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

prying eyes of his household; and what he would do, or would not do for that purpose, is more, I believe,
than Mr Todd can inform us. However, I have no predilection for the word ‘garret’: any other of similar
meaning will equally serve my purpose. Shall I substitute ‘a room in the attic story?’ this may be thought a
more attic phrase and therefore more befitting the dignity of the subject. Or will ‘a room in the western
turret’, be preferred? It was certainly at the very top of the house, ‘editissima’, and rose about the western
end, ‘quae parti occidentali supereminent’. On a subject of this immense importance, I shall be most ready
to adopt any emendation, which may be thought the least degrading to the majesty of the English
monarch. 36
The argument of the Vindication, in so far as it pertained to method, was
unanswerable. Lingard’s rhetoric worked steadily on throughout to separate ‘romance’
from ‘history’, sifting out motives, concepts of majesty, associations of ideas, everything
but facts, from the documentary evidence, on which his balanced, Johnsonian prose, here
bears down with irresistible force before, in the last sentence, he steps back and leaves
the empty field to his opponent. Lingard’s lack of romance was taken personally in some
quarters as a criticism of the reader. It seemed, as Macaulay put it, that ‘his great
fundamental rule of judging is that popular opinion cannot possibly be correct’. 37 It was
also the key to Lingard’s popularity with the more open-minded, with Continental
historians and with William Cobbett, who used Lingard’s History as the basis for his own
polemic, History of the Protestant Reformation, which was published in instalments from
1824-26.
Lingard upset fondly held notions not only about English history but also about
Catholics. He was neither a polemicist like Milner, whose intemperance and association
with the ever troublesome Irish confirmed popular prejudice, nor a gentleman like Gage.
Lingard’s Catholic education at Douai had given him an international perspective. By
drawing on Continental sources, citing the dispatches of foreign diplomats at the Tudor
courts, he showed the English understanding of its Established Church to be not only
factually inaccurate in certain ways but, worse still, from the perspective of the Holy
Roman Empire, provincial. For that he has never, quite, been forgiven. As late as 1984
36
Lingard, A Vindication, pp. 81-82.
37
Quoted in Jones, John Lingard and the Pursuit of Historical Truth, p. 11.
213