Aspects of Recusant History

T.A. Birrell, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, Frans Blom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000098105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924–2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English and American Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular surveys of English Literature in Dutch, but – first and foremost – he was a bibliographer and a historian.

His scholarly oeuvre is extensive and includes such highlights as English Monarchs and their Books (London 1986), a study of the Old Royal Library. However, many of his publications are hidden in occasional publications, periodicals and introductions to books no longer in print. That is why a – posthumous – selection of his bibliographical essays appeared in 2013, entitled Aspects of Book Culture (Ashgate 2013), and that is why it was decided to bring out a companion volume containing a selection of his essays in the field of recusant history.

The present edition contains fourteen of Birrell's articles published between 1950 and 2006. They all demonstrate his bibliographical expertise, his in-depth knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Catholic history and his absolute determination to examine every scrap of archival material that might shed light on the episodes he was investigating. But, perhaps most important of all, he combined his scholarship with an intense interest in the individual lives that shape and are shaped by history, so the lasting impression that these articles will make is the sense of getting close to a whole series of personalities caught up in the turmoil of their time.

Aspects of Recusant History was edited by Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom, all three former students of Tom Birrell and, both individually and collectively, authors and editors of a whole range of important book historical publications. (CS1092).

1
CATHOLIC ALLEGIANCE AND THE POPISH PLOT

A study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period^*

* Originally delivered as an inaugural lecture on 16 March 1950 on the occasion of Birrell’s appointment as Reader in English Literature at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University Nijmegen).

I have chosen to speak this afternoon on the subject of Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot of 1678, a subject which involves the study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period. The writers with whom I propose to deal are Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, Dom James Maurus Corker, monk of the English Congregation of the Order of St Benedict, and Fr John Warner, Provincial of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. You may reasonably wonder why, out of the wide variety of topics which English Literature presents, I should have chosen a subject with which the majority of you are, I imagine, totally unfamiliar. You may even doubt whether the works of the writers with whom I am about to deal are entitled to the name of literature at all for you will find none of them mentioned in such a repository of orthodox critical opinion as the Cambridge History of English Literature.

To the charge of irrelevance and obscurity, I would make two answers. Firstly, that this is a Catholic University, and that here, if anywhere, we should be interested in the study of Catholic writers of other countries, and of how they, as individuals, reacted to a given political situation. The Popish Plot was the last nationwide persecution of Catholics in England.

Secondly, I would call your attention to the present topical significance of the situation with which English Catholics were confronted nearly two hundred years ago. In Eastern Europe at the present time, many millions of Catholics are having to decide which things are, and which things are not Caesar’s, and the outcome of their decisions is, for many of them, literally a matter of life and death. Now the number of martyrs in the Popish Plot persecution was, in contrast with some modern persecutions, comparatively small. Between 1678 and 1681 twenty-five¹ priests and laymen died on the scaffold, and more than a dozen others are known to have died in prison.² But the episodic history of the Popish Plot bears a sickening resemblance to the pattern of modern persecution. There was the ‘discovery’ of an alleged treasonable plot, there were the carefully staged treason trials, there was an elaborate campaign to vilify and to calumniate the Catholic body as a whole and to stir up public animosity against it, and there was an attempt to create a schism among the Catholics themselves by offering them an Oath of Allegiance which denied the authority of the Pope. History indeed repeats itself. It may be worthwhile, I think, to study some few forgotten writers in a neglected episode in English history, if only for the light which they may throw upon our present problems.

1 R. Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London 1924), p. xxxvi.

2 Challoner, p. 564. Of course the numbers of those who died in gaol will never be accurately known until the post-mortem inquisitions of all the English gaols are collated.

The objection, that the kind of writing with which I shall be dealing is not literature, is based on a misconception, a Romantic misconception, that literature ought to deal only with the sublimities of self-expression. But the Restoration was the age of ‘occasional’ literature, and the age when English prose fully developed itself as a medium for the communication of ideas in the cut and thrust of political and religious controversy. The Catholic pamphleteers, whose work was composed in haste and stealth, and printed and distributed under the conditions of the gravest difficulty and personal danger, played their part, too, in the development of a modern prose style.

The Popish Plot persecution could never have occurred had not the Restoration period been one of moral disintegration and decay. I refer, of course, not only to the symptoms of moral decay (in the narrowest sense of the word moral) that we find in the Restoration drama, but also to the wider collapse of social and political morality which, in turn, can be attributed to the collapse of the court culture of the early Stuart period.

The rise of a figure like Shaftesbury during the Restoration marks the beginnings of modern politics in the worst sense. Shaftesbury brought into existence the party machine as a vehicle of political expediency. He divorced politics from moral and ethical considerations, and set about the reorganization of the national administration and system of justice as an instrument of local and immediate political triumph and power. One has only to read Sir George Sitwell’s book The First Whig³ or North’s Examen⁴ to see with what skill and assiduity the law courts, the popular press, and popular demonstrations and displays, were organized to make public opinion the instrument of political power. It is only if we have a sense of the political decadence of the period that we can appreciate how the Popish Plot persecution came into existence at all. For the earlier persecutions of Catholics from the time of Henry VIII had been motivated by the assertion of Royal Supremacy, but the Popish Plot began and ended as a screen under which an unscrupulous politician aimed at the total overthrow of monarchical authority – and lying, slander, jobbery, and judicial murder were but the means that Shaftesbury used to attain his ends.

3 Brighton 1894. Esp. Chaps V and VI.

4 London 1740.

Charles II had had no children by his Catholic wife. The heir to the throne was therefore James Duke of York, a professed Catholic. The King of France, England’s great rival, was a Catholic. It was these three simple facts which formed the basis for what F.S. Ronalds has rightly called ‘the attempted Whig revolution’.⁵

5 F.S. Ronalds, ‘The Attempted Whig Revolution of 1678–81’. Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences (Urbana 1937), Vol. XXI, Nos. 1 & 2.

It is not to my purpose to describe in detail the history of the Plot. Suffice it to say that Titus Oates, a seedy adventurer and pathological liar, came forward with a fantastic story of a plot by the English Catholics, aided by an invasion from France, to rise up and overthrow the Protestant government. Oates’s appearance before Parliament in October 1678 was shortly followed by the mysterious death of the very magistrate before whom he had originally laid his story. The occasion was ideal for the Whig propaganda machine. A reign of terror swept from London across the whole country. Catholic priests and laity (and especially Jesuits or those connected in any way with the Royal Household) were arrested indiscriminately, and held in prison until Oates and his accomplices were ready to fix some tale of murder or treason upon them. Anti-Catholic and anti-Papal processions were organized in London, and anti-Catholic fears and prejudices, and particularly the memory of the Gunpowder Plot, were revived.

The Catholic community, priests and laity alike, who had hitherto lived quietly and peaceably among their fellow countrymen since the Restoration, now found that, owing to the slanders of Oates and his masters, they were regarded as a body capable of treason and murder, to say nothing of perjury. To add to their difficulties, the Catholics were confronted with a great stumbling-block in the very question of their loyalty to the Throne. Many Catholic families had suffered by loss of life and estates during the Civil Wars, and yet, much as they would have liked to make a public affirmation of their loyalty, the only means by which they could do so was to take the Oath of Allegiance.⁶

6 cf. C. Dodd, Church History of England, ed. M.A. Tierney (London 1841), Vol. IV, pp. 66 sq.

The Oath of Allegiance had been first formulated in the reign of James I, after the Gunpowder Plot, with the deliberate intention of creating a schism among Catholics on a doubtful point of doctrine. It was drafted by an apostate Jesuit, Perkins, who well knew the difficulties of conscience that this Oath would cause, for, besides a declaration of loyalty to the Crown, it contained unwarrantable aspersions on Papal authority. The Oath was condemned by two breves of Pope Paul V in 1606 and 1607,⁷ but the controversy among Catholics which raged around it is a sad indication of the almost diabolic ingenuity of its devisers. At every ensuing outbreak of persecution, their enemies forcibly presented Catholics with the Oath, for it served a twofold purpose. Firstly, it divided the Catholics against themselves, and served to break their united front, and secondly, it meant that those who refused it on conscientious grounds could be held up to public execration as refusing to declare their loyalty to the Crown.

7 Printed in Dodd, pp. xcl and cxlvi.

This ‘state trick’, as Dodd, the Catholic historian, calls it,⁸ brings us to the central issue confronting the Catholic body during the Popish Plot. Catholics had been, and were to continue to be until the death of the Young Pretender, instinctively loyal to the House of Stuart. And yet the good Catholic, however eager to show himself a loyal subject at such a crisis as the Popish Plot, was forced, on conscientious grounds, to refuse the Oath of Allegiance, and his conduct was thus made to appear in the eyes of the world as an admirable confirmation of all the current slanders against him.

8 Dodd, p. 79.

The foregoing description of the broad outlines of the political and social setting has been made in order to bring out, as clearly as possible, the precise situation with which the Catholic writers of the Restoration period had to contend. The first Catholic pamphleteer to whom I should like to draw your attention was a representative of the Catholic laity – Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine.⁹ Castle-maine began as a pamphleteer before the outbreak of the Popish Plot, and the three of his works which I shall consider are The Catholique Apology (1674), the Compendium (1679), and the Manifesto (1681).¹⁰ When I say that Castlemaine represents the Catholic laity, I mean of course that he represents the Catholic nobility and gentry, for it was not yet the Age of the Common Man. For an instance of Castlemaine’s social views, we may quote his answer in the Apology to the charge that Catholicism goes together with ignorance:

But the greatest Wonder of all is, to heare Protestants still tell us, that Ignorance is a helpe to our Religion, whereas they see that not only the Catholics, that have bin from their Infancy bred so, are of the chiefest Ranck in England, and inferior to none in all natural & artificial Endowments, but that our Converts were, and still are Persons of Eminency both in their Parts and Quality. And whereas heretical seducers ever prey upon the meanest and simplest of the Land, & if they come to be considerable, ‘tis at last by their Number; On the contrary our Missioners had rather deale in Universities, than shops, because deep Points of Divinity (being always to be demonstrated a posteriori & by Deductions) are best comprehended by the wise; and therfor they not only gladly preach to the Learned and Noble, but as I said, when they chance to make Converts, ‘tis ten to one but they are Persons of prime Note, either for their Families or Accomplishments; & who instead of their former worldly hopes, contentedly resolve for Persecution, which to the amazement of their Enemies they so magnanimously undergo.

(pp. 163–4)¹¹

The Catholic martyrs of the Western Rising in the reign of Edward VI he calls ‘Devonshire clowns’ and their action ‘the madnesse or Capricio of an unruly Rabble’ (p. 386).

9 cf. J. Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics (London 1885), Vol. I, pp. 424 sq.

10 These are listed in D. Wing, Short Title Catalogue 1641–1700, as C 1240,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot: a study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period
• 2 Non-Catholic writers and Catholic Emancipation: an aspect of Sidney Smith, Shelley, Coleridge and Cobbett
• 3 Latter-day recusants
• 4 English Catholics without a Bishop 1655–1672
• 5 Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (1680)
• 6 Joseph Berington, The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (1793)
• 7 James Maurus Corker and Dryden’s conversion
• 8 English Catholic mystics in non-Catholic circles: the taste for Middle English mystical literature and its derivatives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries
• 9 Recusant historiography: an historian looks at the achievements of 25 years’ study of recusancy
• 10 William Leslie, Henry Howard and Lord Arlington 1666–67
• 11 John Brown, Scottish Minim (1569–1643): a tale of three title pages
• 12 English Counter-Reformation book culture
• 13 Review of Paul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven University Press 2004)
• 14 William Carter (c. 1549–84): recusant printer, publisher, binder, stationer, scribe – and martyr
• Index