John Lingard and the catholic revival

Abstract

The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.