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

Æthelwold’s Benedictional, an illuminated MS. of the 10 th Century, in the Library of his
Grace the Duke of Devonshire’. The essay, which was followed by a transcript of the
Benedictional, explained what it was and set it in its historical and liturgical context.
Acknowledging the safe arrival of his copy Lingard noted:
I admire much the research and judgement which you display in your preliminary dissertation, but still
more (without disparagement to you) that extraordinary change in the public mind, which has permitted the
antiquarian society to publish under its auspices so papistical a treatise. Soon I hope religious bigotry will
be entirely extinguished. 44
The secret of Gage’s success was not a decline in bigotry. On the contrary his work could
easily be interpreted to suit anti-Romanism. A review of the Dissertation, which he kept
among his papers, signed ‘H. Y.’ and from an unidentified publication, suggests how
matters really stood. The writer praises Gage’s scholarship and goes on:
As Englishmen we look back with love and reverence on the ancient national Church of this Kingdom, and
lament, as often as we are reminded, that no remains of its peculiar rites have been suffered to descend to
us. The old national Churches, which formed the great body of the Catholic Church, though they professed
the same faith, and practised the same worship, still retained with pious respect several peculiar practices
and ceremonies, which they had inherited from their apostolic founder: they were sisters all of the same
family, yet distinguished from each other by certain features. 45
This was the other way of accommodating the Catholic past to the Anglican
present. The High Church tradition of the Stuart antiquaries, notably Dugdale, maintained
that the English church had its own integrity, independent of both Rome and the Tudor
reformation, stretching back before Augustine to a hazy past emanating from the first
church of Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. 46 Lingard had specifically set out to
counter this version of events in his Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, which argued
that the early church in England was under the direct authority of Rome. This, like his
44
Lingard to Gage, May 24 1832, Hengrave mss 21/4/129.
45
Hengrave mss 21/4/116.
46
See Hill, ‘“The ivi’d ruins of folorn Grace Dieu”’ and Corbett, ‘The Title-Page and Illustrations to the
Monasticon Anglicanum’.
216