The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688-1791

By Geremy Carnes

Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship implicitly or explicitly associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among the aristocracy cosmopolitan, its intellectuals increasingly attracted to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and skepticism, and its membership growing among the middle and working classes. This community had an impact on the history of the English nation out of all proportion with its size—and yet its own history is glimpsed only dimly, if at all, in most modern accounts of the period.

The Papist Represented reincorporates the history of the English Catholic community into the field of eighteenth-century literary studies. It examines the intersections of literary, religious, and cultural history as they pertain to the slow acceptance by both Protestants and Catholics of the latter group’s permanent minority status. By focusing on the Catholic community’s perspectives and activities, it deepens and complicates our understanding of the cultural processes that contributed to the significant progress of the Catholic emancipation movement over the course of the century. At the same time, it reveals that this community’s anxieties and desires (and the anxieties and desires it provoked in Protestants) fuel some of the most popular and experimental literary works of the century, in forms and modes including closet drama, elegy, the novel, and the Gothic. By returning the Catholic community to eighteenth-century literary history, The Papist Represented challenges the assumption that eighteenth-century literature was a fundamentally Protestant enterprise.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781644530207

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The Papist Represented

The Papist Represented

Literature and the English Catholic

Community, 1688–1791

Geremy Carnes

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2017 by Geremy Carnes

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-019-1 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-020-7 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carnes, Geremy, author.

Title: The papist represented : literature and the English Catholic community, 1688–1791 / Geremy Carnes.

Other titles: Literature and the English Catholic community, 1688–1791

Description: Lanham, MD : University of Delaware Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017020374 (print) | LCCN 2017034891 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | English literature—Catholic authors—History and criticism. | Catholics in literature. | Catholics—England—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC PR858.C28 (ebook) | LCC PR858.C28 C37 2017 (print) | DDC 820.9/921282—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020374

For my parents, Greg and Michelle

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support, financial and otherwise, of the University of Michigan and Lindenwood University. In the earliest stages of this project, Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School provided me with the time and money to deeply explore my subject of study. I was able to bring the project to a happy conclusion thanks to Lindenwood’s support for faculty research. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of my provost, Marilyn Abbott; my dean, Michael Whaley; and my department chair, Kyle Glover.

In the eight years I have worked on this project, I have been immensely fortunate to benefit from the guidance, assistance, and simple goodwill of colleagues, friends, and family. This book began as my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my graduate school advisors. Lincoln Faller was a wise, incisive, and patient dissertation chair who never complained about having to read the immense, rambling first drafts of many of these chapters. David Porter’s comments on my work refined my thinking and my writing in ways I never knew they needed refining. Sean Silver has always been ready to assist me not just with my research but also with the practical side of navigating academia. I also wish to thank Clement Hawes, David Hancock, Christina Lupton, Sunil Agnani, Gregg Crane, Scotti Parrish, and Vivasvan Soni for their insights, collegiality, and generosity with their time during my years in the program. And I will always hold a special place in my heart for my brilliant graduate school cohort, particularly Karen McConnell, Andromeda Hartwick, Brian Matzke, Molly Hatcher, and Alison Carr. Their friendship provided me with incalculable support during our time at Michigan, and still does to this day. At Lindenwood University, I have been blessed with amiable and generous colleagues, among them Elizabeth Fleitz, Travis McMaken, Ben Cooper, and Sarah Noonan, whose camaraderie helped me to keep driving forward with this project. And a special thank you must go to Justine Pas, my first-year mentor and first friend at Lindenwood. I also wish to thank the English Department and School of Humanities staff at these institutions, especially Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, and Elaine Ragland, for all of the work they do to help faculty and students find time to conduct their research.

Many other individuals and organizations have influenced the shape this book has taken, more than I could name here, but I wish to single out a few. For workshopping several of this book’s chapters at various stages of their development, I want to express my gratitude to the members of the University of Michigan’s Eighteenth-Century Studies Group and Nineteenth-Century Forum, and Washington University’s Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, especially Tili Boon Cuillé and Rebecca Messbarger. I received valuable feedback from audiences at conferences hosted by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the International Society for Heresy Studies. With regard to the ISHS, I wish to give a particular thanks to its president and vice president, Gregory Erickson and Bernard Schweizer, who drew me into the organization while it was still in its infancy, deepening my exposure to the discipline of religious studies. Further thanks must go to Adam Beach, George Justice, Misty Anderson, and Lori Branch, all of whom helped me along in this project in different ways over the years. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Restoration, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, and the University of Delaware Press, whose insightful feedback refined my arguments.

Finally, I wish to thank some of the friends and family who helped me in more intangible ways throughout my life. Adam Burns, Robby and Angela Maher, and the rest of the Maher clan were generous in giving me opportunities to escape the academic world from time to time. Micki Fasteland selflessly gave me emotional support and encouragement in the times when I doubted whether I would finish this book. From the drafting of this book’s first chapter to the completion of its final revisions, Trista Doyle has brought warmth and friendship to my life. I owe the oldest and deepest debt to my extended family, who have shown me only kindness for as long as I can remember. This book is for my parents, Greg and Michelle Carnes, for all of the support and guidance they have given me over the years.

Portions of this book have appeared in other publications. Chapter 1 is a revised and expanded version of "Catholic Conversion and Incest in Dryden’s Don Sebastian," Restoration 38, no. 2 (2014): 3–19. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as "‘Let not religion be named between us’: Catholic Struggle and the Religious Context of Feminism in A Simple Story," The Eighteenth-Century Novel 9 (2012): 193–235. I am grateful to Restoration and The Eighteenth-Century Novel for their permission to reprint my work.

Introduction

The title of this study invokes one of the most famed defenses of Catholics in early modern English literature, John Gother’s The Papist Misrepresented and Represented: or, A Twofold Character of Popery. Writing in 1685 under the protection of England’s last Catholic king, James II, Gother was one of a number of Catholic controversialists who attempted to rehabilitate the image of English Catholics in the eyes of their Protestant countrymen. A former Protestant himself, Gother described the popular Protestant conception of a Catholic, a figure he called The Papist Misrepresented. This figure is "a perverse, malicious sort of Creature, Superstitious, Idolatrous, Atheistical, Cruel, Bloody-minded, Barbarous, Treacherous, and so Prophane, and every way Unhumane, that ’tis in some manner doubted whether he be a Man, or no. Ingrained in the English Protestant imagination, the Papist Misrepresented was ubiquitous in English literature and culture, reinforcing the deeply held prejudice against Catholics and their religion. Gother’s text aims to supplant this figure with another, The Papist Represented. As described by Gother, the Papist Represented is a Catholic whose Faith is according to the Proposal of the Catholick Church; which, by Christ’s Command, he is oblig’d to believe and hear; and whose whole design in this World, is for the obtaining Salvation in the next."[1] This Papist Represented is, of course, as fictitious in his saintliness as the Papist Misrepresented is in his monstrousness, but Gother, like most clerical controversialists, was not inclined to subtlety. Indeed, there probably was not time for subtlety. No one expected James II to reign very long. If Gother’s oppressed community was to have any chance of obtaining lasting toleration, it needed to create a revolution in the popular representation of Catholics, and to do so quickly. Unfortunately for Gother and his coreligionists, a revolution did take place within the next few years, but it was James II who was overthrown, not the Papist Misrepresented.

Another century would pass before Parliament trusted Catholics with most of the basic rights and privileges of English subjects, including that of openly practicing their religion. That century was the most important period of transformation for the English Catholic community’s relationship with the Protestant majority since the reign of Elizabeth I. Yet while recent work by historians has done much to illuminate the political and social processes behind this momentous transformation, scholars of eighteenth-century literature have had little to say about the role literature played in challenging the most fundamental prejudice of the English nation. How did a figure so familiar, so culturally omnipresent as that of the Papist Misrepresented, lose so much of its power over the Protestant imagination in the hundred years separating the Glorious Revolution and the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791? What kinds of Papists Represented combated with it? How did literature generate solidarity within the English Catholic community and elicit sympathy for it from without?

Many scholars would struggle to name a single English Catholic character or to point to a clear allusion to the English Catholic community from a major literary work of the period, outside of The Rape of the Lock or some late-century Gothic tales. No doubt the apparent indifference to English Catholicism displayed by canonical eighteenth-century writers is partly responsible for the inattention paid to it by modern eighteenth-century scholars. With the period’s most well-read texts seemingly silent on the subject, one might assume that eighteenth-century English people were no longer greatly concerned by domestic Catholicism and that any controversy regarding it was confined to polemical literature. Such an assumption would be a mistake, however. First, we must recognize that canon formation is an ideological process. Anti-Catholic texts that embarrass our treasured notions about the Age of Reason are absent from our anthologies, not because they do not exist, but because they do not suit the narratives we have chosen to tell about the eighteenth century.[2] Then we must admit that Catholic writers had good reason to be evasive on the subject of their religion. The public was quite aware of the confessional status of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and it was generally willing to enjoy their writings regardless, but its indulgence was not without bounds. These Catholic authors usually sought to keep their religion from figuring conspicuously in their writings. But under closer examination, we can find characters in many of their works onto whom the English Catholic community’s experiences have been projected. If we ignore the indirect strategies by means of which these authors informed their works with their experiences as Catholics, we are, intentionally or not, colluding in the continued exclusion of their marginalized community’s perspective from our understanding of the century.

As for Protestant writers, they had their own reasons for silence, and in some cases, that silence speaks volumes. Samuel Richardson’s silence on the subject of English Catholicism in Sir Charles Grandison, for instance, is a very ostentatious one; he repeatedly calls attention to that which he will not name. This kind of silence—the treatment of English Catholicism as an open secret, as a problem whose only solution lies in very pointedly pretending it does not exist—is characteristic of midcentury Protestant polite society. Scholarship needs to probe this silence, not imitate it, to clarify and illuminate what these texts sought to render obscure or invisible. It remains distressingly common to find literary criticism in our field that implicitly or explicitly invokes the myth of a dying English Catholic community, one that was slowly being crushed under the pressures of the penal laws or that had retreated out of the world and into its own closed society on rural estates. Eighteenth-century English Catholicism does not appear as a community of real human beings in most literary scholarship, but as an abstraction. Whether treated as a foreign threat or as a native religious tradition, as a source of Protestant fears or as the subject of Protestant persecution, the English Catholic community is almost always reduced to a homogenous, unremarkable Other that serves in some way to inform our understanding of a complex English Protestant culture.

If we reject obscurity, myth, and abstraction, and turn instead to the past forty years of historical research on the eighteenth-century English Catholic community, we find an oppressed yet dynamic and adaptive religious minority of great complexity. The English Catholic community did not merely survive the eighteenth century, but grew. Its leaders among the nobility were engaged, proactive, and worldly. It found converts among the working and middle classes, and those middle-class adherents played an ever greater role in its affairs. Its intellectual environment was sufficiently modern and capacious to foster, and eventually be dominated by, skeptical theologians and leaders who embraced the Enlightenment’s ideals of liberty and its critique of papal authority. Exile and education led many of its members to homes on the Continent, forging international ties that it exploited at need and generating a cosmopolitan spirit within the community. In England, its center of mass shifted from the countryside to the cities, where, with only token efforts at covertness, it began to build chapels for its burgeoning population in spite of penal laws that continued to render the celebration of its religion illegal. And, of course, the community had its own history, one that often influenced the larger history of eighteenth-century England yet that is glimpsed only dimly, if at all, in most modern accounts of the period.[3]

The common narrative of eighteenth-century English history vis-à-vis Catholicism is, quite simply, wrong. And given how important that narrative is to other narratives that have traditionally defined the period (those tracing developments in secularization, toleration, and Protestant nationalism, to name only a few), acknowledging the realities of the English Catholic community entails calling much of what we know about the century into question. How does eighteenth-century literary history change when the silences, omissions, and misconstructions surrounding the English Catholic community are removed? Where can we find Catholic influence, direct or indirect, on the century’s major literary experiments? What role did literature play in reconciling both Catholics and Protestants to religious pluralism? And how did the Catholic community shape, and how was it shaped by, its literary representation? These are the questions that drive this book and that it aims to answer—or rather, to begin to answer, as the project of returning English Catholic experiences and history to our study of eighteenth-century literature must be an ongoing one.

For this study, I have chosen to focus on a narrow subset of representations of English Catholics: representations in major literary texts that attempted to portray Catholics as sympathetic, realistic (and thus, imperfect) human beings—the somewhat scruffier siblings of Gother’s saintly Papist Represented. The presence of such representations in these texts is intriguing, as strongly negative representations of Catholics remained prevalent in English culture. The Georgian era was not one of toleration and politeness, or even indifference, in matters of religion, despite what some narratives of rapid secularization would have us believe. Anti-Catholicism remained strong at all levels of society at least until 1746, and among the lower classes through the end of the century (the Gordon Riots standing as the clearest testimony to this prejudice’s persistence). Anti-Catholic rhetoric was not merely a vestigial inheritance from a seventeenth century plagued by religious wars and revolutions; it was woven into the fabric of eighteenth-century English society and was crucial to the development of a shared British identity.[4]

It is thus unsurprising that eighteenth-century writers of polite literature—including, at one time or another, all of the writers I focus on in this study—continued to use traditional anti-Catholic stereotypes. Yet at the same time, simplistically negative portraits of Catholics were increasingly challenged in eighteenth-century texts—often subtly or circumspectly, but challenged nonetheless. These challenges developed alongside the growing acknowledgment by both Protestants and Catholics of two facts: that England would never be brought back into the Catholic fold and that the English Catholic community was not going to wither away and disappear.[5] Only after Catholic emancipation in the early nineteenth century would the modern concept of majority-minority relations fully develop, but we can see the early stages of that development through the changing approach to Protestant-Catholic relations in the eighteenth century.[6] As the English slowly accepted that their kingdom’s religio-political dynamics were undergoing a fundamental transformation, there was likewise a transformation in the anti-Catholic discourse through which Protestants understood and addressed those dynamics, and in the Catholic response to that discourse.

It hardly need be said that these transformations were not easy. They required much imaginative work, on the part of both Protestants and Catholics, to reconceptualize what it meant to be an English Catholic in this changed religious and cultural landscape. Above all, the "Unhumane" Papist Misrepresented needed to be humanized.[7] This work could not be left entirely to Catholic apologists like Gother; to influence a broad public, it would also have to be performed in works of popular and polite literature. Such texts’ role in dealienating Catholics—however tentative or limited this dealienation was—is a dimension of eighteenth-century literature that, like the English Catholic community itself, has been largely overlooked.

At the heart of this book is a series of case studies of texts by five major eighteenth-century writers who, for a variety of reasons, attempted to humanize the English Catholic experience, representing the Catholic community to itself and to Protestant communities as worthy of sympathy and toleration. This is not necessarily to say that they portray Catholics positively; all of the texts by Protestant writers examined here are anti-Catholic to one degree or another. Yet the mere act of creating Catholic characters with a claim to the same experience of interiority as Protestants generated sympathy for them, whatever flaws they might have or mistakes they might make. Though guided by disparate motives, the writers who appear in these case studies all concluded that traditional representations of the English Catholic community were undesirable or, at the very least, unsustainable, given England’s changing religio-political dynamics. This book attempts to understand those motives, and it explores the representations of English Catholicism that resulted from them. Over the course of the century, these writers conveyed the humanity of English Catholics through veiled allusions, anxious displacements, telling silences, and, ultimately, in the open depiction of an English Catholic priest as the protagonist of a novel. Elizabeth Inchbald’s creation of the first complex, unabashedly English Catholic hero in a widely respected novel is past due for acknowledgment by scholars as one of the most significant—not to mention daring—milestones in the history of English literature.

In an effort to cast some light onto the obscurity in which the eighteenth-century English Catholic community remains shrouded, this introduction provides a digest of recent historical and critical work on the topic. The first section provides a discussion of current literary scholarship that addresses early modern English Catholicism, prefaced by some remarks on the progress of the turn to religion in eighteenth-century studies. Next, I offer an overview of traditional narratives of English Catholic history and of the revisionist studies that have overturned them. Subsequent sections provide an account of the qualities that differentiated the eighteenth-century English Catholic community from its seventeenth- and nineteenth-century incarnations, an explanation of my decision to limit this study to representations of English (as opposed to British) Catholics, a discussion of anti-Catholic sentiment in the period, and a brief note on this study’s debts and contributions to the wider field of minority studies.

The Turn to Religion and Eighteenth-Century Literary Scholarship

This book is not a study of religion per se, but of representations of a community established around a religious identity. As such, it does not delve into details of religious practice or theology except when such matters can elucidate these representations. That said, in arguing for the importance of religious identity to the experiences of eighteenth-century English people, this book takes part in the turn to religion in early modern studies. That phrase refers, of course, to Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti’s oft-cited essay The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies, which traced the emergence of religion as a subject of central importance to early modern scholars, especially in the decade or so prior to the essay’s publication in 2004.[8] Jackson and Marotti urged further serious study of religion in the period, and judging by the number of books on the subject that continue to flow steadily from academic presses, their call has been heeded by many. At this point, early modern scholars are no longer turning to religion; they are facing it, or at least a critical mass of them is, and what they are seeing from this new vantage point has already radically transformed our understanding of early modern literature and culture.

That is, it has with respect to literature and culture from the first half of the early modern period. In their review of major scholarship on religion in early modern literature, Jackson and Marotti focus almost to exclusion on studies performed on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature. Few works they cite extend past the English Civil War, and only one—a monograph by Raymond D. Tumbleson, discussed below—penetrates well into the eighteenth century.[9] Unfortunately, this is not an oversight on the part of Jackson and Marotti. In a more recent essay, Jennifer Snead undertakes an overview of the turn to religion in eighteenth-century studies, concluding, "Works specifically dedicated to religion or religious topics in eighteenth-century literature are . . . few and far between."[10] Simply put, scholars of eighteenth-century literature are running well behind their counterparts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century studies in making the turn to religion.

This laggardness is, I suspect, primarily due to the continued influence of the Whig interpretation of history. This narrative has long identified the eighteenth century as the period during which England developed a modern, largely secular worldview that reconceptualized religious belief and practice as matters belonging to the private, rather than the public, sphere. Having freed itself of any danger of domination by absolutist or Catholic powers with the Glorious Revolution, eighteenth-century English people grew tolerant of other religions, content to keep their religious disagreements private. Shaped by the processes of secularization and governed by a social code of politeness and tacit tolerance, eighteenth-century society had little interest in the persecutions and doctrinal contentions of the two preceding centuries.

This narrative of eighteenth-century history has encountered growing skepticism in recent decades, thanks to challenges by revisionist historians, most prominently J. C. D. Clark. In his 1985 study English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Régime (and in a revised edition published in 2000), Clark rejects the view that modernization and secularization made major advances in the period.[11] Eighteenth-century England, he argues, was a confessional state, held together by a hegemonic vision of patrician and Church of England authority until it was finally destroyed by the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the Reform Act in 1832.[12] While Clark’s interpretation of England as a confessional state has not gained wide acceptance, his work, alongside that of other revisionist historians, has done much to place religion and religious institutions back at the center of eighteenth-century English society and culture.[13] That said, Whiggish history—and in particular, its secularization paradigm—continues to influence eighteenth-century literary scholarship. Snead suggests that the historical influence of the secularization paradigm on the field is largely responsible for its reluctance to embrace the study of religion. Alison Conway and Corrinne Harol, in their essay Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century, contend that, while literary scholars have shown their willingness to accept the factual inaccuracy of the traditional secularization paradigm, they have been slow to enter debates about its norms and legacies and how they affect the field. Thus, postsecular work that challenges the simple binary of religion and secularism or that interrogates the construction of those concepts remains uncommon in eighteenth-century studies.[14]

Indeed, far from moving beyond the secularization paradigm, some scholars of the eighteenth century remain powerful proponents of that element of Whiggish history. Perhaps the most visible of them today is Steve Pincus. His book 1688: The First Modern Revolution made waves when it was published in 2009, sparking a debate over religion’s role in the event that traditionally marks the beginning of the eighteenth century in England. Given its impact on conversations about religion and secularity in the period, particularly with regard to Catholicism, we must pause here a moment to address its claims. Pincus actually purports to refute the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution: whereas Whiggish history has generally treated the revolution as a conservative historical moment that sought to preserve traditional English liberties and religion against absolute monarchy and papal authority, Pincus sees the revolution as a radical effort to create a modern state based on new understandings of political and economic liberties.[15] Yet, as many critics of Pincus’s work have observed, he does not stray as far from the Whig narrative as he seems to believe he does.[16] Among other things, he shares the Whiggish position that the revolution paved the way for a secular, rapidly modernizing eighteenth-century England. Indeed, Pincus claims that England had already secularized prior to the revolution. Religion remained an important element of English political life, but it had ceased to dominate it, Pincus writes. The English, by 1685, had begun to move beyond identity politics.[17] Pincus’s real opponents, then, are not the stalwarts of the Whig interpretation of history, whose views he does as much to revive as refute. His opponents are the revisionist historians like Clark who have argued that the Glorious Revolution was not particularly revolutionary and that old-fashioned religious bigotry was one of its primary motivating factors.

Pincus does acknowledge that the Glorious Revolution would not have happened without the deep religious divides in England, yet he seeks to minimize religion’s role at every turn. These efforts to downplay religion occasionally result in some rather dubious claims.[18] Particularly disconcerting are the lengths to which he goes to reframe religious violence in secular terms. He claims that scholars have mistaken the extensive and brutal anti-Catholic violence of 1688 and 1689 for a manifestation of traditional anti-Catholic prejudice, when those acts can be better understood as attacks on the instruments and symbols of James II’s modern and Gallican state.[19] Better understood by whom, exactly? Did the rioters understand that they were really beating symbols and instruments of a modern Gallican state? And if so, why did Catholics make up such a disproportionate number of the instruments attacked when so many of James’s supporters were Protestant Tories?

Pincus’s monograph and the responses it has provoked from other scholars reveal that questions about the role of religion and religious identity in the eighteenth century are far from settled. Many scholars continue to doubt that religious difference is crucial to understanding the eighteenth century or its literature, and despite considerable evidence to the contrary, some continue to backdate the secularization of English politics and culture to the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. This state of affairs is unfortunate, as literary scholars who do take eighteenth-century religion seriously have offered invaluable new perspectives on social movements such as early feminism and the culture of sensibility,[20] on the development of modernity and the modern self,[21] on prominent genres such as courtesan narratives and the Gothic novel,[22] and on major authors such as Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft (not to mention all of the authors featured in later chapters of this book).[23] Such scholars have begun the work of correcting the secular slant of eighteenth-century studies, work to which this monograph aims to make a contribution.

As limited as investigations of religion in eighteenth-century literature have been, scholarship that attempts to place literature in the context of ongoing debates about Catholicism and the Catholic community has been even rarer.[24] As noted by Jackson and Marotti, the turn to religion has been a great boon to Catholic studies in earlier periods, and certainly when it comes to historical scholarship, some major advances have also taken place in eighteenth-century studies (which will be discussed below).[25] But that historical work has been slow to penetrate literary studies of the period.

Due to the scant literary scholarship available on eighteenth-century Catholicism, I frequently turn to studies of seventeenth-century literature for commentary on the subjects explored in this monograph. Two of these studies deserve particular mention. Alison Shell’s Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 is an essential study of early modern Catholic discourse and literature.[26] Sifting through an impressive quantity of archival material, Shell produces a sketch of a distinctly Catholic literary tradition in the century between the accessions of Elizabeth I and Charles II, the influence of which can be felt well into the eighteenth century. The other study is Frances Dolan’s Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture, which adopts an approach closer to my own, seeking to contextualize strategies of Catholic representation. She identifies the central problem posed by English Catholicism as one of conceptualizing identity and difference: Undermining Englishness and Protestantism by not being different enough, English Catholics unsettled the nation’s relation to its own past and, with their allegiances divided between England’s sovereign and Rome’s pope, blurred the distinction between the English and foreigners, loyal subjects and traitors, us and them.[27] This problem of blurred boundaries between self and other is one reason why Catholics were so often associated with another group of people who suffered from confused representation in early modern discourse: women. Dolan demonstrates that in Protestant discourse, Catholics were persistently linked to women: similar yet different, familiar yet threatening, a subordinated group who yet dominated the culture’s imagination.[28] The influence of her work on Catholic feminization in Protestant discourse can be felt in several chapters of this study. It should be noted, however, that her emphasis on the indistinguishability of Catholics and Protestants, while entirely warranted in her study of seventeenth-century Catholicism, is not perfectly applicable in an eighteenth-century context (as is true of many aspects of Shell’s and Dolan’s analyses). As we shall see, the eighteenth century saw firmer distinctions drawn between the Catholic and Protestant communities. Yet ambiguity by no means vanished, and Dolan’s remarks are valuable for understanding Protestant fears through the eighteenth century and beyond.

Studies of the Catholic contexts of the Romantic Period have also informed this monograph’s analysis of Catholic literature at the close of the eighteenth century. The debate over the nature and degree of anti-Catholicism in Gothic literature plays a role in my analysis of Inchbald’s work.[29] So too does Michael Tomko’s British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History, and National Identity, 1778–1829, which demonstrates the impassioned and divided opinions of Romantic Period writers (Inchbald included) on the subject of Catholic emancipation.[30]

But what of the eighteenth century proper? The most significant study in our period has already been alluded to: Tumbleson’s Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745. Tumbleson’s monograph explores anti-Catholicism’s influence over English politics and literature in the latter years of early modernity, arguing that secularism should be understood not as developing in opposition to religious bigotry, but as arising out of it. Anti-Catholicism, then, plays a fundamental role in the creation of modernity, at least in the English context. What is anti-Catholicism? Tumbleson asks. It is the ghost in the machine, the endless, neurotic repetition by self-consciously rational modernity of the primal scene in which it slew the premodern as embodied in the archetypal institution, arational and universal, of medieval Europe.[31] Tumbleson’s exploration of anti-Catholicism provides a crucial corrective to narratives that unreflectively credit secularity’s growth in the eighteenth century to humanity’s better angels. For all its value, however, his monograph is, as its title indicates, the study of an imagined thing—Catholicism as understood by a generally anti-Catholic Protestant population—and it does not purport to investigate the relationship between anti-Catholic representations and the actual condition or behavior of Catholics in England.

Happily, as eighteenth-century religion and religious difference slowly receive more attention, we are beginning to see English Catholicism addressed in more studies. For instance, Howard D. Weinbrot’s Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 gives sustained attention to the religious contexts of the Gordon Riots.[32] Such studies are encouraging, but our field continues to suffer from a scarcity of scholarship that takes eighteenth-century English Catholic contexts as a primary subject. What scholarship exists mostly focuses on individual authors or works and will be discussed where appropriate in the following chapters. However, one collection of essays deserves to be singled out: a special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Eighteenth-Century Women and English Catholicism.[33] Editors Anna Battigelli and Laura M. Stevens assert that the issue’s essays extend recent scholarship’s claims that, far from receding from national discussion by contracting into an enfeebled opposition culture, Catholicism remained an unavoidable and complex component shaping eighteenth-century English national identity. As I do in this study, the contributors of these essays identify the characteristics that uniquely distinguished the eighteenth-century English Catholic community, and their studies focus on individuals who responded to that community with sympathy.[34] This issue’s collection of high-quality, historically attentive essays from a variety of disciplines is a hopeful sign of growing interest in English Catholicism in eighteenth-century studies.[35]

Changing Views on Eighteenth-Century Catholicism

The greatest obstacle to an informed analysis of the representation of English Catholics in the eighteenth century is the representation of eighteenth-century English Catholics in the nineteenth century. Although the direction that Whiggish histories of Catholicism would take was already discernible in the eighteenth century, the narrative of the community’s stagnation and backwardness became accepted fact over the course of the following century. That Whiggish historians held eighteenth-century Catholics in disdain should hardly inspire wonder, of course. What may come as a surprise is that nineteenth-century Catholics shared their contempt. Abused by both friends and enemies, misrepresentations of eighteenth-century Catholicism went virtually unchallenged until the 1970s. Even today, as the historian Gabriel Glickman writes, current judgements on the eighteenth-century recusants have accepted too readily the Whiggish and confessional narratives of Catholic cultural degeneration.[36]

According to the Whiggish narrative, the eighteenth century was a period of decline within the English Catholic community. Most Catholics remained fervently loyal to the deposed Stuart dynasty and anticipated its eventual triumphant return, but as the Jacobite cause met with failure after failure, Catholic numbers dwindled. Banished from political life, Catholics withdrew into their enclaves in the countryside where they could be protected from the worst effects of the penal laws by the rural Catholic squirearchy. These squires were generally honest, faithful leaders of their coreligionists, but they were also men of limited understanding and ability. The condescending sympathy with which Thomas Babington Macaulay describes a typical Catholic squire exemplifies the Victorian Whig view:

He was a Roman Catholic because his father and grandfather had been so; and he held his hereditary faith, as men generally hold a hereditary faith, sincerely, but with little enthusiasm. In all other points he was a mere English squire, and, if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more simple and clownish than they. The disabilities under which he lay had prevented his mind from expanding to the standard, moderate as that standard was, which the minds of Protestant country gentlemen then ordinarily attained. Excluded, when a boy, from Eton and Westminster, when a youth, from Oxford and Cambridge, when a man, from Parliament and from the bench of justice, he generally vegetated as quietly as the elms of the avenue which led to his ancestral grange. His cornfields, his dairy and his cider press, his greyhounds, his fishing rod and his gun, his ale and his tobacco, occupied almost all his thoughts.[37]

Under such guardians, Catholics dwelt in semi-feudal simplicity, submitting quietly to the economic penalties and other nuisances that recusancy entailed. These penalties, an unfortunate product of an earlier, more bigoted era, were rarely enforced under the tolerant regime of the Hanoverians and never posed an immediate threat to the community, but they slowly took their toll as men of ambition and sense apostasized to improve their prospects. Fortunately, England was rapidly secularizing, and most Protestants ceased to be troubled by the Catholic presence in their kingdom. But while the rest of England advanced into modernity, the Catholic community was left behind, lost in its traditions and in its dependence on its conservative and insular Catholic squirearchy. Only increasing Irish immigration and the gradual repeal of penal laws by England’s secularized leadership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saved the community from extinction.

So Whig history goes. And nineteenth-century Catholic historians did little to contest this narrative. They were embarrassed by their eighteenth-century forebears. The great Age of Martyrs had ended with the Glorious Revolution. Catholics’ subsequent submission to Protestant domination struck their Victorian coreligionists as a sign of weak devotion and weak spirits. It did not help that Victorian Catholicism was dominated by Ultramontanists (believers in a strong and broad papal authority), whereas eighteenth-century Catholics widely disavowed Ultramontanism. As a result, Victorian Catholic histories of the previous century were not flattering. Consider, for instance, the depiction of eighteenth-century Catholicism in John Henry Newman’s Second Spring sermon (1852). The Catholic convert writes that