2011 Hertford College Magazine (Issue 91)

“ The pressure for
young scholars to
publish is such that
a PhD is expected to
be rushed into print
at the earliest possible
opportunity ”
Hertford past and present: From English Catholics to imperialism
families valiantly withstanding the pressures
of a Protestant nation, and clinging
to their private consciences under intense
moral and physical duress. Set against
such heroic highlights, the eighteenth-century
would be dismissed as a drab age for
the English Catholic faith: a time of waning
commitment and tepid spirituality,
after the last drop of martyrs’ blood had
been spilt, and before the kiss of life provided
by the Victorian religious revival.
As such, it had been neglected, even by
modern Catholic scholars with less tangible
confessional commitments. At the other
extreme, much of the more mainstream
scholarship of Early Modern political and
cultural history saw Catholics reflexively
as the defeated and silenced party in English
national life, cast to the margins as the
kingdom consolidated its reformed Protestant
identity. These alternative biases had,
ironically, pushed generations of very different
historians towards the same conclusion
- Catholic and non-Catholic historians
alike stressed the things that set recusants
apart from their native country, that alienated
them from the national esprit de corps.
An ‘upper class sect’ in the words of one
HERTFORD COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Gabriel Glickman
historian, hiding behind the walls of crumbling,
ivy-clad mansions; to Cardinal Newman
‘the people who shunned the light’.
My book argued that historians had
tended towards this verdict largely as a result
of looking in the wrong places. The archives
that I encountered in my research
- manuscripts stored in working monasteries,
in London Jesuit collections brooded
over by the skulls of sixteenth-century
martyrs, in county record offices and in
private family houses - revealed a mass
of hidden documentation: an untouched
window onto the Catholic perspective not
merely on eighteenth-century England, but
much of the continent of Europe. Especially
fruitful were the personal letters, political
treatises, sermons and fragments of poetry
preserved from the English seminaries and
convents founded in places such as Lisbon,
Paris, Douai and Rome: material now scattered
across an array of archives in England
and Europe, and, as a result, notably understudied.
Drawing upon the archival traces
left behind by families, poets, scholars
and priests, one begins to cast light upon
a world more complex and more compromised
than the old visions of suffering her-
27.