Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion by Stuart Andrews

Abstract

Stuart Andrews. Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 270. $95. Stuart Andrews's new book argues for Southey's literary and ... historical importance, and lasting significance of his seeming ... paranoia, both political and religious (xi). It is book, Andrews says, about Southey laureate, rather than Southey poet (ix). It could equally be described as study of question, 1790s 1829, with ensemble cast of Southey, Coleridge, John Milner, Charles Butler, Blanco White, Richard Musgrave, and many others. But emancipation is particularly rewarding angle for life and letters of Southey, who was, in Hazlitt's phrase, shaped on any model. Southey's biographer Bill Speck describes him as oddity and anachronism, almost Quaker, who behaved like a seventeenth-century Anglican at war with both Popery and enthusiasm. (1) But Southey's stance looks less odd in view of antediluvian nature of his (Roman) Catholic enemy. The Romantic epoch of 1798 was also year Napoleon abolished papacy by Act of Sovereign People (1). Robert Peel later recalled how religion, we were told, was ... volcano burnt out, that could never be rekindled (qtd. 172). Like William Pitt, polemicist John Milner asked rhetorically if it was from side of Popery, or opposite quarter of Jacobinism, that Established Church is in most at present day (qtd. 8). But Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1801 turned defunct danger into contradiction at heart of political life. As Coleridge later summed it up: There is and can be but one question: and there is and can be but one way of stating it. A great numerical majority of inhabitants of one of realm profess religion that professed by great majority of whole realm.... In fewer words, three-fourths of his Majesty's Irish subjects are Roman Catholics, with papal priesthood, while three-fourths of sum total of His Majesty's subjects are Protestants. (Church and State; qtd. 2) The question created problem for political language. After 1801, integral part not only does not imply, but is hostile to, greater whole. Charles Butler suggested that even this was false ... perspective, giving two-page list of vastly more extensive territories where Roman Catholicism was established religion (qtd. 114). Southey reasserted Protestant perspective by mocking such exhibitions of Siamese, and Tonquinese, and ... Cochin-Chinese converts (qtd. 134). But context perhaps helps explain Southey's reductive rhetoric on church and state: facing complex disintegration of parts and wholes, he insisted on complete homology between these two pillars of temple of our prosperity, bound by mathematical necessity stand or fall together (qtd. 55). Andrews describes general shift relatively reasoned, courteous exchanges of debating points in 1790s barrages of vituperative language in 1820s (9, 18, 128). Southey was critic of Catholicism his early experiences in Lisbon in 1795-96. In his 1797 Letters written during short residence in Spain and Portugal, Southey spoke of his mingled ... pity and disgust at [t]he sight of Monastery or Monk ... foul and filthy men without accomplishments or virtues, [because of] system they are subject to (qtd. 4). Southey's visceral sense of Catholicism as throwback was at heart of question. [T]hey will not tolerate, Southey told Charles Wynn in 1807: the proof is in their practice all over Europe, and it is in nature of their principles now (qtd. x). Andrews reads Southey's Letters England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807) as complex double-bluff. In character of Espriella, an able man, bigoted his religion . …