Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

historian John Lingard as having now ‘fallen into that strange category of people, (once
formalised by the censors of the Soviet Bloc) “who are not to be mentioned even to be
denounced” ’. 4 If this is perhaps putting it strongly, it is certainly the case that Lingard’s
importance as an historian whose methods helped to change the writing of history in
England, was deliberately obscured because of his Catholicism. 5 Conversely antiquarian
researches which generated politically and socially acceptable views of the past during
this period, however insecurely based in fact, might acquire considerable longevity. The
recent decision of the Scottish Parliament to establish an official register of tartans can be
traced back directly to the questionable findings of the Sobieski Stuarts. 6
As these examples suggest, the two areas in which antiquaries found themselves
during this period most frequently entangled with politics were Catholicism and
Jacobitism, issues which clearly overlapped but which evoked diametrically opposite
responses. Catholicism, still more or less illegal in 1789, remained controversial and
largely unpopular even after Emancipation in 1829. The successive convulsions sent
through the Established Church by the Tractarian movement were followed by the reestablishment
of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, which in turn provoked the Papal
Aggression crisis. 7 The Broad Church Protestantism of Prince Albert made High
Victorian England no very friendly place for Roman Catholics. Individual Catholic
antiquaries, however, met with different receptions. They might be mistrusted in different
ways or achieve a wide degree of acceptance, depending on their subjects and their
methods. Jacobitism, by contrast, not only ceased to be a threat over this period, it
became, largely due to the efforts of antiquaries, a romantic ideal, a part of Britain’s and
indeed specifically England’s national self-image, expressed in a love-affair with the
Highlands which reached its apogee at the mid-century, ten years after Victoria and
Albert’s first visit, with their purchase in 1852 of Balmoral.
4
Jones, John Lingard and the Pursuit of Historical Truth, p. ix.
5
My assessment of Lingard’s importance as an historian is largely based on the account in Jones’s book.
See also Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, p.138.
6
I am grateful to Hugh Cheape of the National Museums of Scotland for showing me his evidence to the
Economy, Energy and Tourist Committee of the Scottish Parliament in April 2008 as part of the
consultation on the establishment of the register.
7
See Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 4, ‘Catholics’, pp.365-376.
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