Catholic Emancipation Research Articles

Liberal intellectuals and public culture in modern Britain, 1815-1914: making words flesh

'Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain' shows how liberal values reconstructed public space in Britain after the repeal of the Test and Corporations Acts [1828] and the passage of Catholic emancipation [1829]. It traces the century-long process against subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. It examines the emergence of the intellectual authority of the universities and the social authority of the professions. It shows how these changes gave different political and social opportunities for new families such as the Bensons, the Venns, the Stracheys and the Trevelyans. When the social moorings of the confessional state diminished new forms of association emerged to devise and promote liberal values as a distinctive form of cultural capital. This cultural capital - antique and modern letters, mathematics - filled the public sphere and provided the materials for intellectual change. The final chapters on Roman Catholicism and nationalism reveal the fragilities of this public culture. WILLIAM C. LUBENOW is Professor of History at Stockton College, New Jersey. He is the author of 'The Politics of Government Growth, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis', and the 'Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914'.

Reinventing the Marian Persecutions in Victorian England

For nineteenth-century Protestant authors, the reign of Mary I (1553-1558) epitomized the horrors of a world in which Roman Catholics were in charge. Catholic Emancipation (1829) stimulated new Protestant anxieties about the threat to British stability posed by the nation's Catholic residents — and abetted by dangerously liberal Protestants. Protestant novelists and poets thus turned to the Marian persecutions, often by adapting narratives from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs , to warn their audiences that violent martyrdom might well be on the brink of return. In particular, their fictions staged a conflict between the treatment of Queen Mary's body and the martyr's body, especially the female martyr's body: Mary I's excessive passion for Philip of Spain and her false pregnancy emblematize the pathologies that underlie religious persecution and threaten English nationhood itself, whereas the injuries inflicted on the female martyr's body testify to the universal truths of Protestant faith. As the article's first section demonstrates, Victorian representations of Mary I and her body frequently originate from the work of the Catholic historian John Lingard; even Evangelical visions of Mary draw heavily on Lingard's and Agnes Strickland's accounts of a virtuous but ultimately frail Queen. But for Protestants, this sentimental Mary threatens the nation through her perverse sexuality and equally perverse religious obsessions. The second half of the essay turns to the role of the popular martyr Rose Allin in novels by Anna Eliza Bray and Emily Sarah Holt. Allin's resistance to torture suggested how heroic women could counteract the moral threat posed by the queen's weakness.

<em>The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry</em>, by Giles Hunt

Reviewed by: The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry Nancy LoPatin-Lummis (bio) The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry, by Giles Hunt; pp. xiii + 214. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008, £20.00, $37.00. On 21 September 1809, Foreign Secretary George Canning and Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, fought a duel. On the surface, this might not seem extraordinary; the infamous and deadly duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had taken place only five years earlier. But Britain was at war with Napoleon and in the middle of economic chaos. Whatever would possess two members of the government to engage in such cavalier behavior? Answering this question is the purpose of Giles Hunt's biographical and ideological study in political ambition and contrasting success in the age of high politics and war. Organizing the book in chapters that contrast their early lives, education, and political careers, Hunt argues that Canning and Castlereagh came to serve His Majesty's government from two very different paths. On the one hand, Canning's father had been disowned for his choice in marriage, leaving the family bankrupt when he died during Canning's infancy. While his grandfather held estates in Northern Ireland, the young Canning relied upon his uncle and only upon his grandfather's death was his grandmother able to pay for his formal schooling at Eton. Robert Steward, later Lord Castlereagh, on the other hand, descended from an Ulster Scots plantation fortune and the commercial wealth of an Indian nabob. He was born into privilege and grew up at his grandfather's estate, Mount Stewart, experiencing the social and education expectations of his rank. Canning landed a place at Christ Church at Oxford with the assistance of a family friend. Brought up as a Foxite Whig, he became "Pittized" (33); the new alliance brought him to the House of Commons for Newton, nominated by the Prime Minister, and soon allowed him to join the Foreign Office under William Grenville. Castlereagh also rejected family political connections to the Whigs. He went to Cambridge rather [End Page 169] than Trinity College, Dublin, under the influence of his step-grandfather, Lord Camden. He launched his political career with the calculated choice to govern Ireland "by force" rather than "by reason" (32), openly opposing Henry Grattan and the Irish Parliament. By 1794, Castlereagh severed himself from Irish politics and embarked upon a political future in Westminster. The drama, Hunt shows, started to manifest itself as early as 1801 when William Pitt resigned and was replaced by Henry Addington over the failure of Catholic Emancipation. When war resumed with France merely a year after the Peace of Amiens, an attempt to bring Pitt back into power divided political loyalties and Canning and Castlereagh assumed leadership roles in the cabinet. When Pitt died in January 1806 his government fell and both men were now in opposition to the Ministry of all the Talents. They should have found common ground, particularly after King George III dismissed the coalition government and asked the aging Duke of Portland to form a government. But others' ambitions were stirring up policy differences, generating criticism, and otherwise undermining one by evoking the name of the other. In the end, Canning was forced to resign and a humiliated Castlereagh challenged him to a gentlemen's duel. Meeting at Putney Heath at five o'clock in the morning on 21 September, the standard gentlemen's resolution could have ended the conflict. Canning, however, did not fire in the air on the first shot, putting Castlereagh in the awkward position of restoring his damaged political reputation by showing "superiority not by trying to kill him, but by shooting him, literally and metaphorically, in the foot" (137). When Canning aimed for a second shot, Castlereagh shot Canning in the thigh, nearly hitting his femoral artery. What did this all mean? Hunt argues that the duel impacted public opinion, personal reputation, and political legacies, even more so than the political backbiting and squabbling going on behind the scenes. Criticism of the two cabinet ministers dueling during a foreign war was nearly universal. Castlereagh panicked about Canning's...

The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714-1837

The last decade has seen an upsurge in interest in the relations between Britain and Hanover, the north German state linked with Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century because its rulers were also the kings of Britain. The present book, which began life as a Cambridge conference on the same topic in 2004, acts as a timely collection of the various aspects to this recent research. It also underscores the impact which the Hanoverian connection had on areas of British political, military, and intellectual life during this period—in essence ‘putting the Hanoverian dimension back into British history’ (p. 4). The thirteen chapters range widely in their subject matter. Jeremy Black, Brendan Simms, and Torsten Riotte examine the involvement of three leading eighteenth-century political figures in Anglo-Hanoverian matters—Walpole, Pitt the Elder, and George III respectively. Simms uses Hanover as a case-study to explore Pitt's broader initiatives concerning foreign policy. Tracing Pitt's shifting stance towards Hanover, he indicates how Pitt used Hanover as a tool to attack or win over George II, depending on particular political circumstances. Riotte focuses on George III's attempts to balance what he saw as his prime responsibilities as king of Britain with his duties towards his Hanoverian subjects. In doing so, Riotte argues that George III played a key role in formulating British foreign policy in the early 1800s, thus contributing to debates about the changing function of the British monarchy. Meanwhile, Christopher D. Thompson and Mijndert Bertram explore the impact of Hanover in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thompson posits that there was a Hanoverian dimension to British domestic politics during this period (particularly during the Catholic Emancipation debate) and that the royal family continued to pursue Hanoverian interests.

In Sunlight and in Shadow

In Sunlight and in Shadow Ben Howard (bio) Richard Tillinghast , Finding Ireland: A Poet's Exploration of Irish Literature and Culture. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 276 pages. $25; David Pierce , Light, Freedom, and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing. Yale University Press, 2005. 350 pages. $40. Irish history casts a long shadow on contemporary Irish culture. Amidst the bright prosperity of recent years that shadow has sometimes receded from view. And in youthful stylish Dublin, with its ubiquitous mobile phones and thriving Internet cafes, it often seems to have vanished. But, in two recent books on Irish history, literature, and culture, the shadow of the past is not only present but very much in the foreground. Richard Tillinghast's Finding Ireland is a gathering of memoirs, travelogues, reviews, "letters from Ireland," and familiar essays, in which the American poet explores Irish culture mainly through the works of modern Irish writers. A longtime sojourner in Ireland, Tillinghast now lives in retirement in County Tipperary. In the manner of an informed "blow-in" speaking to the less informed, he endeavors to cross what he calls the "oceans of sentimentality and prejudice [that] keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity." In tones ranging from the professorial to the celebrative to the elegiac, he writes with authority on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Derek Mahon, the fiction of William Trevor, the plays of Brian Friel, the felicities of Irish traditional music, and the surviving pleasures of rural Irish life, where "there is still a place by the fire and a cup of tea for the visitor in a farmhouse kitchen." Though his book has the look of a miscellany, its center of gravity may be found in the poet's intellectual passions, namely Anglo-Irish culture and modern Irish poetry. Jonathan Swift, the first major Anglo-Irish writer, described his people as "strangers in a strange land." And Yeats, two centuries later, spoke of "Anglo-Irish solitude." In "Who Were the Anglo-Irish?" Tillinghast embraces these descriptions, portraying a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the late eighteenth century and declined thereafter, becoming ever more isolated and insecure. Distrusted by the Irish and English alike, the Anglo-Irish lived apart in their [End Page 665] big country houses, watching the Protestant Ascendancy become what Julian Moynahan has called a "Descendancy," its power eroded by Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Law Act of 1881. Yet, as Tillinghast notes, the "existential insecurity" and "heightened awareness" of the Anglo-Irish fostered a "golden age" of Anglo-Irish writing, which includes the novels of Maria Edgeworth; the diaries, letters, and fictions of Somerville and Ross; and the major works of the Irish Literary Revival. Concurrently the "hybrid" nature of Anglo-Irish culture nourished a distinctive literary tradition, beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing through the fiction of George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. "Year by year from 1800 on," writes Tilling-hast, "as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called 'the indomitable Irishry' built from words a hybrid body of work that will stand with the world's best." Turning to specific authors, Tillinghast discusses their distinct contributions to the Anglo-Irish tradition. In "The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross" he rejects the common view that the coauthors romanticized the Ascendancy and portrayed sentimentalized stage-Irish characters. In Tillinghast's view they offered a "vigorous realism" that extended to their portrayal of servants' lives, and they were "deeply implicated" in the "ironies and tragedies of Irish history." In "The Asymmetrical George Moore" he defines Moore as a "nationalist" who differed "from others in the movement by his complete lack of idealism and patriotic sentiment." In "Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child" he opposes the view of Bowen as a class-ridden snob, seeing her instead as a writer who "took the world as she found it." And in his essay on William Trevor he identifies Trevor as a "Protestant-Irish and English" author whose interest lies not in politics, history, and class in...

William Shakespeare: The model Victorian Protestant

This essay explores how Shakespeare was viewed in relation to Protestantism in Victorian England. Two abiding themes in the nineteenth century were then, and are still, the status of the established church and the status of Shakespeare as a national icon. How Shakespeare and the Victorian Church of England intersect is thus the focus here, particularly in the light of debates about Shakespeare among Victorian writers, clergymen and academics: debates that turn on biographical as well as polemical and political issues, from Catholic Emancipation to evolutionary science. Examining the Victorian experience of contesting Shakespeare's religious identity may further illuminate current debates about his beliefs and religion.

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 Sean Farrell Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006, by Paul Bew, 632 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. $75.00 Burke is back. One of the hallmarks of recent scholarship on late eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Ireland has been a renewed appreciation for the subtlety and significance of Edmund Burke’s thought. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paul Bew’s important and thoughtful new study of modern Irish politics. Bew’s overarching argument centers on Burke’s notion that Anglo-Irish relations would only work if there were a real and substantive union between Britain and Ireland, and specifically, one that featured Catholic emancipation and political integration. While Bew details a wide and often surprising range of advocates for such an approach—the portrayals of Castlereagh and Pitt are particularly memorable—it is the consistent failure to act along Burkean lines that dominates British governance in Ireland across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Henry Grattan famously argued, this was a legislative union rather than the true identification of two nations, a point made most clearly by British policy failures during the horrors of the Great Famine. Bew is at his caustic best when describing the yawning gap between British and Irish sentiment: “For Trevelyan, contemplating his role in feeding of hundreds of thousands, this could only be a benign development; Ireland now knew how much England cared. For many in Ireland, however, that was precisely the problem.” Although Bew’s narrative starts with this searching critique of the British political class’s lack of generosity and creativity, Irish nationalism does not escape unscathed. For all of the rhetorical celebration of Tone and Davis, Bew finds that Irish nationalism has rarely risen above its essentially sectarian core. Throughout the book Bew’s argument underlines nationalists’ and Unionists’ trenchant consistency in failing to construct a workable via media. Among many poignant examples, Daniel O’Connell’s remarkable inability to make even the smallest gestures of inclusivity to William Sharman Crawford and potentially sympathetic Ulster Presbyterian reformers remains the most illustrative of this failure of imagination. There is nothing particularly novel about writing an historical narrative around the British failure to construct humane and generous relationships with Ireland and the Irish failure to bridge sectarian enmities; in lesser hands, this challenging book would have run the risk of caricature. That it does not do so testifies to Bew’s skill as an historian and his unrivaled knowledge of this complex terrain. He weaves together portraits of well-known leaders (among whom Parnell, predictably, stands out) with unheralded figures like Cooke Taylor and [End Page 145] William Cusack Smith. Moreover, Bew manages to acknowledge sectarianism’s central place in modern Irish history without sacrificing the nuance and complexity that the best modern scholarship has infused into our understanding of the modern Irish experience. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws. It is much stronger on the nineteenth century than on the twentieth, particularly after 1914. In part this is a simple matter of space; Bew’s book devotes seven-and-a-half chapters to the nineteenth century and a mere three-and-a-half to the twentieth. Given Bew’s expertise on the latter century, one wonders whether this was a decision made in the offices of the publisher. If so, it does real damage: much of the richness and nuance that marks Bew’s handling of nineteenth-century material is simply not there in later chapters. Given the recent work on de Valéra, his treatment here seems particularly undeveloped. But the problem is not just brevity. The Burkean framework that gives the nineteenth-century material power and coherence does not work as well for the twentieth century, except in Bew’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where it gives rise to some creative and provocative comparisons. And the abbreviated focus on political enmity gives short shrift to such crucial developments as the Republic’s entry into the European Community. But it would be wrong to end on such a negative note. This is significant and humane work, a “must read” for anyone interested in modern...

Basil Montagu QC (1770-1851): A Portrait of an Early 19th Century Life in Literature and the Law

In 1814 Basil Montagu, by now an extremely busy member of the Chancery bar took up residence at 25 Bedford Square in fashionable Bloomsbury. Together with his wife, large family and servants he continued to live at this address for the next 20 years or so. On Sundays Mrs Montagu often reigned over a salon that attracted prominent literary figures amongst whom were several long-standing friends of her husband. At the time of their marriage in 1808 Montagu had already been married twice before; his wife had been a widow for about six years and was bringing up her daughter who would one day as Mrs Proctor have her own salon frequented by a new generation of poets and authors. Montagu's chambers were at 10 New Square; his practice was mainly concerned with insolvency matters, serving as a Commissioner in Bankruptcy at the Guildhall. He was a prolific writer on commercial law but is best remembered, if at all, for his many books on bankruptcy and for a lengthy series of law reports. He also wrote numerous pamphlets on contemporary topics such as Catholic and Jewish emancipation. Additionally he published a book of essays one of which dealt with the general principles of law reform and a best selling philosophical anthology. If Bedford Square reflects Montagu's commitment to literature, then New Square represents his professional dedication; sometimes these two segments of his life came together; he acted as junior counsel for Shelley in the proceedings brought by the poet after his wife's death to obtain custody of their children; on at least one occasion Coleridge arrived at chambers to discuss Montagu's Francis Bacon project; urgent steps were taken by him and Bryan Waller Proctor, his step-son in law, to rescue Hazlitt from imprisonment for debt. In this article little attention is given to Montagu's legal career, his role as founder of the Legal & General Insurance Company, or to his work after 1836 as the first Accountant-General in Bankruptcy. Instead it concentrates on his literary activities and private life so often clouded by tragedy. It is suggested that when Montagu died at Boulogne in 1851 he was living there in exile fearful of arrest for debt at home resulting from involvement with the financial disaster of his principal publisher, William Pickering. His death does not end the story that must continue with the hunt, still in progress, for his voluminous papers, manuscripts and other documents together with reminiscences about him. Our research indicates that notwithstanding a belief that much of this material is lost this is by no means the case.

Loyalism in Ireland 1789–1829 (review)

Reviewed by: Loyalism in Ireland 1789–1829 James Kelly Loyalism in Ireland 1789–1829. By Allan Blackstock. [Irish Historical Monograph Series, Vol.5] (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press. 2007. Pp x, 296. $80.00. ISBN 978-1-843-83302-4.) Surprisingly, since it was responsible for one of the most influential and most enduring loyalist organizations in history—the Orange Order—Irish loyalism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries has largely been ignored by historians for whom republican radicalism has long exercised a more compelling fascination. Ireland in this respect mirrors the situation in the United Kingdom, but whereas the realization there that the concentration on left-wing and radical impulses epitomized by E. P. Thompson’s seminal work The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, UK, 1968) produced a partial history of popular politics that has encouraged a number of valuable recent enquiries into loyalism, the subject continues to be neglected in Ireland. As a result, scholars and students alike have been obliged until now to make do with Hereward Sr.’s dated account of Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London, 1966) and a number of fundamentally flawed articles produced by scholars primarily interested is radicalism. Saliently, Allan Blackstock’s canvas is wider than that of Hereward Sr.; following the model that has evolved in Great Britain, he examines Irish loyalism as a “multi-faceted” (p.9) phenomenon during its formative phase from the commencement of the French Revolution to the admission of Catholics to sit in Parliament in 1829. [End Page 171] Loyalism in Ireland, 1789–1829, is not without its limitations, but it is greatly advanced in concept and method when compared to other works in the field. Blackstock has effectively redefined the subject; although others may amplify the information he has uncovered, add new perspectives, and refine his conclusions, all will be indebted to the Herculean trawl he has made to identify the relevant primary source material in the main archives of Britain and Ireland and to his careful deployment of the information contained therein. Irish loyalism did not, of course, emerge in the 1790s. It existed, as the author makes clear in a useful opening chapter, in various prior manifestations. Moreover, it was prompted by its own particular ideological concerns (with Catholicism, primarily) to develop a response to the twin challenges posed by the domestic demand of Catholics for the removal of the barriers that precluded their participation in the political process and the example of the French Revolution, which encouraged many middle-class Protestants to seek to restructure the political system. It was, to be sure, given added ideological vigor by the example of loyalists in Great Britain, but while Blackstock assuredly links Irish developments in 1792–93 to John Reeves’s influential Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans, he is careful to emphasize Irish loyalism’s essentially indigenous character. The mounting insurgency of the United Irishmen-Defender alliance later in the decade hastened the mobilization and militarization of Irish loyalists, especially the Orange Order, founded in 1795, and the yeomanry, established a year later. Blackstock offers a new and telling perspective on these players (especially the role of the Grand Lodge of Ireland) and how they enabled the ascendancy of the Orange strand of loyalism. Indeed, following the trauma of the 1798 rebellion and the perception that Catholics sought to effect the extirpation of Protestant heretics, loyalists established an “exclusive” claim on loyalism by representing Catholics as “incorrigibly disloyal” (p. 111). Significantly, loyalists in the early-nineteenth century abandoned militarism in favor of a political strategy that was spearheaded by the Orange Order, which maintained an active program of parading and public display. Its efforts were insufficient to counter the campaign pursued by an invigorated Catholic interest (led by Daniel O’Connell’s innovative Catholic Association in the 1820s) that secured the concession of Catholic emancipation in 1829. Blackstock’s exploration of the resistance of the Orange Order and the Brunswick Clubs to Catholic efforts is a highlight of the book. It demonstrates the continuing vigor of loyalism when faced with a serious challenge, and although these groups did not prevail on...

The diagnosis of art: Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet – the ears have it?

The bust of Sir George Savile (1726–1784) by Joseph Nollekens (1737–1830), based on Savile's death mask, is currently on display at Tate Britain as part of the 'Return of the Gods: Neoclassical Sculpture in Britain' exhibition, with its permanent home being the Victoria and Albert Museum. It reveals Sir George exactly as he was, a thoughtful, but finally defeated man, in his blemished glory. Notably, on Sir George's left ear, there is a crease visible running diagonally across the earlobe, most likely to be Frank sign. Frank first described a link between this dermatological sign and coronaryartery disease in 1973.1 There is also known to be a significant association with carotid intima-media thickness and with cerebrovascular disease.2 Sir George Savile was a remarkable 18th century political figure who eschewed the laid-back life of huntin', shootin' and fishin' (sic) commonly pursued by his fellow acolytes. Instead, he engaged himself in public life, taking many unpopular positions and steered by his own opinions arrived at by ‘integrity and disinterestedness’.3 Like his famous grandfather the Marquis of Halifax, he had a major impact on the political saliences of his day – American republicanism, Catholic emancipation and electoral reform. His portrait hung in Benjamin Franklin's house a decade before the American Revolution.4 A man interested in evidence and rationality, he was Member of Parliament for Yorkshire from 1759 to 1783, a fellow of the Royal Society and a patron of the Westminster Infirmary. Savile died in the arms of his friend David Hartley in January 1784 eight months after he collapsed while speaking in Parliament. ‘He was proceeding to speak in favour of the motion when finding himself too weak to speak with that animation that he wished to express, he sat down, to the great mortification of the House, who were distressed Figure 1 Joseph Nollekens. Portrait Bust of Sir George Savile, 1784. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Figure 2 Closer view of left ear of bust to see so good a man in so infirm a state of health.’5 This sudden weakness and his subsequent demise over a short period offer us but the slightest clue to the condition or disease process that killed him. However, taken together with his Frank sign, the differential diagnoses include uncontrolled angina and ischaemic stroke. An angina attack brought on by the stress of public speaking is certainly a possibility. An adrenaline-associated increase in heart rate and heightened vasoconstriction could well have prompted an acute attack in Sir George who was 57 years old at that time, but against this is the fact that he was as a well-practised orator. The weakness described in the Parliamentary record is associated with an inability to speak, which may have been dysphasia. His steady slide to death in less than a year is consistent with a neurological diagnosis. Of course, both cardiac and neurological events may have occurred in combination with an underlying atherosclerotic aetiology. Perhaps it was the bed rest that finally brought about his end. His immobility will have further added to his risk factors for cardiovascular disease and thromboembolic events. In conclusion, Sir George Savile, a man who bore the aural stigmata of cardiac/cerebrovascular disease, collapsed under stress and died shortly after at the age of 57 years. As to the precipitant being angina or stroke, we can only speculate. Atherosclerosis, towards which his Frank's sign may point, is a stage upon which either or both could have played a part.

THE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLISM OF CONQUEST IN IRELAND,c. 1790–1850

ABSTRACTThe question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influentialThe Case of Ireland . . . Stated(1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

John Milner and the Orthodox Cause

The study deals with Bishop John Milner, the English Catholic polemicist and historian, closely involved in affairs relating to the efforts to obtain Catholic emancipation. It identifies Milner's most fundamental concerns, offering a description of a coherent structure of anti‐Enlightenment thought. This description serves to provide a unified interpretation both of his very varied and often influential writings and of his conduct in public affairs in England and Ireland. In this broad perspective, the figure of Milner can be seen to be important for an understanding of the transition being made in his period by the Catholicism of the British Isles to its nineteenth‐century identity.

Modesty and Excellence: Gender and Sports Culture in Dutch Catholic Schooling, 1900–40

This article focuses on the construction of gendered identities in Dutch schools run by religious orders during the process of Catholic emancipation. It discusses the fragility of identity, the simultaneity of tradition and modernity, and the role that gender plays in all these interactions. Two schools in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, are compared during the first half of the twentieth century: the Jesuit institution for boys, Canisius College, and the Ursuline college for girls next door, Mater Dei. At both, sport played an important role in the transmission of notions of Catholicism and gender.

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small.Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career.On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.

Re-Evaluating John Lingard's History of England

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.

The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 (review)

Reviewed by: The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 Thomas Bartlett The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840. By Irene Whelan. [History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora.] (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 347. $60.00.) This is a significant book that breaks new ground in its description, analysis, and contextualization of Protestant and Catholic hatred (not too strong a word for it) for each other in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Ireland. It makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of the origins of what was to become the endemic sectarianization of Irish society. And it offers an important perspective on the phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Britain and the United States in the later nineteenth century. The book's main theses are based on a very extensive study of the main documentary archives—notable use being made in particular of the Methodist Missionary Society papers—and also of the published religious ephemera produced by the contending parties. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world. Dr. Whelan examines the emergence in Ireland in the last decade of the eighteenth century of a strong Protestant evangelical movement which took as its objective the conversion of the priest-dominated Irish Catholics. This was a task that had been talked about and even acted upon fitfully since the late sixteenth century, but the results had been, to say the least, disappointing. By 1790 Ireland was infinitely more "Catholic" than she had been two hundred years earlier. This stark fact was a standing reproof to the Protestant Ascendancy that had governed Ireland since the seventeenth century, but until the late eighteenth century there had been for some time a weary, and indeed wary, acceptance that it might not be possible or indeed advisable, to do anything about it. In the 1790's, however, the shattering experience of polarized community relations and religious mayhem culminating in the 1798 rebellion—widely depicted as a sectarian civil war—forced a re-think. One lesson from the rebellion was that Protestantism could never be safe while the mass of the people remained in thrall to their priests, and hence a strong evangelical movement embracing not just Methodists but also key personnel in the Church of Ireland was got under way. This was to culminate in the 1822 declaration of the absolute necessity for a "Second Reformation" by the newly installed Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, William Magee. The Catholic Church, experiencing a resurgence in the early nineteenth century, and under the redoubtable leadership of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin fought back against what it saw as a declaration of war. It was no coincidence that this confessional conflict in the 1820's overlapped with the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell. Each drew upon the other, each sharpened the bitterness with which the debates and the elections were conducted, and when the contest ebbed religion and politics were inextricably [End Page 990] linked for the forseeable future. The "Bible War'' may have peaked in the 1830's, as Dr. Whelan argues, but it continued diminuendo for many decades and arguably formed the crucible of modern Irish Catholic identity. By the 1830's to be Irish was to Catholic and, in Ireland, to be Catholic was to be Irish, a synchronicity which had not been the case in the mid-eighteenth century, but which was to persist by and large to the present day. Thomas Bartlett University College Dublin Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Unrepentant Tory. Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, 1827-38 (review)

Reviewed by: Unrepentant Tory. Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, 1827-38 Richard W. Davis Unrepentant Tory. Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, 1827-38. Edited by Richard A. Gaunt. (Parliamentary History Record Series, 3). Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust. 2006. xl, 405 pp. £50.00. ISBN 1843832666. For two and a half decades after 1820 ultra tories played a significant role in British political life. In their eyes two great causes were paramount. The first was the continued spiritual and political supremacy of the Church of England, the keystone of the protestant constitution they and others considered the precious legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The second was agricultural protection. Shortly after 1820 these two causes became major foci of political attention, and it became clear, even to tory governments, that the futures of these causes were not bright. Catholic emancipation bills began to be passed routinely in the house of commons and defeated in the Lords, but only by uncomfortably small majorities. At the same time, politicians began to seek a way to reduce the prohibitory tariff on corn established in 1815, which had proved completely satisfactory to no one and deeply resented by most outside the landed classes. But as tory leaders began to reconcile themselves to future change, a significant portion of their followers became adamantine in their defence of the existing institutions in Church and state. Ultra positions were supported by votes numbering in the 80s and 90s, roughly half the Conservative peers, with about 50 consistent voters. But though their numbers were formidable, the ultras were never really an organized party. Typically, it was about a dozen peers who exercised the functions of leadership. Probably the most important of these, and certainly the most remarkable, was the fourth duke of Newcastle. Richard Gaunt has studied Newcastle for many years, and taught us much about the ultras in the process. Now, in this meticulously edited volume, he reveals the man himself, or perhaps more accurately allows the duke to reveal himself. In his own time, and since, Newcastle has been looked upon as an eccentric, if not a little mad, failed politician. In fact, many of his eccentricities have been shared by large numbers of christians over the ages. As for being a failure in his public life, he was more cunning than mad. He knew what he was doing, and he could be very successful. Religion was at the very centre of his life. He was a dedicated member of the established Church, devoted to its rituals and formulations, and vigilant in observing the practices of others. So far as he could tell Canning had died without any clergyman coming near him to administer the sacrament. On another occasion when there was talk of Wellington's government setting up a commission to alter the Church liturgy, Newcastle observed that it was just what might have been expected of a minister who held most of his cabinets on a 'Sunday and at Church time'. This was nothing compared to his reaction to the whig government allowing the debate on the second reading of the Reform Bill to run over into a Sunday morning. That 'it should so far forget itself as to overstep the acknowledged bounds of religious propriety in the [End Page 255] due and solemn observance of & respect for the Sabbath, is quite a new event in our history'. It was the work of a 'reforming, revolutionary, and I suppose atheistical Ministry'. It was 'a gross outrage of public morals & national decency as a wanton parliamentary desecration of the Sabbath'. Even matters more apparently innocent could bring down denunciations almost as severe. In 1834 Newcastle made an attempt in the house of lords to halt the holding of a musical festival in Westminster Abbey. 'I think such uses of a Church are most improper & indecent - I would go so far as calling it sacrilegious.' He was aware that he was 'treading on a hornets nest', for the festival had a powerful friend in King William himself, 'but I know that I am doing...

Science, sociability and the improvement of Ireland: the Galway Mechanics' Institute, 1826–51

Irish mechanics' institutes have received little attention from historians of science, but their history presents intriguing questions. Whereas industrialization, Protestant dissent and the politics of liberal social reformers have been identified as crucial for the development of mechanics' institutes in Britain, their influence in Ireland was regionally limited. Nonetheless, many unindustrialized, provincial, largely Catholic Irish towns had mechanics' institutes in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper investigates the history of the two mechanics' institutes of Galway, founded in 1826 and 1840, and analyses how local and national contexts affected the establishment, function and development of a provincial Irish mechanics' institute. Situating these institutes within the changing social and political constellations of early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, it shows how Catholic emancipation, the temperance movement and different strands of Irish nationalism affected approaches to the uses of science and science education in Ireland.

The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (review)

Reviewed by: The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt Robert A. Colby (bio) Greg Kucich, Jeffrey N. Cox, Robert Morrison, Charles Mahoney, and John Strachan, eds., The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, 6 vols. (London and Brookfield, Vt.: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), $775.00 cloth. "The position of Leigh Hunt in our literature might easily be exaggerated and still more easily underestimated," cryptically remarked Arthur Symons in 1888, as quoted in the General Introduction to this latest collection (xii), almost thirty years after Hunt's death. How many nowadays would be confident to take either side? Even among Victorians he is remembered mainly as the prototype of the parasitic, childish Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, allegedly a fit of pique on Dickens's part for what he felt was an insufficient expression of gratitude in Hunt's Autobiography that had just come out. (However, the two remained friends, and Dickens subsequently apologized for his lampoon.) Hunt certainly should not be ignored by members of RSVP, for his was the most extensive journalistic career of the nineteenth century, beginning with the papers headed "Mr. Town, Jr., Critic and Censor-general" for The Traveler in 1804, when he was twenty, and extending to "The Occasional" series for The Spectator in 1859, the year of his death. The Examiner, which he edited from 1808 to 1821, is most closely associated with him, but these volumes contain excerpts from some dozen magazines which he edited for various periods of time. In their General Introduction, editors Kucich and Cox proclaim Hunt to be not merely the most prolific, but "unmistakably, one of the leading writers of his age" (xii). One reason for his insufficient recognition today, they believe, is that alone among his peers – De Quincy, Lamb, and Hazlitt – he has not been accorded a collected works. Earlier editors Lawrence and Caroline Houtchens compressed Hunt's vast output into [End Page 414] three volumes (1949–1962) and moreover "compartmentalized" the theatrical, literary, and political writings which the present editors believe interpenetrate one another. In style, Hunt harks back to the graceful, gentlemanly discourse of his much admired Addison, but he was at the epicenter of his times, which bridge the Romantic and mid-Victorian ages. His muckraking and social activism are well known, particularly his tirade against the Prince Regent for betrayal of the English people, for which he and his brother John were imprisoned for two years on a libel charge. Among his close friends was the labor agitator Richard Carlile. Hunt sympathized with the Luddite Rebellion and Catholic Emancipation. He was a tireless promoter of freedom of the press. He reported on the Battle of Waterloo (observing that the men who served under Wellington were not accorded sufficient recognition), the death of Napoleon (questioning the suffix The Great), and the Congress of Vienna. In the literary realm, he was among the first to recognize Keats, whose first published poem "O Solitude" appeared in The Examiner of May 5, 1816, as well as Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. He accompanied Lord Byron to Italy, where Hunt spent several years. With writers too he was occasionally iconoclastic, as when he suggested that the office of Poet Laureate be abolished on the ground that it encouraged mediocrity. More ephemeral, but certainly of value to theatre historians, was his lifelong relish for the stage. In the judgment of editor Morrison, the essays from the late 1820s through the early 1830s, falling between the heyday of Romanticism and early Victorianism, have been unjustly neglected. Among causes espoused by Hunt during these years were the First Reform Bill, the extension of suffrage, and the perennial plight of Irish farmers. Morrison detects in these writing a reduction of political invective, the tone of conflict "replaced by consensus and rational debate" (3:xxii). In literature, Hunt remained at the cutting edge, among the first to appreciate Browning, Tennyson, and the early Dickens. He also heard Carlyle lecture on the History of Literature. Worth quoting are his last words on "the late King" George IV: "Upon the whole ... a prince of good nature, but no talents, showy rather than magnificent, more polished than refined ..." (The Chat of the Week, July 3, 1830). Volume 4 is...

The Anti-Jacobin Review after John Gifford: Contributions by Identified Authors, 1807–21

Following a contextual introduction, this article consists of a detailed chronological list of 374 items appearing in the Anti-Jacobin Review during its final years (1807–21) to which authors' names can be attached, with the justification for the identification given in every case. An author index follows. The listing covers a time span during which the AJR enjoyed its greatest significance as a vehicle for religious and political propaganda, as it evolved into an increasingly strident mouthpiece for anti-Catholic rhetoric and worked to inflame resistance to Catholic emancipation among the diehard Protestant readers to whom it catered.