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

on his friend’s success in dealing with religious subjects: ‘How you can prevail on the
society to publish such papistical documents I cannot well conceive... you deserve the
thanks of the catholic body, and have effected what no catholic before you probably ever
attempted.’ 13 Lingard had reason to be surprised and perhaps envious. By now his own
History of England had appeared. Published in eight volumes between 1819 and 1830, it
proved immensely popular in the sense that it rapidly ran through several editions, and
gained the support of such notable public figures as Lord Holland and Henry Brougham,
but Lingard had also been widely and violently attacked, particularly for his account of
the Reformation. Among others the Edinburgh Review and the Poet Laureate, Robert
Southey had, perhaps predictably, challenged his version of events. Less predictably, to
those outside the Catholic Church, his first and most active critic had been Milner, who
found Lingard heterodox on many points and not only condemned him in print but went
so far as to attempt to have his work put on the Index of books forbidden to Catholics.
That the writing of English history in the first half of the nineteenth century was
closely related to contemporary debates about Catholic Emancipation is well-known. 14 A
preoccupation with the events and characters of the Reformation was therefore a
recurring theme in the national self-examination that accompanied the various campaigns
for religious toleration and it figured in the work of artists and writers including Southey,
Cobbett, Mill and Carlyle. Antiquarianism made a considerable contribution to the
mixture of history, theology and politics and in the process revealed different styles of
antiquarian activity. Milner’s antipathy to Lingard, I would suggest, had as much to do
with a different attitude towards the nature of the past as with a different interpretation of
its events, while Gage’s ability to pass unscathed through the social and institutional
minefield that faced many Catholic antiquaries was also due, largely, to his methods and
his choice of subject matter.
For Milner, as for many of his contemporaries, especially those who read Scott,
the past was all about him. Like Lenoir in his Museum, or like Oldbuck in his study,
13
Hengrave mss 21/6/73.
14
See in particular Jones, John Lingard and Drabble, ‘Mary’s Protestant Martyrs and Elizabeth’s Catholic
Traitors in the Age of Catholic Emancipation’.
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