westminster Hall. Not even the somewhat juddering progress of the quaintly named “Popemobile” could hide the historic significance of the event. What had all the fuss been about in the 1820s? And yet .. . . The connection between religious affiliation and national identity is once again a topical issue. Not this time between Protestant and Catholic, but between Christian and Moslem. Again there is talk of an imperium in imperio. Will England have become an predominantly Moslem nation by 2050? Southey too was accused of paranoia.

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 199

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

9780230115132_11_ch10.indd 200

8/22/2011 6:32:14 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

Full bibliographical details of works cited are shown, unless the title is excessively long, in which case omissions are indicated. Place of publication is London unless otherwise shown. Where a work is cited in subsequent chapters after its initial appearance, only a short title is given—with a reference to the chapter where the work was first cited: [4]. Where only one work of an author is cited, the reference embedded in the main text is shown by author’s surname; in the case of several titles by the same author cited in the same chapter, the year of publication is also shown or an abbreviation where relevant. The year of publication is also shown when two editions are cited. For a list of abbreviations see preceding pages.

1

Rebellion and Union

Andrews, S., Irish Rebellion: Protestant polemic 1798–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan 2006. Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner. 2 vols. 4th ed. 1799, republished in facsimile, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms 1970. 1: 35–6, 69–72. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 5: 2–8, 71–5, 99–100, 132–45, 338–9; 6: 89–100, 109–18; 8: 176–9. British Critic 17: appendix 1–4; 284–90. Butler, Charles, A letter to a nobleman, on the proposed repeal of the penal laws which remain in force against the Irish Roman Catholics. Wright, Stockdale, etc. [1801]. Coleridge, S. T., Collected letters. Ed. E. L. Briggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1956. ——— Lectures 1795: On politics and religion, in CW 1. Ed. L. Patton and P. Mann. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971. ——— On the constitution of the church and state, according to the idea of each with Aids toward a right judgment on the late Catholic Bill, in CW 4. Ed. J. Colmer. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976. ——— Poems. Ed. John Beer. Everyman paperback edition 1993. The Communion and other services according to the use of the United Church of England and Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1866. Costin, W. C. and Watson, J. S., The law and working of the constitution 1660–1914 . 2 vols. A. & C. Black 1952.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 201

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

202

Wor k s C i t e d

Critical Review 36: 34–50. Fraser, Antonia, Gunpowder plot: terror and faith in 1605. Weidenfeld & Nicolson paperback edition 1997. Hague, W., Pitt the Younger. Harper Collins 2004. Hales, E. E. Y., Revolution and papacy 1769–1846. Eyre & Spottiswoode 1960. Kelly, James, Sir Richard Musgrave 1746–1818. Dublin: Four Courts Press 2009. Kenyon, Lord, Observations on the Roman Catholic question. 2nd ed. Stockdale 1810. Mc Kenna, T., Memoire on some questions respecting the project of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Dublin: Rice 1799. Mather, F. C., High Church prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline tradition in the later Georgian Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992. Milner, John, Case of conscience solved; or the Catholic claims proved to be compatible with the coronation oath . . . 2nd ed. Keating, Brown 1807. ——— Elucidation of the veto, in a threefold address to the public, the Catholics and the advocates of Catholics in Parliament. Keating, Brown 1810. ——— The history, civil and ecclesiastical, and survey of the antiquities of Winchester. 2 vols. Winchester: Robbins 1798, 1801. ——— Letters to a prebendary: being an answer to Reflections on Popery, by the Rev. John Sturges LL.D . . .. Winchester: Robbins 1800. Monthly Review 31: 361–8. [Musgrave, Richard] Concise account of the material events and atrocities which occurred in the late rebellion. Dublin: Milliken/London: Wright 1799. Musgrave, Sir Richard, Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland, from the arrival of the English . . . Dublin: Milliken/London: Stockdale 1801. ——— Observations on the reply of Doctor Caulfield, Roman Catholic Bishop, and of the Roman Catholic clergy of Wexford to the misrepresentations of Sir R. Musgrave. Dublin: Archer 1802. [———] Strictures upon an historical review of the state of Ireland, by Francis Plowden, Esq. . . . Rivington 1804. Orthodox Churchman’s Magazine: prospectus. British Critic 17 (January 1801): appendix 1–4. Pakenham, T., Year of liberty: the study of the great Irish rebellion of 1798. 2nd ed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1997. Philipps, T., History of the life of Reginald Pole. Oxford 1764. Reeves, John, Considerations on the coronation oath to maintain the Protestant reformed religion and the settlement of the Church of England . . . 2nd ed. Wright 1801. Sack, J. J., From Jacobite to Conservative: reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993. Southey, Robert, Book of the Church. 2 vols. Murray 1824.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 202

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

203

[———] Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella translated from the Spanish. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Longman 1808. ——— Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal with some account of Spanish and Portugueze poetry. Bristol: Cottle/London: Cadell and Davies 1797. ——— Life and correspondence. Ed. C. C. Southey. 6 vols. Longman 1849–50. ——— Poems 1797. Bristol: Biggs 1797. Sturges, J., Reflections on the principles and institutions of popery with reference to civil society and government . . . occasioned by the Rev. John Milner’s History of Winchester. . . 2nd ed. Winchester: Robbins/London: Cadell & Davies 1800. Whelan, K., The tree of liberty: radicalism, Catholicism, and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830. Cork: Cork University Press 1996. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical ballads. Ed. W. J. B. Owen. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1969.

2

Lisbon, Madrid, Dublin

Anti-Jacobin Review 28: 267–92; 29: 23–43, 125–38, 224–338; 31: 368–97; 32: 196–203, 445–7; 33: 325–8; 34: 279–89; 36: 34–54. British Critic 31: 168–78. Butler, C., Letter to a nobleman [1]. Coleridge, S. T., Poems [1]. Critical Review 36: 176–88. Fulford, T., “Heroic voyages and superstitious natives: Southey’s imperialist ideology.” Studies in Travel Writing (1998): 46–64. Hippisley, Sir John, Substance of additional observations intended to have been delivered in the House of Commons in the debate on the petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland . . . Faulder 1806. Locke, John, Second treatise of civil government and letter concerning toleration. Oxford: Blackwell 1948. Mather, F. C., High Church prophet [1]. Kelly, J., Musgrave [1]. Milner, John, Case of conscience solved [1]. ——— Ecclesiastical democracy detected: being a review of the controversy between the layman and the clergyman concerning the appointment of bishops. 1793. ——— Examination of the article in the Anti-Jacobin Review for November, February and March last, upon the substance of Sir John Coxe Hippisley’s Additional observations on the Catholic question. AJR 31 (December 1808): 368–97. ——— Inquiry into certain vulgar opinions concerning the Catholic inhabitants of Ireland. Dublin: Coyne and Fitzpatrick/London: Keating, Brown 1808. Mitchell, L. G., Charles James Fox. Penguin 1997. Monthly Review 47: 161–79.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 203

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

204

Wor k s C i t e d

Plymley, Peter (Rev. Sydney Smith), Letters on the subject of the Catholics to my brother Abraham who lives in the country. 7th ed. Rudd 1808. Southey, Robert, Book of the Church. Murray 1824. ——— “British monachism.” QR 22 (November 1819): 59–102. ——— Commonplace book. Ed. J. W. Warter. 4th series. Longman 1876 ed. [———] Letters from England [1]. ——— Letters written during a journey and a short residence in Spain and Portugal. 2 vols. 3rd ed. Longman 1808. ——— Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal 1797 [1]. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— Selections from the letters. Ed. J. W. Warter. 4 vols. Longman 1856. Speck, W. A. Robert Southey: entire man of letters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006.

3

Dailies, Monthlies, Quarterlies

Andrews, S., Unitarian radicalism: political rhetoric 1770 to 1814 . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006. Annual Review 3. Anti-Jacobin Review 34: 94–9, 325–9, 404–15; 36: 34–54, 166–78; 38: 1–13; 40: 337–58. British Critic 31: 168–78; 37: 280–4. Cobbett, W., Weekly Political Register 30: 226. Coleridge, S. T., Collected letters [1]. ——— Essays on his times pt 2, in CW 3. Ed. D. V. Erdman. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970. ——— The Friend, in CW 4 pt 2. Ed. B. E. Rooke. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1969. ——— Notebooks. Ed. K. Coburn. 5 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957–2002. Curry, K., Southey. Boston/London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975. ——— “Southey’s contributions to the Annual Review.” Bulletin of Bibliography 16: 2–17. Duigenan, P., Answer to the address of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan . . . to his fellow citizens of Dublin. Dublin: Milliken 1798. ——— The nature and extent of the demands of the Irish Roman Catholics fully explained: in observations and strictures on a pamphlet entitled, A history of the penal laws 2nd ed. Stockdale 1810. Edinburgh Annual Register 1810. Edinburgh Review 1: 63–93. Froude, J. A., The English in Ireland in the eighteenth century. 3 vols. Longman 1887. Fulford, T., “Catholicism and Polytheism: Britain’s Colonies and Coleridge’s Politics.” Romanticism (1999): 232–53. Hales, E. E. Y., Revolution and papacy [1].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 204

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

205

Hough, B. and Davis, H., Coleridge’s law: a study of Coleridge in Malta. Cambridge: Open Book 2010. Huntingford, G. I., Petition of the English Roman Catholics considered. Winchester: Robbins/Gloucester: Hough/London: Cadell and Davies 1810. Jupp, P., “Dr Duigenan reconsidered,” in From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century unionism. Ed. S. Wichert. Dublin 2004. Kelly, J., Sir Richard Musgrave [1]. Kenyon, Lord, Observations on the Roman Catholic question [1]. Magnuson, P., Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1998. Milner, J., Case of conscience solved [1]. ——— Elucidation of the veto [2]. ——— Enquiry into certain vulgar opinions [2]. Parnell, H., History of the penal laws against the Catholics; from the treaty of Limerick to the Union. Dublin: Fitzpatrick/London: Harding 1808. Plowden, F., Historical view of the state of Ireland, from the invasion of that country under Henry II to its union with Great Britain on the 1st of January 1801. 2 vols. [vol. 2 in in two parts]. Egerton 1803. Quarterly Review 6: 313–57. Southey, Robert. Letters from England [1]. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— “On the Catholic question,” reprinted from Edinburgh Annual Register 1810, in Essays moral and political. 2 vols. Murray 1832. 2: 279–328. ——— Sir Thomas More; or colloquies on the progress and prospects of society. 2 vols. Murray 1829. ——— “Tracts on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition.” QR 6 (December 1811): 313–57. Speck W. A., Robert Southey [2].

4

WAT TYLER and Other Ghosts

Anti-Jacobin Review 44: 58–76, 294–311, 457–66, 634–40; 45: 474–97. Barbauld, A. L., Address to the opposers of the repeal of the corporation and test acts. Johnson 1790. ——— Eighteen hundred and eleven: a poem. Johnson 1812. ——— “Memoirs of the late J. P. Estlin, LL. D,” in J. P. Estlin, Familiar lectures on moral philosophy. Longman 1818. ——— Sins of government, sins of the nation; or a discourse for the fast appointed on 19 April. Johnson 1793. Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld with an introductory “Memoir.” Ed. Lucy Aikin. 2 vols. Longman 1825. British Critic 42: 360–6; 2nd series 5: 515–19; 9: 225–45. Butler, C., Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland. Longman 1813.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 205

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

206

Wor k s C i t e d

Coleridge, S. T., Biographia literaria. Ed. J. Edgell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1983. ——— Collected letters [1]. ——— Essays on his times pt 2 [3]. ——— Lectures 1795 [1]. ——— Poetical works. Ed. J. C. C. Mays. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 2001. ——— Selected poems. Ed. G. R. Holmes. HarperCollins 1996. ——— Sibylline leaves. Rest Fenner 1817. ——— Writings on politics and society. Ed. J. Morrow. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1991. Costin and Watson [1]. Critical Review. 3rd series 22: 225–51; 4th series 4: 11–26. Eclectic Review. 1st series 6: 788–800; 2nd series 1: 606–12. Edinburgh Review 28: 488–515; 41: 125–53. Examiner. January 14, 1817. Hazlitt, W., Selected writings of William Hazlitt. Ed. D. Wu. 9 vols. Pickering and Chatto 1998. ——— New writings of William Hazlitt. Ed. D. Wu. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. 3 vols. 1850. Kelly, J., Musgrave. [1]. Kirkpatrick, R. G. Jr., “Letters of Robert Southey to Mary Barker.” PhD thesis. Harvard 1967. Macaulay, T. B., “Ranke’s History of the popes.” ER 41: 525–53. Madden, L. Ed. Robert Southey: the critical heritage. Boston/London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972. McCarthy, W., Anna Letitia Barbauld: voice of the enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2008. Merlin, J. [Milner, J.] Strictures on the poet laureate’s Book of the Church. Keating, Brown 1824. Milner, J., End of religious controversy in a friendly correspondence between a religious society of Protestants and a Catholic divine. 1st ed. incorporating “Address to the Right Reverend Lord Bishop of St David’s.” iii–xxxvi. Keating, Brown 1818; and 9th ed. including responses to the objections raised by the Rev. Richard Grier. Andrews 1841. ——— Letters to a prebendary [1]. Monthly Review 69: 337–52. Quarterly Review 7: 309–13; 16: 225–77. Ranke, L. von, Ecclesiastical and political history of the popes of Rome, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 3 vols. Murray 1840. Henry Crabb Robinson on books and their writers. Ed. E. J. Morley. 3 vols. Dent 1938. Roe, N., Fiery heart: the first life of Leigh Hunt. Pimlico 2005. Southey, Robert, The critical heritage. Ed. L. Madden. Boston/London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972. ——— History of Brazil. Vols. 1 and 2. Longman 1810, 1819.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 206

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

207

——— Letter to William Smith, Esq. MP from Robert Southey, Esq. Murray 1817. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— Life of Nelson. Abridged ed. A. & C. Black 1925. ——— New letters. Ed. K. Curry. 2 vols. New York/London: Columbia University Press 1965. [———] Wat Tyler, a dramatic poem. A new edition with a preface, suitable to present circumstances. William Hone 1817. Speck, W. A., Robert Southey [2]. The Times March 15, 1817. Watson, S., Reign of George III, 1760–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1960. Wilson, B., Laughter of triumph: William Hone and the fight for freedom of the press. Faber 2005. Wu, D., William Hazlitt: the first modern man. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008.

5

Monks, Friars, Methodists

British Critic. 2nd series 5: 515–34; 7: 500–05; 8: 296–308; 9: 225–45, 369–91; 14: 1–32, 164–85. Baker, F., “Methodism and the ’45 rebellion.” London Quarterly and Holborn Review (October 1947): 325–33. Burgess, T., Protestant’s catechism on the origin of popery, and on the grounds of the Roman Catholic claims; to which are prefixed, the opinions of Milton, Locke, Hoadley, Blackstone, and Burke . . . Rivington 1818. Byron, Lord, “The vision of judgement,” in Complete Poetical Works: Byron. Ed. J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980–93. Coleridge, S. T., Marginalia, in CW 12. Ed. G. Whalley. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980. Fosbrooke, T. D., British monachism, or manners and customs of the monks and nuns of England . . . Nichol, Bentley 1817. Grier, R., Defence of the Reply to the “End of religious controversy” being an answer to . . . Dr Milner’s vindication of the principles of popery. Cadell 1825. ——— Reply to the End of Religious Controversy: as discussed in a correspondence between a supposed society of Protestants and the Rev. John Milner. Cadell 1821. Hempton, D., Methodism and politics in British society, 1750–1850. Hutchinson 1984. Koster, H., Travels in Brazil. London 1816/Philadelphia: Carey 1817. Lecky, W. E. H., History of England in the eighteenth century. 8 vols. Longman 1878–90. Literary Gazette. March 17, 1821. Literary Chronicle and Literary Review. March 24, 1821. Madden, Critical heritage [4]. Mather, F. C., High Church prophet [1]. Milner, J., End of religious controversy [4].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 207

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

208

Wor k s C i t e d

——— Letters to a prebendary [1]. ——— Vindication of the End of religious controversy from the exceptions of . . . the Rev. R. Grier. 1822. Incorporated posthumously in End of religious controversy. 1836 ed. New Testament, first published by the English College at Rheims, in 1582 . . . approved by the Most Rev. Dr. Troy, R. C. Archbishop of Dublin. Keating, Brown 1816. Porteus, R., Brief confrontation of the errors of the Church of Rome illustrated from Bishop Secker’s five sermons against popery . . . 5th ed. Rivington 1815. Quarterly Review 16: 345–87; 22: 59–102; 33: 134–76. Southey, Robert, Book of the Church [1]. ——— “British monachism” [2]. ——— History of Brazil. Vol. 3. Longman 1823. ——— “History of the Vaudois.” QR 33 (December 1825): 134–76. ——— Letters of Robert Southey to John May 1797–1838. Ed. Charles Ramos. Austin: Pemberton Press 1976. ——— Life of Nelson [4]. ——— Life of Wesley and the rise and progress of Methodism. Longman 1820. ——— A vision of judgement. Longman 1821. Speck, W. A., Robert Southey [2]. Watson, R., Observations on Southey’s “Life of Wesley.” Being a defence of the character, labours and opinions of Mr. Wesley, against the misrepresentations of that publication (1820). Extracts in Madden [4] 273–8. Woodward, E. L., Age of reform: 1815–1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1946. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: the later years. Ed. E. de Selincourt. Revised A. G. Hick. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978–88.

6

Southey and “smooth Butler”

British Critic 7: 427–31; 21: 449–63; 23: 174–205. Butler, C., Book of the Roman Catholic Church: in a series of letters addressed to Robert Southey, Esq. on the Book of the Church. 2nd ed. Murray 1825. ——— Historical memoirs respecting the English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics, from the Reformation, to the present time. 4 vols. 3rd ed. Murray 1819. ——— Memoir of the Church of France in the reigns of Louis XIV, XV, XVI, and the French Revolution. Clarke 1817. Carnall, G., Robert Southey and his age: the development of a conservative mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1960. Coleridge, S. T., Poems [1]. Costin and Watson [1]. Examiner. October 17, 1824. Fuller, T. Church history of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year MDCXLVIII [1648]. Williams 1655. Gardiner, S. R., Constitutional documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625– 1660. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1906. Milner, J., Letters to a prebendary [1].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 208

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

209

Prothero, G. W., Select statutes and other constitutional documents of the Reign of James I. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1913. Southey, Robert, Book of the Church. [1]. ——— Letters from Spain and Portugal 1808 [2]. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— Life of Wesley [5]. Tanner, J. R., Constitutional documents of the reign of James I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1952. Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White written by himself; with portions of his correspondence. Ed. J. H. Thom. 3 vols. 1845.

7

Milner as Merlin

Acton, Lord, Lectures on modern history. Macmillan 1950. Andrews, W. E., Critical and historical review of Fox ’s Book of martyrs: showing the inaccuracies, falsehoods and misrepresentations in that work of deception. 3 vols. Andrews 1824–6. Anti-Jacobin Review 32: 445–7. Blomfield, C. J. (bishop of Chester), Letter to Charles Butler Esq. of Lincoln’s Inn, in vindication of English protestants from his attack upon their sincerity in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church. Mawman, Rivington 1825. British Critic 21: 440–63; 23: 174–205. Burl, Aubrey, God ’s heretics: the Albigensian crusade. Stroud 2002. Butler, C., Book of the Roman Catholic Church [6]. ——— Historical memoirs [6]. ——— Letter to the Right Reverend C. J. Blomfield, D. D., bishop of Chester from Charles Butler, Esq., in vindication of a passage in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church censured in a letter addressed to him by his lordship. Murray 1825. Cobbett, W., History of the Protestant “reformation,” in England and Ireland: showing how that event has impoverished and degraded the main body of the people of those countries . . .Clement 1824–6. Coleridge, S. T., Poems [1]. Edinburgh Review 43: 125–63. Gilley, S., “Nationality and liberty, Protestant and Catholic: Robert Southey’s Book of the Church,” in Studies in church history. Ed. S. Mews. Vol.18. 1982. 409–32. Haile, M. and Bonney, E., Life and letters of John Lingard 1771. 1912. Lingard, J., History of England from the first invasion by the Romans to the revolution in 1688. 8 vols. Mawman 1819–30. Merlin, J. [Milner, J.], Strictures on the poet laureate’s Book of the Church [4]. Milner, J., End of religious controversy [4]. Milton, J., Poetical works of John Milton. Ed. H. C. Beeching. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1930. Pemberton, W. Baring, William Cobbett. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1949. Quarterly Review 33: 134–76.

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 209

8/22/2011 8:32:23 PM

210

Wor k s C i t e d

Reports and evidence upon the state of Ireland ordered to be printed by the House of Lords and the House of Commons, session 1824 –1825. Ruskin, J., Pr æterita. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paperback ed. 1978. Sack, J. J., From Jacobite to Conservative [1]. Southey, Robert, Book of the Church [1]. ——— Letters to John May. Ed. Ramos [5]. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ: Letters to Charles Butler, Esq., comprising essays on the Romish Church and vindicating the Book of the Church. Murray 1826. Speck, W. A., Robert Southey [2]. Thom, J. H., Life of Blanco White [6]. White, J. Blanco, Practical and internal evidence against Catholicism, with occasional strictures on Mr Butler ’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church; in six letters addressed to the impartial among the Roman Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland . . . Murray 1825.

8

Southey Defended

British Critic 21: 449–63; 23: 174–205, 643–8; 4th series. 2: 188–201. Burl, Aubrey, God ’s heretics [7]. Butler, C., Book of the Roman Catholic Church [6]. ——— Historical memoirs [6]. ——— Vindication of the Book of the Roman Catholic Church against the Rev. George Townsend ’s “Accusations of history against the Church of Rome with notice of some charges brought against the Book of the Roman Catholic Church in the publications of Dr Phillpotts . . . and the Rev. Joseph Blanco White . . . Murray 1826. Coleridge, S. T., Collected letters [1]. ——— Essays on his times, in CW 3 pt 2 [3]. ——— On the constitution of the church and state [1]. ——— Poems [1]. Edinburgh Review 27: 163–80; 43: 125–63 Fraser, Antonia, Gunpowder plot [1]. Milner, J., Supplement to the pastoral letter, addressed by the Right Rev. J. Milner . . . to the Roman Catholic clergy of his district. Dublin: Coyne 1809. Phillpotts, H., Letters to Charles Butler on the theological parts of his Book of the Roman Catholic Church with remarks on certain words of Dr Milner, Dr Lingard, and on some part of the evidence of Dr Doyle before the two committees of the Houses of Parliament. Murray 1826. Quarterly Review 22: 58–102; 33: 1–37, 134–76. Rowse, A. L., England of Elizabeth: the structure of society. Macmillan 1951. Southey, Robert, “British monachism” [2]. ——— “History of the Vaudois” [5]. ——— Vindici æ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ [7]. Thom, J. H., Life of Blanco White [6].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 210

8/22/2011 8:32:24 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

211

Townsend, G., Accusations of history against the Church of Rome examined in remarks on many of the principal observations in the work of Charles Butler entitled the Book of the Roman Catholic Church. Murray and Rivington 1825. University of Rochester Rare Books Library. White, J. Blanco, Practical and internal evidence against Catholicism [7].

9

The QUARTERLY and Ireland

Andrews, W. E., Historical narrative of the horrid plot and conspiracy of Titus Oates. 1816. Antijacobin Review 27: 20–37, 121–35. Bartlett, T., The fall and rise of the Irish nation: the catholic question 1690 – 1830. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1992. Blackwood ’s Edinburgh Magazine 15: 269–95; 24: 219–25. British Critic, new series 2: 1–38; 5: 154–96. Burke, E., Works. 6 vols. 1837. Butler, C., Reply to the article in the Quarterly Review, for March 1826, on the revelations of la Soeur Nativit é. Murray 1826. Captain Rock detected; or, the origin and character of the recent disturbances; and the causes, both moral and political, of the present alarming condition of the south and west of Ireland fully considered and exposed. By a Munster farmer [Mortimer O’Sullivan?]. Cadell 1824 Field, W., Memoirs of the life, writings and opinions of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL. D; with biographical notices of many of his friends, pupils and contemporaries. 2 vols. Henry Colburn 1828. Huntingford Archive, Fellows Library, Winchester College. Longford, E., Wellington: pillar of the state. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1972. Parliamentary History 35. Parr, S. Letter to the Rev. John Milner: occasioned by some passages contained in his book, entitled the End of religious controversy. Mawman 1825. Phelan, W. and O’Sullivan, M., Digest of the evidence taken before select committees of both houses of parliament, appointed to inquire into the State of Ireland; with notes and historical explanatory. Cadell 1826. ——— Evidence of the Rev. William Phelan, B. D. before the select committee of the House of Commons, on the state of Ireland. Dublin: Milliken 1825. ——— History of the policy of the Church of Rome in Ireland, from the introduction of the English dynasty to the Great rebellion. Dublin: Milliken 1827. Plowden, F., The case stated . . . occasioned by the Act of Parliament lately passed for the relief of the English Roman Catholics. Keating 1791. Quarterly Review 33: 375–410; 38: 535–97. Shorter Cambridge Medieval History. Ed. C. W. Previté-Orton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1952. Southey, Robert, Letters to John May. Ed. Ramos [5]. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— Selections from the letters. Ed. J. W. Warter [2]. Speck, W. A., Robert Southey [2].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 211

8/22/2011 8:32:24 PM

212

Wor k s C i t e d

10

Anglican Englishness

Barker, J., Wordsworth: a life. New York/London: Viking 2000. Blackwood ’s Edinburgh Magazine. 26: 611–30. Braun, T., Disraeli the novelist. George Unwin 1991. Clark, J. C. D., English society 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the ancient regime. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000. Coleridge, S. T., Aids to reflection and the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality and religion. 1st ed. Taylor Hussey 1825. 2nd ed. Hurst, Charles 1831. ——— Collected letters [1]. ——— Notebooks[1]. Craig, D.M., “Subservient talents? Robert Southey as a public moralist” in Robert Southey and the contexts of Romanticism. Ed. Lynda Pratt. Aldershot UK/Burlington VT: Ashgate 2006. Curry, K., Southey [3]. Edwards, D. L., Christian England. Collins 1984. Edinburgh Review 50: 528–65. Firth, J. D’E., Winchester College. Winchester Publications 1949. Gilley, S. “Nationality and liberty” [7]. Gladstone papers, BM Add. MS 44249. f.152 Martin, R. Montgomery, Ireland before and after the union with Great Britain. Orr 1843. O’Connell, P., Romanticism, economics and the question of “culture.” Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, commerce and history: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985. Quarterly Review 38: 535–98. Robinson, H. Crabb, On books and their writers [4]. Shelley, P. B., Complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. R. Ingpen and W. Peck. 10 vols. 1926–30. Southey, R., Book of the Church [1]. ——— Colloquies [3]. ——— The Doctor. Vols. 1–5. Longman 1834–8. ———Letters from England. Ed. J. Simmons. Cresset Press 1951. ——— Life and correspondence [1]. ——— New Letters [4]. ——— Selections from the Letters [2]. ——— Vindiciæ[7]. Southey archive: Bristol Reference Library. Speck, W. A., Robert Southey [2]. ——— “Robert Southey, Benjamin Disraeli and Young England” in History 95 pt. 318 (2010): 194–206. Thom, J. H., Life of Blanco White [6].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 212

8/22/2011 8:32:24 PM

Wor k s C i t e d

213

Ward, Mrs. Humphry [Mary Ward], Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898). Ed. B. Worthington. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1983. Whibley, C., Lord John Manners and his friends. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood 1925. Wohlegemut, E., “Southey, Macaulay and the idea of picturesque history.” érudit nos. 32–33. Wordsworth, W., Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth [5]. ——— Poetical works: a reprint of the 1827 edition. New York/London: Scribner/Warne [1872].

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 213

8/22/2011 8:32:24 PM

9780230115132_12_wcit.indd 214

8/22/2011 8:32:24 PM

I n de x

Published works (with abbreviated title and date of publication) appear under author’s name. Titles of newspapers, periodicals and anonymous works appear in alphabetical order of first significant word. Where the page reference is in square brackets, the title or author does not appear in the text but is nevertheless identifiable. Abyssinian Christians, 106 Act of Union (Irish), xii, 2, 4, 9, 164, 199 Butler on, 156 Duigenan on, 51 in Letters from England, 23 Pitt and, 51 Reeves and Milner on, 9 threats to repeal of, [36], 54, 166, 199 Act of Union (Scottish), 9, 29 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg (1st baron), 134 Addington, Henry, later Lord Sidmouth (1st viscount), 24, 27 Adrian IV, pope, 174 Adrian VI, pope, 16 Agincourt, 53 Aikin, Arthur, 39, 41 Albigenses Butler and, vi, 115, 152–4 Coleridge on, vi, 56, 89 Dominicans and, 15, 56, [89], 103, 123–4 Inquisition and, 15, 103 Lateran Council (1215) and, 18–19, 88–9, 140, 151 and Manicheism, 88, 103, 123, 153

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 215

Milner on, 15, 37, 70, 78, 86, 88–9, 123 Musgrave and, 19, 37 and Protestantism, 89 Southey on, vi, x, 75, 56, 89, 103, 123, 124 and Waldenses, 123 Albuera, (Spain), 38 Aldea Galega, (Portugal), 31 Aliens Act (1781), 26 American War of Independence, 168 Amiens, peace treaty of, 22, 23 Anabaptists, 78, 117 Andrews, William Eusebius Critical and historical review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1824–6), 173 Narrative of the horrid plot and conspiracy of Titus Oates (1816), 173 Anglican church, xi, 2 and apostolic succession, 87 its articles of faith, xii, [113], 186, 196–7 and Athanasian creed, 146–7, 197 based on Scripture and the first four Councils, 13–14 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and, 193

8/22/2011 6:32:23 PM

216

Index

Anglican church—Continued Book of Common Prayer, 17, 109, 156, 197 British Critic and, 80, 137–8 British monarch as supreme governor of, 87 Calvinism and, 84 Catholic Emancipation Bill and bishops of, 181 Charles I and the “middle way” of, 109–10 its claim to be catholic, 147 its clergy, 24, 25, 187 Coleridge and, 2, 111, 182, 195, 197, 198 condition of (in 1820s), 198 Howley, bishop of London/ archbishop of Canterbury, 112, 181 Huntingford, bishop of Gloucester and warden of Winchester College on, 53–4 and Ireland, 172, 176 Jacobin threat to, 8, 63, 157–8 James II and, 111 Kenyon on, 52–3 and the litany, 117, 156 its liturgy, 109, 197 Macaulay and, 192–3 Methodism and, 5, 126, 163 and nationhood, 111, 195, 197, 198 and Orthodox Churchman Magazine, 5 and Oxford Movement, 198 and Pitt, 6 Quarterly Review and, 137 and the Reformation, 87, 101, 147 sacraments of, 2, 28, 197 Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, 111 security from catholics for, 52, 53–4, 62–3, 178

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 216

Southey and, xii, 2, 25, 42, 47, 111, 172 Book of the Church and, 57, 101–2, 131, 138, 196, 197, 198 on Charles I’s “wisely tolerant” policy, 109–10 Colloquies and, 188 suppression of its liturgy, 109 Test Acts/Acts of Uniformity, 5, 110, 119, 126, 169–70 repeal of, 181 Wordsworth and, 195–6 Anglo-Saxon church, 11, 102, 114, 120, 134 Anne, queen of England, 9 Annual Register, 48 Annual Review, 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 55, 73 Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner Canning and, 160 on Southey’s poems, 3, 47 Anti-jacobin Review and Magazine, 1, 3, 128, 162 and Butler, 63–4 and catholic committee (Dublin), 54 on Grattan, 48, 62 and Hippisley, 35–7 on Irish history, 36; and “Irish Papists,” 48 on Jacobinism, 4, 7, 63 on Jesuits, 65 and Kenyon, 54 and Lateran Council (1215), 63, 132 on Letters from England, 26 on Milner, 36, 63, 81, 168 and “Billingsgate eloquence,” 37–8 and Monthly Magazine, 4, 39 on Monthly Review, 5 and Musgrave, 20, 38, 63 on oath of allegiance, 63 and papal deposing power, 63 and Portland ministry, 38

8/22/2011 6:32:23 PM

Index on Quarterly Review, 48 on Unitarian threat, 4–5 on William III’s statute against catholic clergy, 65 Antony, St., 85 Antrim, county, 18 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 13, 123 Arianism, 5, 84 Armada, of Spain, 16 Armagh, 51 Arminianism, 95, 192 Arrabida, convent of (Portugal), 33 Asia, 41 Astorga (Spain), 30 Asuncion (Paraguay), 69 Athanasian creed, 197 Athenæum, 44 Augustine, St., archbishop of Canterbury, 102 Augustine, St., of Hippo, 103 Babylon, 25, 30, 104, 120 Baddeley, Thomas (catholic priest), 173 Baines, Peter Augustine, catholic bishop of Siga, 138 Ball, Sir Alexander, (High Commissioner, Malta), 45–6 Ball, John, 74–5 Ballantyne, James and John (publishers), 43, 48, 64–5 Bank of England, 60 Baptist Missionary Society, 40, 47 Barbauld, Anna Lætitia (née Aikin) Address on the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), 59–60 “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” 59–61 and John Prior Estlin, 59 predicts America’s future greatness, 61 Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), 60 Barker, Mary, 65 Bathurst, Dr Henry, bishop of Norwich, 48

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 217

217

Becket, St. Thomas, [27], 106, 107, 122, 136, 152 Bede, The Venerable, 135 Bedford, Grosvenor, 28, 40–1, 42, 47, 61, 72–3, 188, 190–1, 194–5, 196–7 Bell, Andrew, 55 Belsham, Thomas, Unitarian minister, 4 Benedict XVI, pope, 199 Benedict, St., rule of, 90–1 Benedictines, 25, 30, 42, 56, 67, 90–1 Ben Nevis, 191 Bernard, St., 85, 123 Berry, Duchess of, 177 Berthier, General, 1 Beza, Theodore, and the Eucharist, 83 “Billingsgate humour,” 37–8, 128, 129 Birmingham, 22 Blackstone, Sir William, 8 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 142 and Catholic Emancipation, 179 on Clare election, 166–7 on Colloquies, 193 Blomfield, Charles, bishop of Chester/London, [129], 181 Blundell, Charles, 113, 142 Boethius, Anicus Manlius Severinus (c. 480–524), 184 Boleyn, Anne, 27 Bonaparte, Joseph, 29 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 28, 29, 41, 43, 60, 61 and catholicism in Spain, 38 Coleridge on, 45 concordat with Papacy, 48, 51–2, 175 exiled to Elba, 175 Hazlitt and, 77 imprisons Pius VI, 1, 4, 172 Sister Nativity and, 161–2 Southey on, 45, 97 and toleration, 29

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

218

Index

Bonaventura, St., 85 Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London, 89, 128 Book of Common Prayer, 17, 109, 156, 197 Bossuet, cardinal, History of the Protestant Churches (1688), 116, 132 Botany Bay, 3 Bowyer, James, headmaster of Christ’s Hospital, 189 Braybrook/Braybrooke House, 92 Brazil Jesuits in, 66–7, 69–70, 93–4, 176 Southey on, 66–71 Bridget, St., 33 Bristol, ix, 2, 3 British Critic on bishop Baines, 138 on British constitution, x, 26, 80 on Butler, 129 his Book of the Roman Catholic Church, 112–13, 114, 121, 142, 152 on Catholic Church, 141 on Catholic Emancipation, 80–1, 112–13, 179 and Cobbett, 138 on coronation oath, 9 on events of 1827, 160 on French Revolution, 64 on “frenzy of triumphant Puritanism,” 138 on Grattan’s Catholic Relief Bill (1813), 62–3 on Inquisition, 55 on Ireland, 165, 179 on Lingard, 129–30, 138, 152 on Milner, 26, 121, 138 on Musgrave, 20 and Orthodox Churchman, 5, 6 on Phillpotts, 141 on Southey his Book of the Church, 105–6, 107, 108, 114–15, 122, 137–8, 152

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 218

as an historian, 97, 105 his History of Brazil, 70–1 his Letters from England, 22, 26 his Life of Nelson, 64 his Life of Wesley, 96–7 on Townsend, 141 on Vindiciæ, 141 on Wellington, duke of, 179 on White, Joseph Blanco, 141 British Review, 142 Brown, John, (Milner’s supposed correspondent), 87 Brunswick, house of, 97 Burdettites, 61 Burgess, Thomas, bishop of St David’s, 80 his Protestant Catechism, 81–2 Burke, Edmund founds Annual Register, 48 speech on Test Acts, 170 Busby, Dr Richard, headmaster of Westminster School, 189 Butler, Charles on Albigenses, Hussites, Waldenses, 115, 153 Anglican oaths of allegiance/ supremacy, 144 and the Anglo-Saxons, 135 British Critic on, 112–13, 114, 121, 129, 142, 152 on the Catholic Church, see below on catholic loyalty, 63–4, 158 on catholics in Irish Parliament, 9, 29 on coronation oath, 9, 109, 117 on French nuns at the guillotine, 154 and French refugees, 154 and Great Fire of London (1666), 113 on the Gunpowder Plot, 118, 158 and Irish Union, 118 on language of controversy, 113, 119–20

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

Index on Lollards (and Wycliffe), 115, 154 and Manicheism, 153 on oath of allegiance, 63, 144 on penal laws against catholics, 118–19, 157–8 see also individuals; works Catholic Church and confessional, see penance deposing power, 16, 37, 63, 115, 118, 132, 143–4, 159 exclusive salvation, doctrine of, 146 excommunication of kings, 115 Inquisition, 115, 124, 145–6 Jesuits, 159 Lateran Council (1215), 151–2, 158–9 Marian persecution, 117 miracles, 135 papal authority, 63, 115, 118, 143, 144 penance, sacrament of, 148 persecution by catholics, 124, 125, 144, 151, 157 persecution by protestants, 151, 157–8 prayers for the dead, 148 Protestant Reformation, 117, 156 transalpine and cisalpine catholics, 115, 118 transubstantiation, 116, 144 universality of, 114, 134, 149 individuals and Bossuet, cited by, 116, 132 Calvin, 148 Charles I, 118 Charles II, 118–19 Coleridge on, vi–vii, 56, 120, 197 Cromwell, Thomas, 117 Dominic, St., 116 Edward VI, 117 Elizabeth I, 117–18

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 219

219

Foxe/Fox, John, Book of Martyrs, 110 Garnett (convicted Jesuit), 159 Henry VIII, 117 James II, 119 Lingard, 129, 152, 159 Mary I, 118 Milner, 114, 118, 149, 150 Musgrave on, 19 Oates, Titus, 110, 113 Phillpotts, 146–51 Pius IV, 113–14 Sister Nativity, 164 Southey and his Book of the Church, x, 113–21, 132–3, 147, 149–50, 156–7 Townsend, 150, 151–60 White, Joseph Blanco, 55, 127, 141, 143–6 Wycliffe/Wycliff, 115, 153 works Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland (1813), 63, 65 Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825), 110, 113–20, 137–8, 143–4, 145–53, 156–60, 181 Historical Memoirs (1819), 115, 119, 145–6, 152, 154, 157, 158 Letter to a Nobleman (1801), 9, 10, 19, 29 Letter to Blomfield (1825), 129 Memoir of the Church of France (1817), 112 Philological and Biographical Works (1817), 112 Vindication of the “Book of the Roman Catholic Church” (1826), 141–2, 146–59 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, The Vision of Judgment (1822), 98

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

220

Index

California, 43 Calvin, Jean and Calvinism, 46 Butler and, 148 doctrine of predestination, 84, 95, 107 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 148 and Methodism, 95 Southey on, 107 Cambridge, university of, 42, 186 Campbell, William, poet, 65 Canning, George British Critic on, 80 and Catholic Emancipation, 49, 160 and catholic relief petitions/bills, 62, 80 as prime minister, 160 Cape Clear, 186 Carmelites, 67, 133, 176 Carrickfergus, 186 Carte, Thomas [History of England, 4 vols. (1747–53)], 129 Carthage, council of, (397), 83 Carthusians, 133 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart (viscount), 6, 23, 29 Catholic Association, 128, 168–9 Catholic Church, as an institution and articles of faith, 87, 114, 147 as Babylon, 25, 30, 104, 120 and Book of the Church (1824), see Southey, Robert and Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825), see Butler, Charles British Critic and attacks on, 141 cisalpine wing of, 115, 118 clergy of, 14, 24, 25, 43, 49, 93, 103, 104, 117, 144, 153, 173, 176 corruption alleged, 102, 132, 161, 184 danger to Protestant states undiminished, 5

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 220

Dominicans and, 15, 56, 90–1, 103, 105, 124, 189 in France, 1, 25, 49, 51–2, 149–50, 177, 189 idolatrous practices alleged, 30, 47, 81, 82, 132, 149 and the Inquisition, 15, 90, 103, 105, 115, 116, 124, 145, 186, 189 in Spain and Portugal, 32, 38, 56–7 in Ireland, 2, 114, 164–79, 186 Irish hierarchy of, 20, 50, 52, 62, 171, 174, 175 Macaulay imagines its survival, 60 and Manicheism, 103, 123–4, 153 papal indulgences, 87–8, 103–4, 114, 148, 149 policy of persecution, 15, 82, 88–9, 90, 124, 185–6 and Scripture, 13, 36, 80, 82–4, 102, 127, 136, 156 in Spain and Portugal, 4, 24–5, 29–34, 38, 55–7, 114, 142–3 and superstition, 26, 35, 46, 132, 135, 177 Townsend’s Accusations of History against, 142, 152–60 transalpine wing of, 7, 115, 118 unchangeability of, 85, 151, 162, 176–7, 185–6 universality of, 86, 114, 134, 147, 149 and veto on episcopal appointments, 8, 50, 52, 62–3, 81, 171 see also Papacy Catholic doctrines and practices apostolic succession, 87 asceticism, 14, 35, 103, 161–2 on assassination, 30, 47 clerical celibacy, 14, 93, 135–6, 144–5

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

Index communion in one kind, 82–3, 113–14, 148 creed of Pius IV (1564), 149 crucifixes, 24, 33, 46, 122, 177 devotional practices and books, 93, 148–9 images, 24, 46, 82, 87, 148 miracles, 30, 32, 46, 68, 85–6, 128, 129, 135, 149, 162 pagan traces, 103 papal indulgences, 87–8, 103–4, 114, 148 papal infallibility, 13–14, 36, 62, 83, 93, 108, 115, 132, 149–50, 177–8, 199 papal primacy/supremacy, 2, 13, 81, 106, 114, 122, 142, 149, 152, 156 penance, sacrament of, 14, 29, 47, 87, 93, 104, 122, 136, 148–9 prayers for the dead, 87–8, 122, 148 processions, 31, 46, 169 purgatory, 24, 30, 86, 87–8, 91, 103–4, 114, 122, 148, 149, 189 relics, 102, 122, 148, 149, 177 saints, veneration of, 30, 31, 46, 82, 85, 86, 87, 102, 122, 133, 148, 196 transubstantiation, [30], 82, 87, 104, 114, 116, 122, 144, 155, 196 Trinity, doctrine of the, 4, 85, 116, 197 Virgin Mary Immaculate Conception of, 4, 147 veneration of, 24, 31–2, 91, 102, 114, 147, 149 see also general councils; Papacy Catholic Emancipation, x, xii, 143, 167 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine on, 166–7, 179

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 221

221

British Critic on, 79–80, 112–13, 160 Burdettites and, 61 Canning and, 49, 80, 160 Castlereagh and, 23 Catholic Committee (Dublin), 54 Cornwallis and, 23 George III and, 28, [98], 165 Grattan and, 48, 49, 160 impact on Ireland, 149 Milner on, 8, 88 “no popery” election (1807), 4, 28 Orthodox Churchman and, 5, 6 Peel and, 80, 160, 167, 172, 177, 179 Perceval and, 49 Phillpotts on, 150, 181–2 Pitt and, 6, 23, 51, 164–5, 171 Southey and, 2, 23, 43, 48–50, 131, 162, 167–79, 181–3, 186, 197, 198 Townsend on, 151–2 Wellington and, 160, 166, 167, 179 Catholic Relief Acts/Bills 1791 Act (Westminster parliament), 6–7, 12, 26, 62, 81 Canning and, 62, 80 catholic petition for (1808), 48, 49 failure of motion for (1811), 59 Grattan’s 1813 Bill, 62, 80 and his 1819 Bill, 160 Irish 1793 Act (Dublin parliament), 51, 81 see also penal laws catholics in armed forces, 28 Catholic Association, 127–8, 168 and Fire of London (1666), 17–18, 113, 119–20 their freedom to publish, 27 French Revolution and, 25–6, 49, 157–8

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

222

Index

catholics—Continued Gordon riots (1780), 25 of Ireland, 36 Butler on, 9, 29 Duigenan on, 51–2 Musgrave on, 18–20 Southey on, 49–50, 164–79 and loyalty to crown, 16, 17, 117 in Malta and Sicily, 46–7 and Methodists, 97 penal laws against, 10, 12–13, 51–2, 110, 118–19, 155–8 Caulfield, Dr James, catholic bishop of Ferns (as Veritas) Vindication of the Catholic clergy of Wexford (1798), 18–19 Cecil, Sir Robert, see Salisbury, (1st earl) Chalcedon, council of (451), 14 Challoner, Dr Richard, 132 Chancellor of the Exchequer (Ireland), 21–2, 40 Charles II, king of England 1st Test Act (1673), 110 2nd Test Act (1678), 110, 119 Declaration of Breda (1660), 110, 118 Declaration of Indulgence (1672), 110 Uniformity, Act of (1662), 126 Charlevoix, Pierre, 67–8 Charterhouse, 189 Christian Observer, 142 Christ’s Hospital, 189 Church of England and Ireland (1801–69), see Anglican Church Church of Scotland, 8, 9–10, 17 cisalpine catholics, 115, 118 civil war (English) Lingard on, 130 Milner on, 17, 37 Southey on, [102], 109 Clare by-election, 166–7 Clarke, J.S., Historiographer Royal, 40

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 222

Clement VIII, pope, 30 Clement XIV, pope, 65, 150 Clootz, Anacharsis, 134 Cobbett, William and Catholic Emancipation, 137 Weekly Political Register, 54 Cochrane, Thomas, Admiral Lord (1st earl of Dun Donald), 194 Cochrane-Baillie, Alexander Dundas Ross Wishart (later 1st baron Lamington), 194 Coimbra, university of, 34 Coleridge, Henry Nelson (nephew and son-in-law), 182 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and Anglicanism, 2–3, 112, 182, 195, 197, 198 and assassinations, 47 in Bristol, 2–3 and Butler, vi–vii, 56, 120, 197 at Cambridge university, 2 on Catholic church, 2, 12, 46–7 and Catholic Committee (Dublin), 54 and Catholic Emancipation, 2, 54, 197 on celibacy of clergy, 18–19, 135, 144 at Christ’s Hospital, 189 his commonplace book, 44 on images, 46–7 on imperium in imperio, 144 on Irish peasants, 54, 71 on Irish Union, 2 on his “Jacobin” past, 71–2 in Malta, 45–7 and Methodism, 72, 95–6, 197 his notebook entries, 46–7 on penance, sacrament of, 47 on Reformation, [46], 196 in Sicily, 46, 47 and slave trade, 3 his theology, 2, 72, 197 transubstantiation, 197

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

Index individuals and Sir Alexander Ball, 45–6 the Beaumonts, 71 Bonaparte, 45 Estlin, 2, 59 Hazlitt, 71, 72 Hone, 73 letter to Lord Liverpool, 71 Luther, 46 Milner, vi, 6, 89 and Pitt, 45, 71 Southey and, vi, 2–3, 14, 21, 41, 197; as fellow poet, 65; on the Friend, 44–5; and Life of Wesley, 95–6; proposed literary collaboration, 40–1; and Wat Tyler, 73–4 Wedgwood family, 2 White, Joseph Blanco, 144 Wordsworth, 45 Wycliffe/Wycliff, 46 as journalist and catholicism, 46–7 and Courier, 46, 54, 71, 73–4 and the Friend, 44–6 and “gagging acts” (1795), 71 and Jeffrey, 44 and Morning Post, 39, 45, 71 and Stuart, 39, 44 and the Watchman, 39 works Aids to Reflection (1825), 196 Biographia Literaria (1817), 72, 73 Conciones ad Populum (1795), 72 Destiny of Nations, The (1796–7; revised 1814–16), 59 Lyrical Ballads [anonymously with Wordsworth] (1798), 1, 3 On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), xi, 12, 111, 135, 144, 182, 197

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 223

223

Sancti Dominici Pallium [1826], vi, 56, 89, 120, 124, 139, [197] Sibylline Leaves (1817), 71, 73 Coleridge, Sara (wife), 45–6 Colet, John, Dean of St Paul’s, 189 confessional, see penance, sacrament of Constance, Council of (1414), 115, 132, 152, 178 Constantinople, 25, 168, 170, 175 constitution of United Kingdom alleged catholic threats to, 1, 2, 5, 10, 88, 169, 177–8, 180 Becket and, 136 British Critic on, 26, 79–80 and Irish Act of Union, 2, 197 Phillpotts on, 182–3 and Portuguese constitution, 57 and Revolution Settlement (1688), 7, 111 Southey’s preface to Colloquies on, 183 his proposed textbook on, 57 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, (1st earl Shaftesbury), 187 corn laws, repeal of, 193 Cornwallis, Charles (1st marquis, 2nd earl), 19, 23 coronation oath, 199 British Critic on, 9 Butler on, 9, 107, 117 of Charles I, 109 of Charles II, 7 of Edward the Confessor, 117 of Elizabeth I, 117 George III and, 4, 5, 6–10, 23 Phillpotts on, 165 Reeves on, 7–10 of William III and Mary, 7–8 Correo Braziliense, 55, 57 Corry, Ian, Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, 21–2, 40, [164] Corsica, 8 Coruña, 38 Courier, 46, 54, 71, 73

8/22/2011 6:32:24 PM

224

Index

Court of High Commission, 118 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury burned at Oxford, 27, 53 Butler on, 159 his equivocation, 125, 159 his litany, 117, 156 Milner on, 15–16, 90, 125 Southey on, 109 Wordsworth on, 196 Crespo, José Maria Blanco Y, see White, Joseph Blanco Critical Review hostility to Established Church, 5 on Musgrave, 19, 36 on Southey’s Curse of Kehama, 65 on Southey’s Life of Nelson, 64 on toleration, 19 Croker, John Wilson, on Southey and Anna Lætitia Barbauld, 61 Cromwell, Oliver, 111, 124 Cromwell, Thomas, 118 crown veto on catholic ecclesiastical appointments, 50, 52, 81, 171 da Costa, Hippolyte, 55 Dalai Lama as “Pope of Tibet,” 136 Dante, 13 David, St., 82 Declaration of Breda (1660), 110, 118 Declaration of Indulgence (1672), 110 and (1687), 110 deposing power, 16, 37, 63, 115, 118, 132, 143–4 Disraeli, Benjamin (future prime minister) Coningsby (1844), 194 Southey in Vivian Grey (1826) and the Young Duke (1831), 195 Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), 194 and Young England, 190, 193

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 224

D’Israeli, Isaac, and Southey, 190, 193 Dissenters Milner on, 84 Orthodox Churchman on, 5, 6 William III’s indulgence towards, 8 see also Methodists/Methodism; Unitarians/Unitarianism Dominic, St. (Domingo de Guzman) and Dominicans, 67, 69, 85, 133 and Albigenses, 15, 56, [88–9], 103, 124 Butler and, 117, 124 canonization of, 91, 124, 190 and Franciscans, 105 and the Inquisition, 15, 56, 90, 103, 105, 116, 124, 190 in Ireland, 176 and Jesuits, 67, 69 on legends of, 105 Milner on, 15, 90, 124 and monastic orders, 91 in Quarterly Review, 56, 90–1, 131 and self-flagellation, 91, 104 Southey and, x–xi, 15, 56, 67, 69, 90–1, 104, 105, 131 and Virgin Mary, 91 Dorchester, 23 Douai, 25 Down, county, 18 Doyle, James, catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, 172, 173, 176, 185 Dublin Catholic Committee in, 54 High Court of Admiralty in, 51 Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer in, 6, 22, 40, 164 meeting of catholic bishops in, 51 Parliament in, 9, 23, 29, 51, 167 Southey in, 6, 22, 40, 46 Dubritius/Dubricius, St., 82

8/22/2011 6:32:25 PM

Index Duigenan, Dr Patrick, MP for Armagh on 1798 Irish Rebellion, 51 on crown veto, 52 his Demands of the Roman Catholics (1810), 51–2 Huntingford on, 54 and Irish Catholic Relief Act (1793), 51 Milner and, 52 Musgrave and, 52–3 on papal concordat (1802), 51–2 and penal laws, 50–1 Dunstan, St, 105–6, 114, 122, 128 Durham, university of, Southey and, xi, 187 Durham cathedral, prebendaries of, 141, 146 Ecclesiastical Titles Act (1851), 199 Eclectic Review, 64, 70 Edinburgh, 41 Edinburgh Annual Register, 48–50, 65, 178 Edinburgh Review on Albigenses, 140 Book of the Roman Catholic Church, 138–9, 142 Catholic Emancipation, 138–9, 140 Ireland, 138, 139–40 Lateran Council (1215), 139 Lord Liverpool, 139 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, on Colloquies in, 190–3 Scott, Sir Walter and, 43 Smyth, Rev. Sidney, 28–9, 139 Southey, Robert, 43, 47, 190–3 education Bell’s system, 55 catholic colleges and schools, 25, 26, 101, 178 corporal punishment and, 91, 188–9 decay of English universities, 42, 186

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 225

225

endowed grammar schools, 186 Forster’s Education Act (1870), xi Lancaster’s system, 55 national system of, 55, 57, 77, 187 Edward VI, king of England, 15, 85, 90, 117, 125 Edward the Confessor, king of England, 117 Egypt, 35 Elba, 172 Eldon, Lord, see Scott, John (1st earl) El Español, 74 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 56, 107 Butler on, 117–18 catholic loyalty to, 16 Espriella on, 27 excommunication of, 16, 37–8, 115 her “indulgence to Romanists,” 156–7 Lingard on, 130 Milner on, 15, 16, 36–7, 81, 90, 125 penal laws of, 118, 157–8 Emmet, Robert, 71 Espriella, Don Manuel Alvarez (fictitious), 22–7 Essex, county of, 78 Established Church, see Anglican church Estlin, John Prior, 59 Eton college, 189 Eucharist, 16, 29, 71, 78, 87 communion in one kind, 82–3, 113–14 Puritan refusal to kneel at, 109 European Declaration of Rights, xi Eutychians, 86, 149 Examiner on Coleridge and Wordsworth, 71 on Prince Regent, 59 on Southey, 71, 72, 75–6 Southey and, 77

8/22/2011 6:32:25 PM

226

Index

Faber, Rev. Frederick, 194 Falmouth, 22 Fawkes, Guy, 17, 108, 136, 168 see also Gunpowder Plot Finch-Hatton, George William (10th earl of Winchilsea), 167 Fleet prison, the, 74 Florence, council of (1438–58), 139, 143 Fosbrooke, Thomas, British Monachism, 90 Fougères, 86 Fox, Charles James, 27–8 Fox, Henry Richard Vassall (3rd baron Holland), 163–4 Foxe/Fox, John Acts and Monuments [Book of Martyrs], [105], [112], 173 Butler cites, 110 Milner on, 14–15, 121, 125 Southey proposes life of, 125, 155, 173 France British invasion of, 38 Catholic Church in, 1, 25, 48, 51–2, 149–50, 177, 189 Huguenots of, 174 invasion of Ireland attempted by, 2, 63–4 National Convention of, 134 Pius VI held in, 1 and Waldenses, 124 see also French Revolution Francis, St., 85 Franciscans, 69, 133 and Albigenses, [89] and Dominicans, [91], 105 in Ireland, 176 philanthropic activities of, 116 French Revolution, 8, 182 émigré clergy, 11, 26–7, 49, 154–5 English catholics and, 25, 26 and Ireland, 168 Southey on, 61, 64 and Wat Tyler, 73–4

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 226

Frere, John Hookham, 93 friars, 6, 33–4, 67, 69–70, 89, 91, 93, 111, 133, 145, 155, 176 see also Dominicans Friends of Religious Liberty (Kilkenny), 63 Fuentes d’Oñoro, 38 Fuller, Thomas, Church History of Britain (1655), 102 Gallican articles and, 149–50 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester, 15, 89 Garnett, Henry, Jesuit, 159 general councils, 70, 85, 132, 178 Antijacobin Review on, 37 Carthage (397), 83 Chalcedon (451), 14 Constance (1414), 115, 132, 152, 178 Florence (1438–58), 139, 143 Lateran (1215), 19, 63, 88, 132, 139, 150–2, 158–9, 178 Trent (1545–63), 114, 132, 152, 178 Genet, Abbé, (Sister Nativity’s confessor), 161–2 Geneva, 86 Gentleman’s Magazine, 162–3 George III, king of England, 74 his apotheosis in Southey’s Vision of Judgment, 97–8 and Catholic Emancipation, 4, 6, 9, 28, 98, 165 his catholic subjects, 2 coronation oath of, 4, 6–10, 23, 28 Grenville and, 28 Pitt’s advice to, 6 “royal fortitude” of, 6 terminal incapacity of, 55 George IV, king of England and Catholic Emancipation, 9, [99], 167 death, 188 Milner and, 125

8/22/2011 6:32:25 PM

Index as Prince Regent, 55, 59, 62 and Southey as poet laureate, 69, 74 Southey’s Vision of Judgment dedicated to, 97–8 Gibbon, Edward, historian, 137 Gifford, William, editor of Antijacobin, or Weekly Examiner and Quarterly Review, 47, 61 Gladstone, William Ewart disestablishes Anglican church in Ireland, xii, 199 his State in its relations with the church (1838), 198 Gnosticism, see Manicheism Godwin, William, 41, 48 Gordon, Lord George, 81 Gordon riots (1780), 25 Grattan, Henry, MP for Dublin Antijacobin Review on, 48, 62 Catholic petition (1808) and, 48, 49 Catholic relief bill (1813) and, 62 Catholic relief bill (1819) and, 160 and Irish tenantry, 50–1 Greece, 29 Gregory I (“the Great”), pope, 122 Gregory VII, pope (Hildebrand), 106, 135–6 Grenville, Lord, (William Wyndham, baron), 29 Catholic Emancipation and, 23, 27, 80 George III and, 27 Grey, Charles, (2nd earl), 188 Grey, Lady Jane, 125 Grier, Rev. Richard, vicar of Templeboden, Co. Cork Reply to the End of Controversy (1821), 88 Gunpowder Plot, 16–17, 19, 53, 108, 118, 158, 168, 196 see also Fawkes, Guy Guzman, Domingo de, see Dominic, St.

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 227

227

Hampton Court conference, 125–6 Hardwicke, Lord (Philip, 1st earl), 27 Harrington, James, 50 Harrowby, Lord Dudley Ryder (1st earl), 80 Harrow school, 189 Hazlitt, William on Southey’s letter to Lord Liverpool, 72 “Toad-eaters and Tyrants,” 71 on Wat Tyler, 75–6 Helvellyn, 191 Henry, Robert, History of England 6 vols. (1771–93), 129 Henry II, king of England, 27, 114–15, 152, 175 Henry IV, king of France, 108 Henry VII, king of England, 40 Henry VIII, king of England, 15–16, 27, 85, 90, 107, 125 as “Defender of the Faith,” 107 Macaulay and, 190 Milner and, 15–16, 125 Hertfordshire, 78 Hexham, as possible university, 186 Hildebrand, see Gregory VII Hill, Rev. Herbert, ix, 64 and Dr. Phelan, 165 takes Southey to Lisbon, 3 Hill, Herbert, junior, 188 Hindostan Coleridge and, 46 Southey and, 35 Hippisley, Sir John, MP Milner and, 35–7 undelivered speech of, 35–6 Hitchener, Elizabeth, 196 Hoadly, Benjamin, junior, prebendary of Winchester, 79, 80 Hoadly, Benjamin, senior, bishop of Winchester, 79, 80, 126 Holinshed’s Chronicle, 125 Holland, 19 Holland, Lord, see Fox, Henry Richard Vassall (3rd baron)

8/22/2011 6:32:25 PM

228

Index

Holy Office, see Inquisition Hone, William, editor of Reformists’ Register on Coleridge’s defence of Southey, 73 his imprisonment for sedition, 75 on Southey’s poetry, 73 Hooper, John, bishop of Gloucester (with Worcester), 15 Horsley, Samuel, bishop of St. David’s/Rochester/St. Asaph’s French émigré clergy and, 26, 79 Milner and, 7, 26, 80 House of Lords, see Parliament (Westminster) Howard, Charles (11th duke of Norfolk), 50 Howard, Henry, (1st earl Northampton, 118 Howard, Thomas, see Suffolk (1st earl) Howick, Lord, see Grey, Charles (2nd earl Grey) Howley, William, bishop of London/archbishop of Canterbury, 112, 181 Hume, David, 105 History of England, 6 vols. (1754–60), 129, 137 Hunt, Leigh at Christ’s Hospital, 189 his Examiner attacks Prince Regent, 59 and Southey, 75–6, 112 his imprisonment, 59 Huntingford, George Isaac, warden of Winchester college, bishop of Gloucester/Hereford cites Duigenan, 54 congratulates Southey on his Book of the Church, xiii–xiv, 7, 53, 182 and French refugee clergy, 26 funds anti-popery tracts, 26 and Milner, 7, 26

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 228

opposes innovation, 182 and Parr, 163 pastoral charge (1810), 53 and SPCK, 26 Huss/Hus, John, and the Hussites, 46, 76, 86, 89, 115, 154 India, 35, 41, 47, 103 see also Hindostan Inglis, Sir Robert, MP, 176–8 Innocent III, pope, 124, 126, 175 Inquisition, Holy Office of the, 186 British Critic on, 55, 56, 115 Butler on, 115, 124, 145 Milner on, 15, 125 papacy and, 137 Quarterly Review on, 32, 38, 55–7, 90, 103, 105, 124 St. Dominic and, 56, 90, 103, 105, 124, 189 in South America, 103 in Spain and Portugal, 38, 55–7 White, Joseph Blanco on, 55, 145 see also Southey, Robert, on Catholic Church as an institution Ireland Adrian IV, pope and, 175 American Revolution and, 168 Anglican ascendancy in, 18, 166–7 boroughs, disenfranchisement of, 51 Captain Rock detected, 173 catholicism in, see below chancellor of the exchequer of, 21–2, 40, 164 conversion to protestantism proposed, 179 difficulty in civilizing people of, 22 education in, 178 English oppression of peasants in, 169 forty-shilling freeholders in, 51, 166, 175, 179

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index French Revolution and, 63–4, 168 Harrington on settling Jews in, 50 irrelevance of Catholic Emancipation to, 178–9, 183, 198 Jacobinism in, 6 long-term proposals for, 178–9 Maynooth College, 132, 172, 199 O’Connell and, 168 parliamentary committees on, 165, 171, 178 Peel and, 160, 164 religion and politics indistinguishable in, 173 Scotland compared with, 29 Southey, Cuthbert, on father’s view of, 43 Southey, Robert, and, 6, 21–2, 35, 40, 42–3, 46, 49–50, 162, 164–79, 186 Stuart monarchy and, 168 Wellington and, 160, 164 White, Joseph Blanco, and, 142–3 see also Act of Union (Irish) catholicism in Adrian IV, pope, 175 and Anglican establishment, 176, 199 Benedictine monks, 42 catholic bishops, 20, 50, 52, 174–5 catholic petitions to Parliament: (1805), 35; (1808), 48, 49 catholics and methodists in, 97 Cornwallis, Lord, and, 6 “island of saints,” 177 Jesuits and, 42, 176 Milner and, 37, 38, 81 Musgrave and, 18–20, 38 papacy and, 175–6 Phelan on, 165, 167–8, 174–5 shows true face of Catholicism, 174

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 229

229

periodical press and Antijacobin Review, 36, 37–8, 52–3 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 179 British Critic, 165 Critical Review, 19 Edinburgh Annual Register, 49–50 Edinburgh Review, 138, 139–40 Irish Magazine, 52 Quarterly Review (Southey), 164–79, 186 Irish Rebellion (1641), 19, 51, 54 Irish Rebellion (1689), 51, 54 Irish Rebellion (1798), 2, 4 Butler on, 63–4 causes of, 18, 38 Cornwallis on, 6 Duigenan on, 51, 54 massacres during, 19 Milner on, 36 Musgrave on, 18, 36, 38, 51, 52–3 Irish Volunteers, 168 Isidoro, St., 31 Italy, 47, 94 “Jacobins” Antijacobin Review on, 4, 63, 157–8 Coleridge on his “Jacobin” past, 71–2 Cornwallis on, 6 countered by Loyal Association, 7 greater threat than catholics, 6, 8 in Ireland, 6 and lower classes, 27, 72 Milner on, 8, 86 Pitt on, 6 Townsend on, 157–8 transportation of, 3 Wycliffites and Hussites likened to, 86

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

230

Index

Jacobites, [6], 25, 97 James I, king of England abandons belief in witches, 108 abandons Calvinism, 107 deposing doctrine in time of, 159 on Gunpowder Plot, 16–17, 158 King James Bible, 47, 82–3 oath of allegiance, 118 and toleration, 108 James II, king of England Butler on, 119 catholics in privy council, 9 declaration of indulgence (1787), 111 Huntingford on, 54 Milner on, 18 and O’Connell, 168 Jarrow, monks of, 56 Jeffrey, Francis, editor of Edinburgh Review and Coleridge, 44 reviews Madoc and Thalaba, 43 Southey’s differences with, 43 Jerome of Prague, 76 Jesuits in Brazil, 66–7, 69–70, 93–4, 176 Butler on, 159 in California, 43 civilizing influence in South America, 66–9, 93–4 competition with monks and friars, 67, 69–70 their contribution to literature, 94 their dedication and endurance, 67, 68 dissolved by Clement XIV, 65, 150 in Europe, 65–6, 68 and European colonists, 67, 68 history of, 41, 65, 67–8 in Ireland, 42, 177 in Italy, 94 and papacy, 176 in Paraguay, 43, 67–8, 69, 94, 176 philanthopic work, 66–7, 93–4, [172]

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 230

Phillpotts on, 150 restored by Pius VII, 150, [172] and scripture, 69–70 and slavery, 67, 69, 94 superstition and, 68 Jews Harrington’s scheme for, 50 papacy’s treatment of, 137 in Paris, 29 and Parliament, x, 82 Southey on, x, 32, 57, 189 in Spain and Portugal, 32, 57 Joam III, king of Portugal, 56 John, king of England, 155 John X, pope, 16 Johnson, Joseph, publisher, 60 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 10, 98 Jones, William, Catholic doctrine of the Trinity (1756), 4 Joseph of Arimathea, St., 30 Joseph I, king of Portugal, 57 Kentish, John, 4 Kenyon, Lord George (2nd baron) Duigenan and, 52 Musgrave and, 20, 53 Observations on the Roman Catholic question (1810), 52–3 Keswick, 21, 62, 65, 194 Killala, 64 King, Lady Isabella, 92 Kippis, Dr. Andrew, 5 Knights Hospitaller (Knights of St John of Jerusalem), 45 Knox, John, 115 Koster, Henry, Travels in Brazil (1816), 93 Lambeth Palace, 181, 199 Lancaster, Joseph, 55 Landor, Walter Savage, ix, 65 Languedoc, 88–9, 123 Lateran Council (1215), 19, 63, 88, 132, 139, 150–2, 158–9, 178

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index Latimer, Hugh, bishop of Worcester (resigns 1539), 15, 27, 46, 53–4 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 108–9, 192 Law, George Henry, bishop of Bath and Wells, 182 Leighton, Robert, archbishop of Glasgow, 196 Leipsig, 162 Lewin’s Mead Presbyterian chapel, Bristol, 59 Lichfield, 108 Limerick bishop of, 165 treaty of (1691), 51 Lindisfarne, monks of, 56 Lingard, Dr John Butler and, 129, 152, 159 History of England 8 vols (1819–30), 129–30, 138 Southey and, 129, 130, 173, 185 Lisbon, 94 and his Book of the Church, 131–2 and his projected history of monasticism, 155 Southey in, ix, 3–4, 6, 29–35, 155 Literary Chronicle and Literary Review, 98 Literary Gazette, 98 Liverpool, Lord (Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl), 62 Catholic Emancipation and, 80, 139 Coleridge’s letter to, 71 Southey as poet laureate and, 64 Southey’s letter to, 72 Liverpool Gazette, 97 Lockhart, John Gibson, editor of Quarterly Review, 164 Lollards, 78, 86, 104, 115, 123, 152, 154 see also Wycliffe Lombard, Peter, 123

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 231

231

London, 20, 24, 60 great fire of (1666), 17–18, 113, 118–19 Longman, Southey’s publisher, 40–1, 42, 97 Louis XIV, king of France, 185 Louis XVI, king of France, 86 Loyal Association, 7 Loyola, Ignatius, 94, 176 see also Jesuits Lugo, 29 Luther, Martin, 46, 94 and doctrine of predestination, 84 Milner on, 15–16, 83, 84, 89–90 Lyrical Ballads, 1, 3 Macaulay, Thomas Babington on Colloquies, 190–3 on Ranke’s History of the Popes, 60 on Southey’s histories and biographies, 190 McKenna, Theobald, 2 Madrid, 31–2, 38, 94 Magee, William, Anglican archbishop of Dublin, 139 Magna Carta, x, [53] Malmesbury, monks of, 56 Malta, 45–7 Malthus, Thomas, 41 Manchester, 22 Manes/Mani (3rd-century Persian), 153 Manicheism alleged homosexual practices, 88 St Augustine and Manichean dualism, 103 Butler and, 153 eastern Yoguees and, 35, 70, 103 Southey on, 70, 103, 153 Townsend on, 153 Waldenses and, 123–4 Manners, Lord John (John James Robert, later 7th duke of Rutland) and Young England, 193–5

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

232

Index

Maranham/Maranhão, 69 Mary I, queen of England, 15, 53 as “bloody Mary,” 27, 56 Butler on, 117 Milner on, 15, 89 Mary, queen of Scots, 16, 125, 130 Mass, see Eucharist May, Sir John, 55, 92, 112, 124, 164, 183 Maynooth college, 132, 172, 199 Merlin, John (pseudonym), see Milner, John Messina, 46 Methodists/Methodism and Calvinism, 85 and Catholic Emancipation, 97 and enthusiasm, 35 Methodist Conference, 95 Milner and, 84, 86, 125, 126 Orthodox Churchman’s Magazine on, 5 Southey and, 56, 94–7, 126, 189 as threat to Anglican Church, 5, 126, 163 see also Wesley, John Methodist Magazine, 97 Milner, John, vicar apostolic and catholic bishop of Castabala, 27 Antijacobin Review on, 36–8, 63, 81, 128 British Critic on, 26, 63 Butler and, 114, 118, 149, 150 and Catholic Emancipation, 8–9, 82, 87, 88 on coronation oath, 7–10 and crown veto on catholic episcopal appointments, 8, 20, 52, 63, 81 at English college, Douai, 25 on Gnosticism, 88 on Jacobinism, 8, 86 on Manicheism, 88 as Merlin, 121–4, 147 on oath of allegiance, 6–7, 8, 17 on oath of supremacy, 8

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 232

as “Rome’s brazen serpent,” vi, 6 and Winchester, 6, 11, 15, 25, 79, 80 catholic church as an institution “bad” popes, 16 catholicity/universality of, 86, 114, 134, 149 character of catholic clergy, 122 continuity with Anglo-Saxon Church, 11, 122 Inquisition, Holy Office of the, 15 papal infallibility, 13, 36, 83–4 papal supremacy, 13, 81, 122 persecuting tradition of, 14–15, 82, 88–90 sanctity of, 85–6 unchangeability of, 85 catholic doctrines and practices apostolic succession, 87 articles of faith, 87 clerical celibacy, 14, 135 deposing power, 7 Eucharist, 16, 82–3, 122 marriage, 14 miracles, 85–6, 128 monasticism, 14, 85, 161 prayers for the dead, 88, 122 relics, 122 sacrament of penance, 87, 122 saints, veneration of, 85, 86, 87, 122 scripture, authority of, 14, 36, 82–3, 127 transubstantiation, 82, 87, 122 events Albigenses, extermination of, vi, 15, 37, 70, 78, 86, 88–9, 123 Catholic Relief Act (1791), 7, 26 Gunpowder Plot, 16–17 Lateran Council (1215), 19, 88–9

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index Reformation, 1, 15–16, 83, 85, 87 Spanish Armada, 16 individuals and groups Anglican bishops, 7, 87 Becket, St. Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 122, 136 Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London, 89, 128 Burgess, Thomas, bishop of St. David’s, 80–2 Butler, Charles, 9 Catholic bishops (Ireland), 20, 52 Coleridge, vi, 56, 89 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 15–16, 90, 125 Cromwell, Oliver, 126 Dominic, St., 15, 89, 124 Duigenan, Patrick, MP, 52 Dunstan, St., 122, 128 Gregory VII, pope, 135–6 Grier, Rev. Richard, 88 Hippisley, Sir John, 35–6, 37 Hoadly, Benjamin (junior), prebendary of Winchester, 79, 80 Hoadly, Benjamin (senior), bishop of Bangor/Hereford/ Salisbury/Winchester, 79, 80–1, 126 Horsley, Samuel, bishop of St. David’s/Rochester/ St. Asaph, 7, 26, 79, 80 Huntingford, warden, 7, 26 Hus/Huss, John, vi, 78, 86, 89 James I, 125–6 Lollards, 78, 86, 123 Luther, 15–16, 83, 86, 89–90 Moravians, 129 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 20, 36–7, 63 Parr, Dr. Samuel, 162–4 Phillpotts, Henry, prebendary of Durham, 149

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 233

233

regicides, 78, 125 Sister Nativity, 86, 161 Southey, x, 10, 18, 27, 78, 85, 122–4, 125, 126, 127–8, 161, 173 Sturges, prebendary John, 10–18, 78, 79, [86] Wat Tyler, 78; and Wat Tyler, 122, 123 Wesley, John and Charles, 126; see also Milner on Methodism White, Joseph Blanco, 55, 127 Whitefield, George, 122 Windham, William, MP, 27–8 Winifred, St., 128 Wycliffe/Wycliff, John, see Milner on Lollards Protestantism, 15, 52, 81, 85, 179 Calvin, Jean and Calvinism, 84, 90 Edward VI and, 15, 85, 90, 125 Elizabeth’s persecuting policies, 15, 16, 36–7, 81, 90, 125 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 14–15, 121, 125 Henry VIII, 15–16, 85, 90, 125 Luther, Martin, and Lutheranism, 15–16, 83, 84, 86, 89–90 Mary I and, 15, 89, 125, 128 Mary Queen of Scots, 16, 125 Methodism, 85, 86, 126 Moravians, 126 predestination, 84 Presbyterianism, 86 Socinianism/Unitarianism, 84, 126 works Case of Conscience Solved (1818), 7–10, 27–8, 35 Ecclesiastical democracy detected (1793), 36, 37

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

234

Index

Milner, John, vicar apostolic and catholic bishop of Castabala—Continued Elucidation of the Veto (1810), 20, 52 End of Controversy (1818 edition), x, 79–82, 121, 125, 128, 134; (1841 edition), 82–90 Examination of the articles in the Antijacobin Review (1808), 35–6, 37 History and antiquities of Winchester (1798, 1801), 11, 27, 37, 38, 89 Inquiry into certain vulgar opinions (1808), 36 Letters to a Prebendary (1800), 10–18, 35, 78, 79, 81, 86, 89, 119, 121, 125 Strictures on the Poet Laureate’s Book of the Church (1824), 121–4, 138, 147 Tour through Ireland (1808), 37, 38 Milton, John on Piedmont massacre, 124 quoted by Burgess, 81 quoted by Townsend, 155 Mohammed, 4 monasticism Benedictines, 25, 30, 42, 56, 67, 90–1 bill against émigré orders of (1800), 26–7 in Brazil, 67 Butler and, 154 Carthusians, 25 catholic nunneries, presumed evils of, 26, 33, 92–3 dissolution of monasteries, 42, 92–3, 95, 117 and eastern Yoguees, 35, 70, 85 Manicheistic tendencies of, 70, 103 protestant nunneries, 92, 155 in Spain, 30

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 234

Sturges on, 14 Townsend on, 154 see also Southey on individuals and groups: Dominicans, Franciscans, friars Monotholytes, 86, 149 Montagu/Montague, Lord (Anthony Browne, 2nd viscount), 118 Montagu/Montague, James, bishop of Bath and Wells/bishop of Winchester, [149] Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Lettres Persanes (1721), 22 Montgomery, James, 61 Monthly Magazine, 4, 39, 81 Monthly Review attacked by Antijacobin Review, 4–5 reviews History of Brazil, 71 reviews Joan of Arc, 3 Monument, the, (city of London), 17–18, 118–19 Moore, Sir John, lieutenant-general, 29, 38 Moravians, 95, 129 More, Sir Thomas England of, 191 ghost of in Colloquies, 183–9 Morning Chronicle, 72, 73 Morning Post, 39, 45 Moslems, 134, 170 expelled from Spain, 4, 19, 174 and Parliament, 9, 82 sharia law, xi Murray, Dr Daniel, Catholic archbishop of Dublin, 139 Murray, John, Southey’s publisher and Colloquies, 183 Crabb Robinson on, 61 and Quarterly Review, 164 Southey’s proposed textbooks for, 57 on Vindiciæ, [155]

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index Musgrave, Sir Richard Act of Irish Union and, 18 on Albigenses, 19, 37 Antijacobin Review and, 20, 37–8, 63 on Butler, 19 and Caulfield, 18–19 Concise account of the present Rebellion (1799), 18–19 Cornwallis and, 19 and Duigenan, 51 as Hibernicus, 63 impact on British reading public, 19–20 Kenyon, Lord, and, 20 Lateran Council (1215) and, 18–19, 132 Memoirs of the different rebellions (1801), 19, 36, 37–8, 53 and Milner, 20, 37–8, 63 as Veridicus, 18 Muslims, see Moslems Nares, Robert, 7 national schools, 55, 57 Nativité/Nativity, soeur/sister, 86, 161–2, 177 natural rights, 75, 185 negroes, 35, 41 Nelson, Horatio, Admiral Lord Southey’s Life, xi, 64, 105, 190 Nestorians, 86, 149 New Annual Register, 5, 48 Newbolt, Sir Henry, xi, 64 Newgate prison, 74 Newman, John Henry, 198 New Zealand, 60 Nobrega, Manuel de, 66 Norfolk, duke of, see Howard, Charles (11th duke) Northampton, Lord, see Howard, Henry, (1st earl) Norwich school, 163, 189 Nottingham, Luddites in, 62 nuns, 26, 32–3, 92–3 see also monasticism

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 235

235

Oates, Titus, and “Popish Plot,” 110, 113, 159, 173 oath of allegiance, 8, 175 Butler on, 63, 144 James I and, 110, 118 Milner on, 7, 17 White, Joseph Blanco and, 144 oath of supremacy, 8, 110, 144 O’Connell, Daniel, 166–7, 168, 179 O’Leary, Fr. Arthur, 97 Orange order, 51, 165, 169 Orders in Council, 62 Orthodox Churchman’s Magazine, 5, 6 Owen, Robert, 187 Oxford, city of, 27 Oxford, university of, 25, 42, 73 “decay of sound learning” at, 186 Greek and Hebrew introduced at, 107 Inglis defeats Peel as MP for, 177 Paine, Thomas, Age of Reason, 59 Palermo, 46 Paley, William, archdeacon of Carlisle, 4 Pantheon (Rome), 103 Pantisocracy, ix, 3, 73, 76 Papacy/Pope, the Anglo-Saxons, mission to, 122 Antichrist as, 13, 25 cisalpine and transalpine views of papal authority, 7, 115, 118, 143–4 concordat with Napoleon, [49], 51–2, 175 crown veto on episcopal appointments and, 50, 52, 62, 81, 171 deposing power of, 16, 37, 63, 115, 118, 132, 144, 150–1, 158–9 exploits credulity of the faithful, 135 federal Christendom envisaged by, 106

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

236

Index

Papacy/Pope, the—Continued Gallicanism and, 149–50 Henry II of England and, 114, 175 history of, 69, 133 index of prohibited books, 22–3, 46 Innocent III on jurisdiction of, 175 Inquisition and, 137 and Ireland, 175–6 and Islam, 106 and Jesuits, 65, 158, 172, 176 and Jews, 137 Lateran Council (1215) and, 63, 132, 151–9 medieval “papal system,” 102, 105, 106 papal indulgences, 87–8, 104, 114, 148, 149 papal infallibility, 13, 36, 62, 83, 93, 108, 115, 132, 150, 152, 177–8, 199 papal primacy/supremacy, 2, 13, 81, 105, 114, 122, 142, 149, 156 slave trade and, 137 weakness commented on, 1–2, 152, 172 Wordsworth on, 196 see also Catholic Church; Southey, Robert; individual popes Paraguay Jesuits in, 43, 67–8, 69, 94, 176 Paris, 29 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury, 135 Parliament (Dublin), 9, 23, 29, 51, 168 Parliament (Westminster), 2 committees on Ireland, 165, 171, 178 and on slave trade, 41 House of Commons, x, 27, 28, 41, 82, 166, 172 House of Lords, 7, 26–7, 79, 171, 181, [199]

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 236

reform of, 7, 73, 182, 188 seditious assemblies debate in, 76 see also Catholic Emancipation; Catholic Relief Acts Parnell, Henry, History of the penal laws, 51 Parr, Dr. Samuel, headmaster of Norwich School and prebendary of St Paul’s Lord Holland and, 163 Huntingford and, 163 Letter to the Rev. Dr Milner (1825), 162–3, 164 Memoirs of, 163 on Methodist threat, 163 Parsons/Persons, Robert, Jesuit in England, 155 Paul, St., 82–3 Peel, Sir Robert, MP, later prime minister Catholic Emancipation and, 80, 160, 167, 171–2, 179 and the corn laws, 193, 199 his Irish experience, 160, 164 loses Oxford university seat to Inglis, 177 Maynooth college grant and, 199 Southey and, 195 Young England and, 193 penal laws against catholics Butler on, 10, 118–19, 157–8 Charles II and, 110, 118 Duigenan on, 50–1 Milner on, 10, 12–13 Parnell and Irish catholics, 51 Southey on, 110 see also Catholic Relief Acts penance, sacrament of, 14, 29, 47, 87, 93, 104, 122, 136, 148–9 Peninsular war, 29, 31, 51, 55 Southey’s History of, 134, 190 Perceval, Spencer, prime minister assassination of, 30, 61 Catholic Emancipation and, 28, 38, 49

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index persecution by Anglican Church in Ireland, 176 Butler on, 118–19, 124, 125, 146, 151, 157 by catholics, 14–15, 19, 36, 82, 88–90, 115–16, 124, 125, 145–6, 151, 157 of catholics, 15, 89–90, 118–19, 124, 125, 126, 146, 151, 157 in France, 19, 25 of Jews in Spain and Portugal, 32, 55, 57 Milner on, 14–15, 82, 88–90, 118, 126 Musgrave on, 19 Southey on, 32, 38, 55–7, 82, 90, 124, 185–6 White, Joseph Blanco, 145–6 see also Inquisition; Reformation; individual reformers Perugia, 47 Petrarch, 13 Phelan, Dr William Digest of the evidence to parliamentary select committees on Ireland, 165, 172 History of the Church of Rome in Ireland, 165, 167–8 Southey and, 165–6, 167–8, 174–5 Philip II of Spain and consort of Mary I of England, 16, 27 Phillips, Richard, editor of Monthly Magazine, 4, 39 Phillpotts, Henry, rector of Stanhope, prebendary of Durham, later bishop of Exeter British Critic on, 141 on catholic devotional literature, 148 catholicism “unaltered and unalterable,” 151 on corrupting influence of the confessional, 148 denies catholic claims to universality, 147, 149

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 237

237

on Lateran Council (1215), 150–1 Letters to Charles Butler, [142], 146–51 Lord Eldon and, 182 on Milner, 147, 149–50 on papal supremacy and deposing/ dispensing power, 149, 150–1 on prayers for the dead, 148 on veneration of Virgin and saints, 149 and Wellington on Catholic Emancipation, 181–2 Piedmont, 124 Pitt, William, the younger, prime minister Addington and, 27 Amiens, treaty of, 23 appeal to European universities, 37 Catholic Emancipation and, 6, 23, 51, 164–5, 171 Coleridge on, 45 Irish Act of Union, 2 on Jacobin threat, 6 and Pittite press, 3 resignation, 6, 7, 23, 164–5 Pius IV, pope, creed of (1564), 113–14 Pius VI, pope, 1, [4], 17 Pius VII, pope, 150 Plowden, Francis, catholic barrister, 36, 162 Plymley, Peter (pseudonym), see Smith, Rev. Sydney Pole, Reginald (cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, 1556–8), 27, 117 Pombal, Sebastiaño Jose de Carvalho e Mello, marquis of, 57 “popish plots” Butler on, 113 in Charles I’s reign, 17 in Charles II’s reign, 18, 110 Foxe on, 110 Southey on Titus Oates, 110, 173 Townsend on, 159 see also Gunpowder Plot

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

238

Index

Porteus, Beilby, bishop of London Brief Confutation of the Church of Rome and Milner, 79, 82–4, 87, [90] Portland, Duke of (William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke), 28, 38 Portugal, 86, 162 catholicism in, 3, 22 constitution compared with British, 57 history of, 3, 65 Inquisition in, 32, 38, 55–7 persecution of the Jews in, 32, 55–7 Southey on, 3, 6, 21, 22, 29–35, 55–7, 131–2 predestination, Calvinist doctrine of, 84, 107 see also Calvin Presbyterianism, 5, 9, 25, 107, 109, 126 see also Church of Scotland press government control of, 39, 71 Pittite sympathies of, 3 Southey and curbing freedom of, 61–2, 73, 136 pretenders to English throne, 6 Pretyman, George, see Tomline Priestley, Joseph, 4 Prince Regent, see George IV, king of England Protestant Advocate, 81 Protestantism/Protestants Apocrypha and, 153 British Critic on “numerous” champions of, 141 Burgess’s Protestant Catechism (1818), 81–2 Butler’s Address to Protestants (1813), 63–4 coronation oath and, 7–8 Cranmer and, 125 Ireland, proposed conversion to Protestantism, 179

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 238

Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 108–9 Manicheism and, 153 Marian martyrs, 15 Milner on, 15, 52, 79, 81–2, 85–7 persecution by, 15, 89–90, 118–19, 124, 125, 146, 151, 157 persecution of, 14–15, 19, 36, 82, 88–90, 115–16, 124, 125, 145–6, 151, 157 Protestant Dissenters as Arians/ Socinians, 84 protestant nunneries, 92 “protestant reformed religion,” 7–8, 53, 111 “proto-protestants,” 86, 124, 134 in Scotland, 86, 107 scripture as only rule of faith, 82–3, 126–7, 134–5, 137, 156 Southey on superior moral and intellectual weight of, 134 see also Calvin; Luther; Reformation Public Advertiser, 97 Puritans, 107, 109, 126, 138, 192 Quarterly Review, 34, 139 on Albigenses, 15, 56, 103, 123 on Butler, 129, 141 on Cobbett, 129 Crabb Robinson on, 60–1 Croker and, 61 Examiner and, 112 on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 129 on Inquisition, 32, 38, 55–7, 90, 103, 105, 124 on Ireland and the Catholic question, 167–79 on Lingard’s History of England, 129, 137 Milner and, 126, 129, 137 on monks and friars, 35, 56, 90–1, 93, 103, 131, 155

8/22/2011 6:32:26 PM

Index parliamentary reform and, 73, 76 Phillpotts and, 142, 165 on national system of education, 55 on Reformation in England, 129, 137 on Sister Nativity, 161–2 Southey, Cutbert on, 61 Southey, Robert, see Southey, as journalist on White, Joseph Blanco, 142 Quarterly Theological Journal, 142 Ranke, Leopold von, History of the Popes, 60 Rapin, Paul, History of England 15 vols. (1728–32), 129 Reeves, John on coronation oath, 8–10 and “popery,” 12 Reformation, the and Anglicanism, 87, 90, 96, 102, 110, 184–5 Butler on, 117–18, 148, 156 Calvin and, 46, 84, 95, 107–8, 148 Cobbett, William, History of the Protestant Reformation, 137 Coleridge on, 46, 196 destruction at, 85, 117 and fragmentation of faith, 83 Luther and, 15, 83, 86, 89–90, 95 Milner on, 11, 15–16, 85, 87 moral consequences of, 15–16, 117, 184 other protestant reformers, 15, 27, 46, 53, 156 Quarterly Review on, 137 Southey on, 91–2, 101–2, 131, 132–3, 184–5 and on post-Reformation theology, 40 Townsend and, 156, 159 Reformists’ Register, 72 Regency Act (1811), 55

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 239

239

Renaissance, 25 Rennell, Thomas, prebendary of Winchester, 13 Restoration of English monarchy, 110 Revolution settlement (1688), 7, 111 Rheims, English college at, 80 Richard II, king of England, 74, 75, 78 Richardson, Samuel, novelist, on Protestant nunneries, 92 Rickman, John, 21, 40, 41, 42, 73, 164, 178, 191 Ridley, Nicolas, bishop of Rochester/London, 15, 53 Rio de Janeiro, 69 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 61, 196 Rochester, see of, 79 Rochester castle, 74 Rogers, Samuel, Unitarian poet, 4–5 Roman catholic, see catholics Rome barbarians’ capture of, 25 council of bishops proposed for, 106 Pantheon at, 103 see also Catholic church; Papacy/ popes Romilly, colonel Frederick, 194 royal supremacy, 8, 87, 118 Rugby school, 189 Runnymede, 53 Ruskin, John, 124 Sadler, Michael, 187 St. Andrews, cardinal archbishop of, 90 St. Asaph, see of, 79 St. Bartholomew’s day massacre, 19, 108, [185] St. David’s, see of, 7, 80 St. Salvador [Bahia] (Brazil), 67 see also under first names for individual saints Salamanca, university of, 172

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

240

Index

Salisbury, Lord (Robert Cecil 1st earl of), 158 Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 111 Savoy, duke of, 124 Savoy palace, 74 Scott, John (1st earl Eldon), 171 Scott, Sir Walter and Edinburgh Review, 43 founds Quarterly Review, 47 supports Southey for laureateship, 65 his Waverley novels, 188 scripture authorized version of, (King James Bible), 82 catholic dogmas implicit in, 13 catholic laity and, 102 and Council of Carthage, 83 individual interpretation of, 36, 83–4, 126–7 Milner on, 13, 36, 82–4 on papal primacy and infallibility, 127, 136–7 protestants’ only rule of faith, 82 Rheims New Testament, 80 Townsend on, 156 Vulgate, the, 83 White, Joseph Blanco, and, 127 Scullabogue massacre, 19 seditious assemblies bill (1817), 76 Sergius III, pope, 16 Seville, university of, 143 Shaftesbury, Lord, see Cooper, Anthony Ashley (1st earl) sharia law, xi Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 196 Sicily, 45, 46, 47 Sidmouth, Lord, see Addington, Henry Sidney, Sir Philip, 42 Sister Nativity (la Soeur Nativité), 86, 161–2, 164, 177 slave trade, 41, 137

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 240

Smith, William, MP Southey’s Letter to William Smith, 76–8 and Southey’s Wat Tyler, 76 Smithfield, 74, 89 Smyth, Rev. Sidney, Letters of Plymley, 28–9, 138–9 Smythe, George, and Young England, 193, 194 social contract theory, 75, 185 Society of Jesus, see Jesuits Socinianism, see Unitarins/ Unitarianism Southey, Cuthbert and The Butler, 188 and Colloquies, 43 and The Doctor, 188–9 on his father’s Dublin appointment, 40 on his father’s views on Ireland, 43, 165 and Letters from Spain and Portugal, 34 at Oxford, 55 and Quarterly Review, 61 Southey, Edith (wife), 21–2, 34, 165 Southey, Isabel (daughter), 55 Southey, Margaret (née Hill, mother), [6] Southey, Robert admires Addington, 23 alleged apostasy, 71, 72, 73–4, 76–8 Anglican church and 1688 Revolution settlement, 111 Anglican liturgy and, 109, 197 Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner on, 3, 47 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and, 193 British Critic and, 22, 26, 64, 96, 105–6, 107, 108, 114, 121, 137–8, 141–2, 152 Calvinism and, 85, 107 and Cambridge university, 42, 186

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

Index on church and state, 42, 55, 77, 110–11, 196–7 considers emigration, 166 declines baronetcy, but accepts pension, 195 in Dublin, 6, 21–2, 40, 46 Durham university and, 187 Edinburgh Review and, 190–3 on education, xii, 42, 55, 57, 77, 91, 101, 132, 172, 186, 187–8, 189 on Egyptian asceticism, 35 on assumed English superiority, 35 Exaniner and, 71, 72, 75–6 French Revolution and, 11, 25, 62, 63–4, 74 Gunpowder Plot, 108, 118, 158, 168 and habeas corpus, 62 and Ireland, 6, 21–2, 35, 40, 42–3, 46, 49–50, 162, 164–78, 186 and Irish rebellion (1798), 168 Jacobinism and, 27, 61–2, 72, 75 and Lisbon, 4, 6, 21, 22, 34–5, 94, 131–2, 155 in Madrid, 31, 94 medievalism in his epic poems, 195 Methodism and, xi, 42, 94–7, 126, 189 military metaphors, 120, 127, 172–3 on natural rights, 76, 185 and Oxford university, 42, 72, 186 Pantisocracy and, 3, 73, 76 parliamentary reform and, 72, 75–6, 179 as poet laureate, ix, 64, 71, 72, 73 and Portugal, 3, 6, 21, 22, 29–35, 41, 55–7, 65, 131–2 see also Lisbon and predestination, 107 and Presbyterianism, 25, 107, 109, 126 and public opinion, 191–2

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 241

241 and rail travel, 191 and the Reformation, 91–2, 101–2, 131, 184 on post-Reformation theology, 40 school textbooks proposed, 57 slave trade, and, 41, 137 and Spain, 4, 21, 22, 29–35, 55–7, 65, 111, 131–2 see also Madrid and Test and Corporation Acts, 170, 198 on Thirty-nine articles, xii, 196–7 “ultra royalist,” 76 Unitarianism and, 2, 39–40, 108, 196–7 on “unprotected women,” 92, 155 and Westminster school, 21, 28, 181, 189, 195 see also individuals and groups; monasticism catholic church as an institution Anglican church, compared with, 24–5, 57, 101–2, 109–10, 131, 138, 171–2, 196–7 and Anglo-Saxon church, 102, 114, 135 as Babylon, 25, 30, 104, 120 “battery” on, 120, 127 Catholic Emancipation, x, 2, 23, 43, 48, 50, 131, 162, 167–79, 181–3, 186, 197, 198 catholic relief bill (1813), 62 on character of popes, 136–7 clergy of, 24, 25, 43, 49, 103, 104, 122, 173, 176 clerical celibacy, 14, 93, 103, 136, 144, 153 concordat with Napoleon, 48, 175 corruption alleged, 102, 132, 161, 184 devotional practices, 93

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

242

Index

Southey, Robert—Continued exclusive salvation, doctrine of, 132, 178, 189 fraud alleged, 102, 135 French Revolution and, 25, 61, 63–4 general councils of, 18–19, 115, 132, 178 historical character of, 133, 142, 147 Inquisition, the, 32, 38, 56–7, 90, 103, 105, 124, 145, 186, 189 in Ireland, 6, 22, 35, 42–3, 49–50, 162, 186 and the Jews, x, 32, 137, 189 medieval papacy, 102, 103–5 oaths with heretics not binding, 171, 174 paganism, resemblance to, 103 as a persecuting church, 32, 38, 57, 82, 88, 90, 124, 189 “a prodigious structure of imposture and superstition,” 114 and the slave trade, 137 theology of, 40 universality, claim to, 134 catholic doctrines and practices articles of faith, 133 asceticism, 35, 103, 161 and assassination, 30, 47 on authority of scripture, 102, 137 devotional practices, 93 enthusiasm (in eighteenth– century sense), 35 idolatry alleged, 30, 132 images, 24, 35 Maynooth college, 132, 172, 199 miracles, 30, 32, 67–8, 85–6, 128, 129, 135, 162 papal infallibility, 13, 62, 93, 108, 115, 131–2, 177–8 papal supremacy/primacy, 106

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 242

penance, sacrament of, 14, 29, 93, 103–4, 136 pilgrimages, 31 purgatory, 24, 30, 91, 103–4, 114, 189 relics, veneration of, 102, 177 saints, veneration of, 30, 31, 102, 133 scripture with-held from laity, 102 superstition alleged, 35, 67, 132, 135, 177 transubstantiation, [30], 136, 114, 116, 155 unchangeability of doctrine, 85, 162, 176–7, 185–6 Virgin Mary: Bodily Assumption of, 102; Immaculate Conception of, 4 correspondents Barker, Mary, 65 Bedford, Grosvenor, 28, 40–1, 42, 47, 61, 72–3, 188, 190–1, 194–5, 196–7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 40–1, 44–5 Disraeli, Benjamin (future prime minister), 190, 193 D’Israeli, Isaac, 189–90, 193 Hill, Rev. Herbert (uncle), 64, 165–6 Hill, Herbert, junior (cousin), 188 Howley, William, bishop of London/archbishop of Canterbury, 112, 181 Huntingford, George Isaac Huntingford, bishop of Hereford, 182 Landor, Walter Savage, ix, 65 Law, George Henry, bishop of Bath and Wells, 182 Liverpool, Lord, 72 Longman, Southey’s publisher, 42

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

Index May, Sir John, 55, 92, 112, 124, 164, 183 Miller, Rev. J., 198 Murray, John, Southey’s publisher, 57, [155], 190 Peel, Sir Robert, 195 Phelan, Dr William, 165 Rickman, John, 40, 41, 42, 73, 178, 191 Scott, Sir Walter, 64 Southey, Edith (wife), 22 Southey, Margaret (mother), [6] Southey, Tom, naval lieutenant (brother), 35, 40, 41, 65, 166 Taylor, Henry (brother of William), 39; “a battery on the walls of Babylon,” 120; see also Taylor, William (Unitarian minister, Norwich) Tickner, George, 183 Warter, Rev. John, 3 White, Joseph Blanco, 101, 127, 130–1, 155, 196 Wynn, Charles, 22, 27, 62, 72, 101, 142, 165, 197 see also individuals and groups as historian biographer of Nelson, xi, 64, 105, 138, 190 in Book of the Church, 131–2, 133, 142, 190 of Brazil, 65–71, 91, 93–4, 103, 134 British Critic on, 70–1, 96, 105–6 in Colloquies, 191 destined for fame as, ix Eclectic Review on, 70 “historiographer to Mr Ballantyne,” 64–5 impartiality claimed, 67, 70–1, 96, 97, 131–2, 133–4 of Ireland (projected), 178 of Jesuits in Japan (projected), 65

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 243

243

literary history of Spain and Portugal (projected), 65 Macaulay on, 190–3 of Methodism, 96, 131, 134, 190 of monasticism (projected), 40, 65, 93, 155 Monthly Review on, 70 of Paraguay, 67–8 of Peninsular war, ix, 134, 190 his “perplexed” dreams as, 41 his “poetic licence,” 121–2 of Portugal (not published), 3, 65 professional aim as, 133 proposed textbooks, xii, 57 thinks himself too youthful, 3 individuals and groups Aikin, Arthur, 39–40, 41 Aikin, John, 61 Aikin, Lucy and, 61 Albigenses and, vi, x, 56, 89, 103, 123 Andrews, William Eusebius, 173 and Anglican bishops, x, 181 Augustine of Hippo, St., 103 Ballantyne, James and John (publishers), 41, 48, 64–5 Becket, St. Thomas, 106, 122–3, 136, 152 Bede, the Venerable, 135 Bell, Andrew, educationist, godfather of Isabel Southey, 55 Benedictines, in Spain, 30; in Ireland, 42–3; and catholic system, 133 Blomfield, Charles, bishop of Chester/London, [129], 181 Butler, Charles, 113–20, 132–3, 147, 148–9, 156, 157, 164, 173 casualties of war, 3 Catholic Association, 128 Charles I, king of England, 109–10

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

244

Index

Southey, Robert—Continued Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, vi, ix, 2–3, 14, 21, 40–1, 65, 71–4, 95–6, 198 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 108–9 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord protector, 109, 126 Dalai Lama as “Pope of Tibet,” 136 Disraeli, Benjamin, (future prime minister), 195 D’Israeli, Isaac, 193 Dissenters, 170 Dominicans, see below Doyle, James, catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, 172, 173, 176, 185 Dunstan, St., 105–6, 114, 122 Elizabeth I, 56, 107 Fawkes, Guy, 136, 168 Foxe, John, 105, 125, 155 Franciscans, 69, 105, 133 friars, 6, 33–4, 67, 91, 93, 111, 133, 155, 176 Genet, Abbé, 161–2 Grenville, Lord, 28 Hazlitt, William, 71, 72, 76, 77–8 Henrietta Maria, queen of England, [109] Henry VIII, 107 Hill, Rev. Herbert, 3 Holinshed, 125 Inglis, Sir Robert, 176–7 James I, king of England, 108 James II, king of England, 111 Jeffrey, Francis, 43; see also Edinburgh Review Jesuits, see below Jews, ix, 32, 57, 137, 189 Landor, Walter Savage, 65 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 108–9 Lingard, John, 129–30, 173, 185

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 244

Lollards, 104, 115–16, 123, 152, 154 Longman, publisher, 40 lower classes, 72–3, 77, 187–8 Loyola, Ignatius, 94, 178 Luther, Martin, 94 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 190–3 Magee, William, Anglican archbishop of Dublin, 175 Mary I, queen of England, 27, 56 Milner, John, 18, 27, 78, 85, 121–7, 147, 161, 173 Moravians, 95, 129 Moslems/Moors/Moriscoes, 4, 134, 170, 189 Murray, John, publisher, 183, 190 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 167 negroes, 35, 41 O’Connell, Daniel, 168 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury, 135 Parsons/Persons, Robert, projected life of, 155 Phelan, Dr William, 165, 167–8, 174 Phillpotts, prebendary Henry, (later bishop of Exeter), 146–7, 148, 149, 165, 181 Presbyterians, 25, 107–8, 109, 126 Puritans, 109, 126 Rickman, John, 21, 164 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 196 Sister Nativity, 86, 161–2, 177 Southey, Cuthbert, 34, 40, 43, 55, 61, 165, 188–9 Southey, Edith, 21–2, 34, 165 Southey, Isabel, 55 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop of Worcester, 135 Townsend, George, 152, 156 Unitarians, 2, 39, 108, 196, 197

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

Index Ursula, St., 128, 189 Ussher, James, Anglican archbishop of Armagh, 135 Waldenses, 95, 123, 134, 151, 154 Warter, John (son-in-law), 21 White, Joseph Blanco, 55, 57, 136, 142, 155 Whitefield, George, 95 Winifred, St., 128 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 30 Wolsey, cardinal Thomas, 107 Wordsworth, William, ix, 142, 196 Wycliffe, John, 78, 95, 104, 106, 115, 123 Wynn, Charles, 21 Young England, 194–5 see also correspondents; Dominicans; Jesuits Dominicans and St Dominic, 67, 133 and Albigenses, x–xi, 15, 56, [89], 103, 123 canonization of Dominic, 91, 189 Dominic’s self-flagellation, 91, 103 and Franciscans, [91], 105, 176 and the Inquisition, 51, 55–7, 90, 103, 105, 116, 123, 137, 145, 189 and monastic orders, 91–2 Quarterly Review on, 56, 90–1 Jesuits in Brazil, 66–7, 69–70, 93–4, 176 in California, 43 civilizing mission in South America, 66–9, 93–4 their contribution to literature, 94 their dedication and endurance, 68–9 in Europe, 65–6, 68 and European colonists, 67, 68

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 245

245

in Ireland, 42, 177 in Italy, 94 their “manufactory of slander,” 125 martyred, 67–8 and miracles, 68 in Paraguay, 43, 67–8, 69, 94, 176 philanthropic work, 66–7, 93–4 and slavery, 67, 69, 94 superstition and, 68 as journalist in Annual Review, 39–40, 41–8, 55, 73 in Athenæum, 44 on Baptist Missionary Society, 40, 47 on burden (and stimulus) of reviewing, 41–2 and Catholic Emancipation, 64–7, 167–79 in Critical Review and, 44 in Edinburgh Annual Register, 48, 65, 178 Edinburgh Review and, 43, 47 The Flagellant (when a schoolboy), 188–9 on Hannah More, 42 in Monthly Magazine, 39, 44 on monthly reviewers, 43 Quarterly Review and, x, 15, 34, 35, 42, 44, 47, 48, 55, 65, 112 in Quarterly Review (Dec. 1811), on the Inquisition, 32, 38, 55–7, 124, 131; (Oct. 1816), on parliamentary reform, 73, 76; (Nov. 1819), on monachism, 35, 56, 90–1, 93, 103, 131, 155; (Dec, 1825), on the Vaudois [Waldenses], 123, 124, 154; (Mar. 1826), on Sister Nativity, 161–2; (Oct. 1828), on Ireland – the Catholic question, 164–79

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

246

Index

Southey, Robert—Continued works “The Battle of Blenheim” (1797), 98 Bibliotheca Britannica (projected), 40 Book of the Church (1824), x, xi, xii, 14, 35, 56, 57, 65, 101–20, 126, 131, 133, 190, 195, 198 Carmen Triumphale (1814), 72 Chronicle of the Cid (1808), 56 The Curse of Kehama (1810), 65 The Doctor, (1834–8; 1847), x, 188–9 Essays Moral and Political (1832), 48–50 History of Brazil (1810, 1817, 1819), ix, x, xi, 3, 66–71, 93, 103, 134 History of Portugal (not published), 41 History of the Peninsular War (1823, 1827, 1832), ix, 134, 190 Joan of Arc (1796), 3 Journal of a residence in Portugal 1800–1801 (1960), 35 Letters from England (1807), 11, 22–7, 39, 43–4, 48–9, [121], 198 Letters written during a journey and a short residence in Spain and Portugal (1808), 4, 29–34, 38, 56, 111 Letters written during a short residence in Spain and Portugal (1797), 3, 29, 30, 34, 47 Letter to William Smith, Esq. MP (1817), 76–7 Life of Nelson (1813), xi, 64, 105, 190 Life of Wesley (1820), xi, 85, 94–7, 98, 129, 190

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 246

Madoc (1805), 21–2, 40, 41, 43 Poems (1797), xii, 3 “The poet’s pilgrimage to Waterloo” (1816), 98 Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies (1829), x, 43, 184–8, 190–3, 195 Specimens of the later English poets (1807), [41] Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), 43 Vindiciæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1826), 124, 127–8, 130–7, 141, 147, 153, 155, 159, 167, 173 A Vision of Judgment (1821), 97–9 Wat Tyler: a dramatic poem (1817), 73–8, 98, 121 see also Southey, as journalist Southey, Tom (brother), 35, 40, 41, 65, 166 Spain, 86, 162 armada against England, 16, 157–8 catholicism in, 4–5, 21, 29–34, 38, 114, 142–3 clergy of, 24 Inquisition in, 32, 38, 55–6, 145 Moslems expelled from, 4, 18, 174 persecution of Jews in, 32, 55–6 Southey on, 4, 29–34, 55–7, 65, 111, 131 Spenser, Edmund, poet, 128 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop of Worcester, 135 Straw, Jack, (Lollard), 75 Stuart, Daniel, and Coleridge, 39 Sturges, John, prebendary of Winchester, 27, 79 admits loyalty of catholics, 16 on clerical celibacy, 14

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

Index and the Eucharist, 16 Luther and, 16 Milner and, 11–18, 78, [86] on monasticism, 14 on Pius VI, 1, 12 Reflections on Popery (1800), 1, 11–18 use of term “popery,” 12 and weakness of papacy, 1 on Wycliffe, 78 Suffolk, county of, 78 Suffolk, Lord, Thomas Howard (1st earl), 118 Susquehanna river, 3, 21 Swithun, St., 15 Switzerland, 19 Syracuse cathedral, Sicily, 47 Talavera, 31 Taylor, Henry, (brother of William), 39, 120 Taylor, William (Unitarian minister in Norwich), and Annual Review, 41 Test and Corporation Acts, 5 1st Test Act (1673), 110 2nd Test Act (1678), 110, 119 Barbauld on, 59–60 Burke and, 170 and Catholic Emancipation, 5, 181 repeal of, 59–60, 169–70, 181, 198 Southey on, x, 169–70 Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, [113], 126, 196–7 Thurlow, Edward, Lord Chancellor, (1st baron), 26–7, 79 Tickner, George, 183 The Times, 168 tithes, 176 commutation of, 198 Tomline, George (formerly Pretyman), bishop of Lincoln, 4 Toulmin, Joshua, 4

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 247

247

Townsend, George, prebendary of Durham his Accusations of history against the church of Rome (1825), 142, 150, 151–60 on Albigenses, 152, 153 on Becket, 152 on Catholic Emancipation, 141, 142, 151–60 on the deposing doctrine, 159 dismissive verdict on Butler, 159 on Elizabeth I’s reign, 156–8, 159 on friars, 155 on Gunpowder Plot, 158–9 on Lateran Council (1215), 151, 158 on Lollards, 152, 154 on Manicheism, 153 cites Milton, 155 on persecuting traditions of the catholic church, 151 on the Reformation, 156, 159 on scripture, 156 and Southey, 141, 152, 155–6 on Titus Oates, 159 on the Virgin Mary, 154 Tract 90, 198 transalpine catholics, 7, 115, 118, 144 transubstantiation, 29, 82, 87, 104, 113, 116, 122, 144, 155 Trent, council of (1545–63), 114, 132, 152, 178 Tresham, Sir Thomas, 158 Trinity, doctrine of the, 4, 85, 116, 197 see also Unitarianism Trinity College, Dublin, 51 Troy, John Thomas (catholic archbishop of Dublin), 36, [171] Tucuman, 67 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of Durham, 117 Turks, 29, 170, 175

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

248

Index

Turner, Sharon, History of the Anglo-Saxons (1823), 129 Tyler, Wat, 50, 72–6, 154 Southey’s Wat Tyler (1817), 72–6, 98, 121, [123] see also Lollards Udal, Nicholas, headmaster, Eton College, 189 Unitarians/Unitarianism, 35 Aikin, Arthur, and, 39 Antijacobin Review on greater threat than catholics, 4–5 Barbauld, Lætitia, and, 59 Belsham, Thomas, and, 4 Coleridge and, ix, 2 Critical Review and Arianism, Socinianism, 5 and distribution of the Watchman, 39 Estlin, John Prior, and, 2, 59 freed from Blasphemy Act of 1798 (1813), 60 Jones, William, Catholic doctrine of the Trinity (1756), 4 Kentish, John, 4 Kippis, Dr Andrew, 5 Milner on, 84 Monthly Review and, 4–5 Phillips, Richard, editor of Monthly Magazine, 4, 39 Priestley, Joseph, 4 Southey and, ix, x, 39–40, 108, 196–7 United Church of England Ireland (1801–69), see Anglican church United States of America, 60 Barbauld’s prediction of prosperity for, 61 Great Britain at war with, 62 Protestantism in, [134] religious processions in, 169 university religious tests abolished, 199

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 248

Ursula, St., and her 11,000 virgins, 128, 189 Ussher, James, Anglican archbishop of Armagh, 135 Valence, 1 Valetta, 45, 46, 47 Van Mildert, William, bishop of Durham, 181 Vatican, 118 see also Papacy Vaudois, see Waldenses veto on catholic episcopal appointments, 8, 50, 52, 63, 81, 171 Victoria, Don Francisco, 67 Victoria, queen of England: on Ireland, 198 Vinegar Hill massacre, 19 Virgin Mary English lack of reverence for, 24 Immaculate Conception of, 4, 147 litanies to, 154 relics of, 102, 177 veneration of, 24, 31–2, 91, 102, 114, 196 Vulgate, the, 83 Wakefield, Gilbert, 4, 22–3 Waldenses/Vaudois, 95, 115, 123–4, 134, 152, 154, 196 Wales, 81 Ward, Mary (Mrs Humphrey), 199 Warrington, 191 Warter, Rev. John, 3 Waterloo, battlefield of, 98, 162 Watson, Joshua, founder of National Society schools, 57 Watson, Rev. Richard, Observations on Southey’s Life of Wesley, 97 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley (1st duke of), 38, 41 and Catholic Emancipation, 160, 166, 167, 179, 181–2 his duel with Lord Winchilsea, 167 and Ireland, 160, 164, 179

8/22/2011 6:32:27 PM

Index his military victories, 62 prime minister, 160, 167, 179, 181–2, 188 Wesley, Charles, 189 Wesley, John, 85 Coleridge on, 95–6 Southey on, 94–7, 98 Wesley, Samuel, 95 Westminster Hall, 199 Westminster Review, 142 Westminster school, 21, 28, 181, 189–90, 195 Wexford, town of, 18, 19 Whitbread, Samuel, MP for Bedford, 172 White, Rev. Joseph Blanco (formerly José Maria, Blanco Y Crespo) British Critic on, 141 and Butler, 55, 127, 141, 143–6 and Catholic Emancipation, 143 and clerical celibacy, 135, 145 Coleridge and, 144–5 on the deposing power, 143–4 Edinburgh Review on, 139, 143 and friars, 145 on the Inquisition, 55, 57, 145–6 his Irish, ancestry, 142–3 Milner and, 55 on miracles and “monkish piety,” 146 on papal primacy and infallibility, 127, 143–4 on persecution, 145–6 Practical and internal evidence against catholicism (1825), 127, 142–6 Quarterly Review on, 141, 142 and scripture, 127 Southey and, 55, 57, 101, 130–1, 136, 142, 155 his Spanish ancestry, 142–3, 145 and Wordsworth, 142 Whitefield, George, 84–5, 95 Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury, 126

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 249

249

William III, king of England, 8, 9, 17, 29, 51, 65 William IV, king of England, 188 William of Wykeham, 15 Winchester, Cathedral chapter of, 1, 11, 26, 79, 80 Winchester, city of, 6, 11, 15, 25, 26, 117 Winchester college, 7, 26, 177, 182 Winchilsea, Lord, see Finch-Hatton Windham, William, MP for Norwich, 28 Winifred, St., 128 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 30 Wolsey, cardinal, 140 Worcestershire, 59 Wordsworth, William on Book of the Church, 195–6 and Catholic Emancipation, 195–6 and the Church of England, 196 on Cranmer, 196 distributor of stamps for Westmorland, 71 Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), xi, 195–6 Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1838), 196 in The Friend, 45 on Gunpowder Plot, 196 Hazlitt’s attacks on, 71 Lyrical Ballads, 1, 3 on monasticism, 196 on papal abuses, 196 on the saints, 19 Southey and, 2–3, 142 on transubstantiation, 196 on Waldenses, 196 White, Joseph Blanco and, 142 on Wycliffe, 196 on the Virgin Mary, 196 World Council of Churches, xi

8/22/2011 6:32:28 PM

250 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, and his rebellion, 89 Wycliffe/Wycliff, John, 83 British Critic on, 106 Butler on, 115, 154 Coleridge on, 46 Milner on, 78, 123 Southey on, 78, 95, 104, 106, 115, 123, 152 Townsend on, 154 Wordsworth on, 196

9780230115132_13_ind.indd 250

Index Wynn, Charles Watkins Williams, MP for Montgomeryshire, 21, 22, 27, 62, 72, 165, 197 Yoguees, 35, 70, 103 York, city of, 62 York, Frederick Augustus, duke of, 160 Young England movement, 190, 193–5 Zwingli/Zwinglius, Ulrich, 46

8/22/2011 6:32:28 PM