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

so dangerous’. 41 In a very similar way, in the minds of many Britons, any awkwardness
in reconciling an admiration for the Catholic Middle Ages with loyalty to the Anglican
faith, could usually be satisfactorily if not quite logically resolved. By extension
contemporary Catholics, if they had been recusant since the Reformation, might be cast
in a romantically melancholy light. In John Henry Newman’s sermon, ‘The Second
Spring’, preached in 1852, he recalled the mental picture of the old catholics that he had
imbibed as a boy when he was an enthusiastic reader of Scott: ‘An old-fashioned house
of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate and yews, and the
report… that Roman Catholics lived there.’ 42
Although Hengrave Hall in Suffolk is not particularly gloomy, the ancestral home
of the Gage family, which provided Gage with the subject of his most substantial work,
The History and Antiquities of Hengrave, near enough fitted the bill. A splendid Tudor
mansion where Elizabeth I once stayed, it was begun shortly before the Reformation in
about 1525 for a branch of the family that did not adhere to the Roman Catholic faith. 43
Gage himself, however, who took the family name of Rokewode when he inherited the
baronetcy, could trace his pedigree back through generations of recusants to two notable
Ambrose Rookwoods. The elder was executed in 1605 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot
while the younger met the same fate at Tyburn in 1696 having been involved in the
Barclay Conspiracy, a Jacobite attempt to assassinate William of Orange. All of this
information, some of it researched in collaboration with Lingard, was included in the
Antiquities of Hengrave. It was no wonder that Lingard, the son of a respectable builder
whose family had never been known to threaten the British state in any way, was mildly
incredulous at what Gage could get away with. But of course distance lends enchantment
and Gage’s long-dead ancestors could easily be absorbed into the romance of history,
while Lingard’s awkward facts could not.
The other key to Gage’s success was his preference for the discrete subject rather
than the broad overview. In 1832, in Archaeologia, he published ‘A dissertation on St
41
Scott, The Antiquary, p.162.
42
Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, p.172.
43
See Pevsner, Buildings of England, Suffolk, pp. 262-264.
215