John Milner, history and Ultramontanism
Frederick Husenbeth began his 1862 biography of John Milner 1826) by setting out the bishop's claims to historical attention. He fixed chiefly on his role in the politics of Catholic Emancipation, casting him in the role of a Moses, who, having led the English Catholics through their long journey towards their inheritance, expired within sight of it.1 This adulatory assessment of Milner still stands to the extent that a claim that the age of Milner succeeded that of Challoner in English Catholic history would probably still go uncontested,2 and that is due, in large measure, to his involvement in the Catholic politics of the age. It is an error to accord primacy to matters of politics in discussing Milner, one that he himself would have been anxious to correct. Still, his political role was important; for he was outstanding among English Catholics in his favourable disposition towards the character the Emancipation campaign acquired in Ireland, before and under O'Connell. It was thus that he was able to contribute to that Irish campaign - the one which mattered. His achievement, in other words, was to bring English Catholics, with much difficulty, to the Irish banner.Husenbetlťs typology, one might remark, needs revision. The native offered elsewhere in his work, recording Milner' s appellation as an 'English Athanasius',3 is better: At home, among English Catholics, he was liable to take on the appearance of a solus contra mundum in the attitude he manifested to Emancipation. Such a measure, he thought, was indeed to be welcomed, chiefly as a declaration that the Anglican state
embraced an alliance with Catholic Europe against the menace of the
Revolution. This was the view he manifested in his discussion of the ficulty his sovereign encountered in attempting to reconcile approbation of the measure with his coronation oath: changed circumstances, that the threat now came not 'from the side of Popery, ... [but] from the opposite quarter of Jacobinism', changed the obligation of the oath.4 Then again, 1 F. C. Husenbeth, The life of ... John Milner, D.D., bishop of Castabala... (Dublin, 1862),
ppi- 4.
2 Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), p. 36.
3 This frequently used approbation was perhaps first suggested by Milner himself, who declared that in opposing Enlightenment christological heterodoxy he aspired to trace 'the
steps, at an humble distance, of the great Athanasius'. John Milner, Letters to a prebendary ... with remarks on the opposition of Hoadlyism to the doctrines of the Church of England (2nd ed., Winchester, 1801), p. 505.
4 [John Milner], The case of conscience solved: or, Catholic Emancipation proved to be compatible with the coronation oath... (London, 1801), pp 5-35. See especially p. 29.
would not an increase in the legal and social status of Catholics assist
in securing the interests of their Church and advancing their religion? Yet Milner more often saw the passage of Emancipation as a testing at Meribah than as a triumphant crossing of the Jordan. He saw very great
dangers and most of his activity was concerned with averting them,
activity which often appeared to parts of the English Catholic body as an undermining and an obstruction of their efforts.5
Milner, however, was simply acting on the Catholic principle, most clearly enunciated by the Counter- Reformation papacy, that, in politics as in all conduct, matters relating to faith must be accorded precedence over all others. The achievement of Emancipation would be vitiated if this principle were not adhered to and Catholics succumbed to the temptation of using their victory to pursue their temporal advantage.
... by the Catholic cause, many of its advocates, now-a-days, stand not the safety and prosperity of the Catholic religion itself, as our forefathers understood it, but the exemption of its professors from certain civil disadvantages under which they labour: and to obtain this, too many of them seem to consider that the end fies the means...6
The final phrase condemned those in England, notably adherents of the Cisalpine party, whom he perceived to be sacrificing principle to tage, by surrendering to the British state such influence over the Catholic Church in its territories, that its 'jurisdiction, in this period of boasted Catholic Emancipation, is in great danger of being overwhelmed../7 Since adherence to the Catholic faith pre-eminently consisted in admitting 'that living speaking tribunal in the pastors of the universal church',8 a matter of jurisdiction clearly pertained to faith.
The dispute about government involvement in ecclesiastical
ments - it came to be designated somewhat inaccurately as the 'Veto
Controversy'9 - had flared. Irish Catholics, in Ireland and England, and the traditional lay representatives of the English Catholic body diverged 5 Narratives of Milner's political activity can be read in the works of Bernard Ward. See The
dawn of the Catholic revival in England 1781-1803 (2 vols, reprint, Farnborough, Hants., 1969, of orig. ed., London, 1909) and The eve of Catholic Emancipation... (3 vols, reprint,
Farnborough, Hants., 1970, of orig. ed., London, 1911).
6 J[ohn] M[ilner], Supplementary memoirs of English Catholics, addressed to Charles Butler... (London, 1820), p. 1.
7 John [Milner], 'A pastoral charge addressed to the Catholic clergy of the Midland District', being pt. 2 of a privately printed ad clerum of 1813 (Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives
[hereafter B.A.A.], Milner Papers, R 212, p. 1).
8 Milner, Letters to a prebendary, p. 411.
9 Fergus O'Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O'Connell and the birth of Irish democracy 1820-1830 (Dublin, 1985), pp 3-4.
in their responses to the proposals being made in the years after 180 with Milner stoutly representing the Irish view. He thought it desirab in 1811 to explain to the faithful of his own charge, more fully than had hitherto done, the extent of the threat he perceived. Adapting to purposes the arguments that had been developed in Ireland,10 he asser that the measure then proposed, ostensibly a very limited one, mere to allay Protestant anxieties, would lead to 'an efficient control over t appointment of our bishops and officiating priests, nominally in the crown, but effectively in the established clergy'. This was a means o advancing 'a settled plan ... formed by statesmen, the most eminent for their zeal to effect Catholic Emancipation'. This plan was 'to introd a sort of reformation into the Catholic Church'. In this design they h found accomplices in the Cisalpine movement.11 The precise content Milner's fears is revealed in his reference to the use to be made of 'the
established clergy', a group which aroused less anxiety among Irish veyors of this argument. He certainly did not view the whole body of the Anglican clergy with hostility. His stance was revealed in the course of his Letters to a Prebendary , where he had entered gleefully, fiercely and effectively into the heart of Anglican domestic quarrelling. He depicted that part of the establishment's clergy which had received an infusion of Enlightenment thought, its Low Churchmen,12 as apostates, tually and morally corrupted. He traced their views to the figure at the centre of the Bangorian Controversy of the early eighteenth century, Bishop Benjamin Hoadly - appropriately, in view of the regard in which this prelate was held by his immediate antagonists in controversy - and denounced his opinions as a denial of divine authority that could rightly be stigmatized as democratic. Such noxious thought contrasted with that of faithful Catholics, whose loyalty to the monarchy it was the purpose of
10 C. D. A. Leighton, 'Gallicanism and the veto controversy: church, state and Catholic
community in early nineteenth-century Ireland' in R. V. Comerford et al. (eds), Religion,
conflict and coexistence in Ireland: essays presented to Monsignor Patrick J. Corish (Dublin,
1990), pp 135-58, at pp 147-50.
11 [John] Milner, Instructions addressed to the Catholics of the Midland counties of England, on the state and dangers of their religion (Wolverhampton, 1811) pp 11-15. The work was reprinted by
Richard Coyne in Dublin. Coyne's title declared it to be addressed to 'the Catholics of the British Empire'.
12 The term 'Low Church' is used here in conformity Peter Nockles observation that, before the
rise of the Tractarians, it 'was confined to the Latitudinarian school associated with Benjamin
Hoadly and Francis Blackburne'. Those Anglicans whom Milner was apt to identify as commendable (and spoken of in this study as High Churchmen) were pre-eminently those whose views might have led them to oppose Low Churchmanship thus described, though with an exclusion of Evangelicals, whom some might, obviously often inaccurately, label as 'Calvinisť or even 'Puritan'. Milner's classification of Anglican parties might thus be said to anticipate Tractarianism's. Nockles offers a general discussion of Anglican party
nomenclature in Milner's period and after in his The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican
High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge, 1994), pp 25-43.
the work as a whole, ostensibly, to vindicate.13 The probable involvement in Catholic affairs of these clerics, and that of at least equally corrupted cians, threatened not merely to damage the external order of the Catholic Church, but to produce a schism, like that which followed the partial acceptance of France's Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Among those who accommodated themselves to the wishes of the state, there would be a direct subversion of Catholic belief, while others would face persecution.
If such fears as those Milner experienced now appear exaggerated, it is because of an inability to imagine sympathetically the contemporary reaction to a control of the Christian churches by what might now become states propagating a political religion to rival Christianity. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this was commonly advanced through vastly increased direct control of the churches' adherents, dering control of ecclesiastical institutions generally otiose. Moreover, this has been achieved in ways which have usually rendered persecution
equally otiose. Milner and his contemporaries understood that power
exercised over the churches constituted power over the population. Those in France who had sought such power by means of the Civil Constitution
in 1791 had, almost immediately afterwards, manifested themselves as devotees of a secular religion engaged in a violent suppression of
Christianity throughout Europe.14 The affairs of France - in any case perceived as remote by few during the years of the Revolution and the consequent warfare - impinged a great deal on Milner' s thought. He was certainly very intimately acquainted with them, from the arrival within the bounds of his mission at Winchester of perhaps a thousand refugee French clergy (sheltered in the King's House there) to the appearance and endurance of schism among those who remained in England in the period after the Napoleonic concordat, a circumstance that demanded his attention as a bishop. In his consideration of the specifics of the Catholic question, French precedents seem never to have been far from his mind. Thus, for example, Sir John Coxe-Hippisley's proposals for state ment in Catholic affairs earned him the sobriquet of 'our Ministre de Culte , that would be'.15 His address of 1811 reveals this habit of thought more fully: his denunciations of the proposed British measures was prefixed by an account of the assault on Catholicism on the European mainland, which had been launched by the Civil Constitution.16
13 Milner, Letters to a prebendary , chap. 7 (recte 8). See especially p. 433.
14 Michael Burleigh, Earthly powers : religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the
Great War (2nd ed., London, 2006), pp 48-111.
15 Milner to Denys Scully, 5 Aug. 1812 and 13 March [1813] (Brian MacDermot [ed.], The Catholic question in Ireland and England: the papers of Denys Scully [Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 1988], pp 370-2 and 437-8.
The description of Milner, a champion of resistance to civil interfer ence in ecclesiastical appointments and enemy of an avowedly Gallic party in England, as an Ultramontane hardly warrants defence. Is th however, to be taken as a claim that Milneťs significance is as the h binger, or indeed clear appearance, of that New Catholicism of the ni teenth century, in which, it is freely conceded, Ultramontanism, th matter of Roman power, was central?17 In what senses was Milner a Ultramontane? Such a claim for Milneťs significance is justified, thou continued use of the word 'Ultramontane', with a semantic range th
absorbs the 'New Catholicism', seems desirable. It is understandab
that, at present, historians should seek a new term - even a singular uninformative one - that suggests liberation of religious history from study of mere ecclesiastical structures. Yet the older term has the me both of indicating at once a great deal of the content of what is bei spoken of and, if explanation of causation is attended to, possessing less capacity for comprehensiveness. The re-assertion of its authority the nineteenth-century Papacy was a secondary phenomenon, best s as a response to a willing, zealous turning to Rome. This disposition its manifestations require explanations which seem hardly to exclud any areas of historical investigation. The papacy was turned to becau of perceptions of it - of its character and its right, willingness and ability to answer in some way the perceived needs or the desires of Catholics individuals, in their communities or as subjects of states. Whatever in enced that perception or those concerns of Catholics, as well the chan brought about by the means used to address them, are legitimately in tigated under the heading of Ultramontanism. It was a movement th
increased Papal power and popular influence simultaneously, as t
Church increasingly addressed and responded to its faithful directly. relations with states and politically influential elites worsened progr sively over the century, it became necessary - to use the language of m politics appropriately adopted by Christopher Clark - for Catholicism mobilise its support base'.18
Milner, it might in passing be observed, quite epitomized this chan relationship between the hierarchy and the laity, quite singularly am the English bishops of his day. While he found it highly advantageou his struggle against Cisalpinism to ally with the popular journalist a proprietor of the Orthodox Journal , William Eusebius Andrews, Bish Poynter of the London District denounced the monthly as a manifesta of 'that democratic spirit which is operating so powerfully against epi 17 For exemplification of the use of the term 'New Catholicism,' see Christopher Clark, 'T
New Catholicism and the European culture wars' in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Ka
(eds), Culture wars: Secular-Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe (Cambridge, 200 chap. 1.
18 Ibid., p. 11.
pal and all ecclesiastical authority' . While Poynter was held in opprobrium by many ordinary Catholics of his own district,19 Milner was regarded as a tribune of the lower ranks' of the Catholics - as Charles Butler complained to Cardinal Fontana.20 No doubt it was the bishop's struggle against the Vetoist politics of the English Catholic elite which chiefly enhanced his popular standing, particularly among the Irish, whose admiration of him was reciprocated - from sentiments which extended far beyond tion with their Catholic politics.21 Yet Milner's habitual uncompromising and aggressive polemic was, in any case, likely to appeal to the popular Catholic mind in an age in which it 'seemed to revel in ... [that which] created an even greater chasm between Catholics on the one hand and Protestants and freethinkers on the other'.22
Ultramontanism, it may conveniently be said, was nineteenth-century Catholicism's response to its age, begun, by a conventional reckoning, in Paris in 1789. Burke had famously extended the malignant phenomenon then manifested to encompass the Enlightenment of the Philosophes. Milner was inclined to reiterate the commonplace of the Catholic Enlightenment, that the evil of Enlightenment was 'fundamentally a Protestant emanation'.23 Indeed, the evil could be represented as ing in insular Protestantism in particular. Citing both English and French authors in his support, he asserted that
... the poisonous plant ... which has produced such dreadful
effects of late years on the Continent, was transplanted thither from this Protestant island, and that it was produced, nourished, and increased in its enormous growth, by that principle of private judgement in matters of religion, which is the very foundation of the Reformation.24
The historiography of what was referred to was diverse: the enon had its origins in varying eras and it was explained with reference to human thought and action, divine providence and supernatural evil in varying degrees. Among the French, it tended to retain the name of
19 William Poynter to James Kirk, 26 June 1819, Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster
[hereafter A.A.W.], Poynter Papers, A68.
20 Butler's 'Memorial to Cardinal Fontana ... Perfect [sic] of the Sacred Congregation de
Propaganda Fide', 23 March 1822, B.A.A., Milner Papers, C 2388, ff 3-4.
21 In view of the historiographical concern of the present essay, it is appropriate to note Milner's contribution to Irish antiquarianism, An inquiry into certain vulgar opinions concerning the Catholic inhabitants and antiquities of Ireland ... (3rd ed., London, 1810).
22 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: body and spirit in the secular age (London, 1999), p. 14
23 D. M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment : the French Counter- Enlightenment and the
making of modernity (Oxford, 2001), p. 10.
la Révolution ,25 but Blessed Pius IX avoided such dramatic characteris tion when, in the final proposition of the Syllabus of Errors, he spoke 'progress, liberalism and modern civilization/ terms to be understood he explained, in precisely the sense given to them by the enemies of t Church.26 If description varied, what remained constant was a sense th what was now everywhere manifest constituted a threat to civilizatio built on Catholic Christianity, as itself, as the mid-century Spanish stat man, Donoso Cortés put it, 'a complete civilization Between these two civilizations there is an unfathomable abyss, an absolute antagonism. T attempts directed at trying to achieve a compromise between them ha been, are, and will always be vain/27
If this clash of civilizations was general, both geographically and in the areas human activity it permeated, yet its pluriformity requires that the Catholic response be understood in the context of the ries of states, localities and their institutions. Awareness of the threat Christendom his times made clear was a dominant element in Milner' s thought and a guide of his actions; but his own concern was with his own corner of Christendom, with the Church in the British Isles and despite his estimate of the importance of and extremely favourable di position towards Irish Catholicism, his view was Anglo-centric. His ta was to influence the shaping of his Church's relationship to the nascen British - or, interchangeably, English - nation state, which, like those the European mainland, would come to seek justification for its existen as a state less in dynasty and religious confession, than in an already w developed national identity. The task involved political activity indee but also the historiographical activity that is the subject matter of t remaining parts of this essay. By means of politics, a space was to be found for Catholicism in British public life, but in such a way that its task of struggle against the evil now fully manifest in the Revolution was n compromised. By means of history writing, a place was to be found fo Catholicism - indeed it was to be the pre-eminent place - in England' national identity, in such a way that that identity might be more securely constituted as a barrier to the evil.
That he whom we can describe as the first of the distinguished Engli Ultramontanes should purposefully appear as an historian, in addition to manifesting that character when not ostensibly writing in it, is har surprising. He was a religious controversialist and religious controver 25 Geoffrey Cubitt, 'God, Man and Satan: strands in Counter- Revolutionary thought amon nineteenth-century French Catholics' in Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (eds), Catholici in Britain and France since 1789 (London, 1996), pp 135-50.
26 Roberto de Mattei, Pius IX, trans. John Laughland (Leominster, Hereford, 2004), par chap. 2.
27 Selected Woprksofjuan Donoso Cortés, trans, and ed. J. P. Johnson (Westport, Conn., 2000),
had, since the Reformation era, been conducted with historical
mentation. This, it has been noted, shaped much of the conduct of the
Emancipation debate, which in turn, in a noteworthy degree, shaped
subsequent British historical thought.28 Moreover, the tury phase of the enduring struggle which was to assume the name of Ultramontanism, the Counter-Enlightenment, had been the most zealous upholder of the historical discipline, defending it as it was seen to be penetrated by the ahistoricism of the Enlightenment29 and finding in it the effective antidote to its philosophically derived polemic.30 Milner stood firmly in this tradition, on a number of occasions noting the threat to historical study in general posed by attempts to discount on a priori grounds narratives of supernatural events, which the historian qua torian had no reason to challenge. It was true, certainly, that miraculous
events possessed immense value in the practice of apologetic; for the
Enlightenment's criticism of deriving religious assertions from gent historical phenomena, such as Lessing offered, had had but little influence. Thus Milner, as a bishop, was not at all unwilling, as was the
case with his contemporaries among the bishops of the British Isles, such as Archbishop Murray and Bishop Doyle,31 to make favourable
public declarations on particular contemporary occurrences. When he did so however (speaking of a miraculous cure obtained at St Winefride's Well in Flintshire), it is notable that he took the opportunity, not only to develop an argument against the Protestant inclination to seek a temporal confinement in the primitive Church of miraculous activity, but to assail a tendency to 'a general historical scepticism' by those whose dislike of divine involvement in history led them to argument likely 'to invalidate the credibility of human testimony'.32 Further, Milner had already made clear that his Counter-Enlightenment concern for the integrity of history was occasioned by more than the matter of supernatural elements in its narratives. In a short study designed to assert the identity of St George as an authentic Christian martyr, against Gibbon particularly, the new member of the Society of Antiquaries had complained of dangerous and unreasonable historical scepticism among those hostile to Christianity, finding them liable to discredit sound historical testimony simply because of its textual juxtaposition with the apparently unsound. Milner would not 28 R. J. Smith, 'Cobbett, Catholic history, and the middle ages' in Leslie Workman (ed.),
Medievalism in England , Studies in medievalism, vol. iv (Cambridge, 1992), pp 113-42, at
p. 113.
29 McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment , pp 8-9 and 138-41.
30 For remarks on this in an English tradition with which Milner was familiar and to which he was sympathetic, see C. D. A. Leighton, 'The Non-Jurors and their history' in Journal of
Religious History, xxix, no. 3 (Oct. 2005), pp 241-57, at pp 247-57.
31 S. J. Connolly, Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland 1780-1845 (Dublin, 1982), p. 116. 32 J[ohn] M[ilner], Authentic documents relative to the miraculous cure ofWinefrid White...
have engaged in historical labour had he not believed it capable of acco plishing a veritable 'revolution ... in the public opinion' with regard t Catholicism: his purposes were those of a missionary priest. However, h concern that history be allowed to fulfil its task merged with the mer scholarly concern to defend its integrity and importance against the ence of philosophism.33
The most egregious difficulty Catholics faced in siting Catholicism with England, whether in the country's intellectual, political or religious lif was, of course, the influence of the country's ancien régime confession ism. Its influence on Britain's national identity had indeed been much consolidated in the eighteenth century.34 As Milner remarked, was n even the Empire, much of it but recently acquired, raised by 'religio jealousy'?35 Milner responded, it should be noted firstly, with a strikin positive approach to the Anglican inheritance, in its High Church form He perceived what the history of the Oxford Movement would later rev with clarity: an affinity between parts of the Counter-Enlightenmen
in the British Isles and that in Catholic Europe. He suggested that alliance was commended - as was the more favourable dispositio
towards Catholicism he urged on George III - by changing times, whi revealed new enemies and might alter for the better views of old on If the English church had indeed served as the nursery bed of that 'po sonous plant' which grew into the Enlightenment and the Revolution there was, nevertheless, much to commend in it. Accused by a Protesta opponent, Richard Grier, a clergyman of the diocese of Cloyne, of mak the Anglican clergy the object of his 'severest attacks', Milner declar that he had 'expressly testified' his 'preference of the religion of the estab lished church of England to that of every other Protestant communi whatever'.36 Grier's claim might certainly have received support fro Milner's attacks on those clergymen of the established church he had identified as under the influence of Hoadlyism. However, his sympat with Anglicanism's High Church tradition and the clergy who espous it was real. It was shaped in the exceptional 1790s, when English hostil to France's Revolution notably, if only temporarily, reduced hostility
33 J[ohn] Milner, An historical and critical inquiry into the existence and character of St Georg in a letter to the ... earl of Leicester, president of the Antiquarian Society (London, 1792). See esp.
pp 1-2 and 22-23.
34 This point has been made, notably, in Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation 1707-1837 (2n
ed., London, 1994). See esp. chap. 1. 35 Milner, Instructions, p. 13.
36 J[ohn] M[ilner], A vindication of 'The end of religious controversy', from the exceptions o Thomas Burgess, bishop of St David's, and ... Richard Grier, vicar ofTemplebodane ... (London
1822), p. 64.
the Catholicism that the enemy persecuted. Then he himself, as he gled to deal with the political activity of the Cisalpines, the Enlightened of his own communion, found a friend in Bishop Samuel Horsley, whom he styled 'the light and glory of the established church'.37
It is true that it is possible to depict Milneťs commendations of the High Church tradition as tactical manoeuvres in the apologetic warfare he was conducting. It had always been advantageous to use non-Catholics in defence of Catholic positions and to show inconsistency and division among one's opponents:38 and for Milner High Churchmen never wholly lost their identity as opponents. They could hardly be perceived otherwise, when, in the early nineteenth century, there was a revival of a High Church polemic against Catholicism that rested on an assertion of the apostolic character of the Church of England. Nevertheless, it cannot be held that '[t]he precise churchmanship of his Anglican adversaries probably had little more than tactical significance for Milner'.39 This disregards the pattern of thought which regulated Milner's perception of the enon of Protestantism and of its divisions. It is true, as remarked above, that he might reflect and argue historically, asserting that the origins of the individualistic rationalism that characterised the Enlightenment lay in an implicit claim to a right of private judgement in matters of faith, together with adherence to the principle of sola scriptum, to be found in Protestantism universally.40 He was also inclined, more fundamentally, to view the relationship between Protestantism and the Enlightenment morally. In that case, these two historical phenomena might be seen to have a common origin, producing a similarity of character: both might be seen as manifestations of fallen humanity's tendency to the ity of rebellious self-assertion, the common source of religious dissent and that irreligion which now threatened all Christendom. However, this might corrupt different persons and different groups in varying degrees. Milner had a strong antipathy towards Protestant Dissenters, and cially 'Methodist Jumpers',41 which was rooted less in their particular doctrines, than in the character given to them by the act of dissenting
37 M[ilner], End of controversy, p. i. For an account of Horsley's involvement in Catholic politics, see the fine biographical study by the late Professor Frederick Mather, High Church prophet :
Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733-1806) and the Caroline tradition in the later Georgian church (Oxford, 1992), chap. 6.
38 Milner indicated the conventions for dealing with this mode of conducting controversy in
his Letters to a prebendary, p. 6.
39 P. B. Nockles, "'The difficulties of Protestantism": Bishop Milner, John Fletcher and Catholic
apologetic against the Church of England in the era from the first relief act to Emancipation'
in Recusant History, xxiv, no. 2 (Oct. 1998), pp 193-236, at pp 204-12.
40 For Milner's attribution of the rise of Socinianism and Free-thinking in the Church of
England to its sola scriptum doctrine, see his 'Pastoral letter on the Word of God, addressed to
the Catholics of the Midland District of England', being his Lenten pastoral of 1825 (B.A.A.,
Milner Papers, A 1102, p. 3).
- and in their more virulent anti-Catholicism, which the turpitude of dissent might do much to explain. Individual dissenting denomination thus perceived, stood variously positioned on a descent, a 'career of irre gion' impelled by the practice of exercising private judgement in matte of religion, that ended in the Enlightened views of 'modern reformers'
It was the presence of such men within the established church, co
stituting its Low Church party, lacking even the integrity to accept th sacrifice of status and benefices for their dissent, which gave genuin zeal to Milner's declaration of support for their opponents, among who he was able to find other commendable traits. In brief, the contentio that Milner lacked sincere sympathy with parts of the Anglican clerica body disregards what is so evident in both his life-long conflict with th Cisalpines and so much of is activity as a writer: his profound intellectu moral and religious commitment not only to opposing what he took t be the consequences of Enlightenment influences, but to exposing the fundamental character of Enlightenment thought to odium.43 He was re sonably well acquainted with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century High Churchmen's defence of Christian doctrine against the threats offered it by the English Enlightenment and could not but sympathise.
The presence of sympathy with the High Church tradition is one egr gious feature of Milner's historical writings. When the foundation of th sympathy is noted, as it has been above, the presence of a second featur medievalism, can be given a more than superficial explanation and its nature shown. An acquaintance with the character of the medievalism embraced by Catholics as the century of Ultramontanism went on tend to render Milner's enthusiasm a rather mild affair. In the next generation, Newman felt obliged to argue against an even more extreme medievalis than he himself could embrace, when this was advanced by his friend Thomas Allies, as he was about to begin writing his monumental torical defence of papal authority, the Formation of Christendom. Newman pointed out that while the medieval order of society did, historically, serve the salvific task of the Church and might thus be taken as a model, th pursuit of its restoration could not be held binding as part of the missi of the Church in all circumstances.44 Such developed views should no be sought in Milner. Neither, though, was he merely concerned to find niche for Catholicism within England's historical identity or to propo
that medieval civilization was worthy of some appreciation Milner
medievalism is certainly not to be placed with that of his enemies, th
42 John Milner [John Merlin, pseud.], Strictures on the poet laureate's [Robert Southey] ' Book o
the church' (London, 1824), pp 9-10.
43 C. D. A. Leighton, 'John Milner and the Orthodox Cause' in Journal of Religious History, xxxi
no. 3 (Sept. 2008).
44 See the correspondence between Newman and Allies quoted in M. H. Allies, Thomas Willia
Allies (2nd ed., London, 1907), pp 111-32.
Cisalpines, such as Joseph Berington, who found in the middle ages
much worthy to be studied, 'perhaps even admired'.45
An understanding of Milneťs enthusiasm for the middle ages is to be found, as suggested above, in relating it to other commitments he fested. However, medievalism has not been regarded as integral to his thought. Bridget Patten, for example, concludes her short study of his involvement in the Gothic Revival with the opinion that his ian knowledge' was but a pedagogical accomplishment that he found of value in articulating what he deemed an authentic Catholicism, 'no more than a useful tool with which to explain Catholicism to itself'.46 Patten's remark need not be controverted; but it requires considerable explication, to avoid the suggestion that this scholarship was a dispensable tool. Even if attention is directed only to Milner's study of Gothic architecture, a number of motivations and purposes may be discerned. Central to such study, he maintained, was the application of aesthetics and essential too an understanding of Catholic liturgy.47 The study thus constituted an act of piety to Englishmen's 'Catholic ancestors ... [who] filled this land with the richest and most beautiful edifices in the service of religion'. These edifices themselves joined the bishop in preaching his faith, in which the chief duty was liturgical activity.48 He would certainly have taken much pleasure in the remark of a much later and greater English Catholic torian, Christopher Dawson, briefly a Wykehamist, who recalled learning more from time spent in the cathedral Milner so loved than 'from the hours of religious instruction in school'.49 Others, of course, preached the same faith as Milner without the benefit of his erudition; but this was a scholarship that made further uses of its chosen subject area. In that thetic accomplishment was taken to be the gauge of civilization, Milner's favoured study allowed the expression of a very general understanding of history, one central to his understanding of Christianity's situation in his age and thus, implicitly, its identity. This medievalist interpretation of history starkly contradicted the Weltanschauung not only of the Cisalpine movement, but of the Enlightenment as a whole. It made Milner an early 45 R. J. Smith, The Gothic bequest : medieval institutions and British thought, 1688-186 3
(Cambridge, 1987), p. 109.
46 Bridget Patten, Catholicism and the Gothic revival: John Milner and St Peter's Chapel,
Winchester , Hampshire Papers, no. 21 (Winchester, 2001), p. 19.
47 'Observations on the means necessary for further illustrating the ecclesiastical architecture of the middle ages, in a letter from the Rev. John Milner...' in T[homas] Wharton, J[ohn]
Milner et al., Essays on Gothic architecture (London, 1800), pp xi-xxiii, at pp xvi-xx. See also John Milner, A treatise on the ecclesiastical architecture of England, during the middle ages ... (London, 1811), pp xvii-xviii.
48 [John] Milner, The substance of a sermon preached at ... the Catholic chapel of St Chad ... (Birmingham, [1809?]), pp 9-11.
49 Quoted in Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the world : the Augustinián life and mind of Christopher
articulator of themes which were already advancing towards the positio they would assume at the heart of the militant, Ultramontane Cathol thought of the mid and late nineteenth century. More will be said of th below
For the present, it will suffice note briefly the extent of Catholic claims upon English identity to which Milneťs reflections on civilization led. He pointed out that it was to Catholic England that he and contemporaries were 'indebted for our Christianity, our monarchy, and our constitution'.50
The medieval period's place in England's constitutional history was a
familiar topic, aired in refutation of defenders of the Protestant tion against the threat of Emancipation. It was, though, Christianity that Milner listed first; for it was Christianity, in its necessarily Roman form, which generated and sustained a nation's civilization in its entirety. That civilization was an epiphenomenon of Christianity was manifested by the study, for example, of the early medieval period, in which its peoples, pagan, Arian and Catholic manifested variant relationships to the nomenon of civilization.51 England's civilization was not indigenous, but uniformly derived from the Catholic mainland of Europe. Catholicism thus not only had a place in England: it was, historically, as it still was spiritually,52 what was to be valued in it. Of the Anglo-Saxon achievement in the arts with which he was concerned, Milner thought little and trated at some length his claim that its existence was to be attributed solely to 'missionaries from Rome'53 and 'frequent intercourse with France and Italy'.54 His unstinted praise was reserved for Anglo-Norman era, though
the achievement of the Normans too was but a consequence of their
having become 'devout Christians'. The accomplishment of this people, 'without question, the most valiant, magnificent, studious, enterprising people of the eleventh century', when, in Milner' s view, the civilization of Europe entered into its period of greatness, was England's; for 'they were the very flower of Normandy, and the neighbouring provinces, both in church and state, who crossed the sea and settled in our island. The
continent was despoiled to enrich England.'55 All Englishmen might
look on Catholic England of the Anglo-Norman period as the nent source of national pride. And Catholic Englishmen did not need to disown entirely the era after the Reformation. Since Catholicism was 'the common source of Christianity',56 they might, in a sense, claim as their 50 John Milner, The history and survey of the antiquities of Winchester ... (3rd ed., 2 vols,
Winchester, [1839]), i, p. vi.
51 Milner, Treatise on ecclesiastical architecture, p. 36.
52 Milner, Instructions, p. 7.
53 Milner, Treatise on ecclesiastical architecture, pp 17-36.
54 Milner, Winchester, ii, p. 59.
55 Milner, Treatise on ecclesiastical architecture, pp 39-43. 56 [Milner], Strictures, p. 4.
own, what was to be esteemed in their political constitution and the High Church tradition, whether preserving the essentials of that Christianity or resisting revolution, in the age of the Stuarts or of George III.
Before discussing the two particular characteristics of Milneťs raphy mentioned above - the favourable attitude displayed to the Church of England's High Church tradition and the assertion of the superiority of the medieval over the modern period - some consideration should be given to its more general characteristics. In truth, these reflect well the characteristics of the historiography of the age. His historical writings, particularly the most notable of them, The history and survey of the ties of Winchester, consistently displayed that 'combination of antiquarian and specifically archaeological interests alongside more orthodox ment-oriented scholarship', now entering its ascendancy. It would tute the fabric of English historical studies well beyond Milneťs period.57 He was clearly much gratified by being admitted a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1790 and the publication of his study of Winchester rendered acceptance of this scholarly identity secure. However, he demned those other antiquaries 'who, too dull for any other branch of literature whatever, spend their lives in minute and uninteresting
tigations and enumerations, which are incapable of raising any other emotion than that of disgust7.58 His was an antiquarianism, he quite
rightly believed, which was marked by the adoption of the methods and interests of the historian proper. But it was the new sort of historian, pursuing documentary evidence, whom he emulated. It was, after all, the absence of such a methodology which had corrupted the conclusions of the Enlightened historians, whose chief concern had been to write elegantly, obtaining their raw materials merely from the works on the shelves of their studies. In contrast to them, he presented, as he spoke of the history of St George, 'the discerning critic and patient antiquary', labouring with his primary sources.59
The courtship of antiquarianism and history was further advanced in Milneťs work by a desire to ensure that the local study dealt, in the manner of history proper, with events and topics of general importance and that its subject matter was placed in a wider context. He protested against weaving 'the annals of insignificant places ... out of ordinary and domestic transactions' and 'writing the lives of obscure individuals'. Such 57 Philippa Levine, The amateur and the professional: antiquarians, historians and archœologists
in Victorian England, 1838-1886 (Pbk. ed., Cambridge, 2002), p. 1.
58 Milner, Winchester, i, p. vii.
writing repelled.60 Attraction to accounts of particular localities was to secured by ensuring that they were 'connected to the general history England'.61 Milner amply met his own demand in his study of Winchester. For here the city's history became a paradigm of the nation's, and inde Europe's history. In Winchester the achievement of the high middle ag was to be surveyed; for '[i]t was during the reign of the first Henry that Winchester attained the zenith of its prosperity'. The gradual decl of the succeeding medieval centuries could be observed and, more esp
cially, the depredations wrought on civilization by the Reformati
which left 'our ancient city defaced in its outward appearance and impo erished'. If civilization had not yet reached its nadir, the level to wh had sunk had its measure in the city's late eighteenth-century appear ance, which conveyed 'the idea of a paltry village, rather than that of respectable city'.62 What was manifested by this physical decay was ma plain in the treatment of the city's notable inhabitants, from bishop such as William Giffard and the fourteenth-century William Wykeh to Jonathan Trelawney and Benjamin Hoadly in the eighteenth century Milner's zeal for the duty of the historian proper, to speak of 'motive causes, consequences, and ... circumstances',64 ensured that appropriat religious conclusions were drawn from this depiction of decay.
In this too, Milner was both the antiquary and historian of his era; f both, the one no less than the other, were 'emphatic on drawing on past for moral exhortation'.65 For Milner, his fellow Catholics, and orthodo Protestants exhortation to the moral - not intellectual - act of faith was
a fundamental obligation and the moral purpose of history writing was very frequently expressed by making it a vehicle of religious controversy.66 Milner made it clear that he intended his own history writing as versy and, further, was willing to treat lack of controversial zeal in the history writing of others as grounds for severe criticism. He, like most of his contemporaries, was possessed of no anxieties that the tion of controversy might violate the integrity of historical scholarship, which was quite properly assisted by religious direction. Indeed, since the Church was possessed of a revelation with an historical form and an infallible authority to teach that revelation, it was on (certainly rather rare) occasions appropriate and desirable for ecclesiastical authority to regulate such scholarship by uncontradictable declaration. The era distinguished 60 Milner, Winchester, i, p. ix.
61 Milner, Letters to a prebendary, p. viii.
62 Milner, Winchester, i, pp 156-57, 283-84 and ii, p. 48. 63 Ibid., i, pp 153-56, 221-25 and ii» 44-46.
64 Ibid., i, p. xviii.
65 Levine, Amateur and professional, p. 75.
66 Rosemary O'Day, 'John Lingard: historians and contemporary politics, 1780-1850' in Peter
Phillips (ed.), Lingard remembered: essays to mark the sesquicentenary of John Lingard's death
(London, 2004), pp 82-104, at p. 84. 3ÒO
historical facts from interpretation and he was accordingly obliged to assert, against often tolerated opinion among some contemporary
Catholics, the right of the Church to pronounce infallibly on the former, as much as the latter. Contingent facts were included among religious truths.67 Had Milner founded this belief in the need for historiography to be guided by religious doctrine on an extended scepticism about the capacity of the uninspired historian to reach objective truth, his Catholic stance might have merited the appreciation of the present day or, more accurately, post-modern observer. Inevitably, however, he succumbed to the conviction of his age. History could be expected to produce truth, if not obviously prevented from reaching this end by extraneous factors, though these might include religious stances. It would thus generally be found to be in harmony with, and might well confirm truth more securely held. Such an attitude disposed Milner to believe that diligent ship would generally yield findings supportive of a view of the past which demonstrated the moral, intellectual and cultural excellence which ence to Catholic belief was likely to produce. About critics of his study Winchester, convinced that good scholarship would support their own Protestant or Enlightened view of the past, Milner protested:
... they complained that it presented details too favourable to the religion of our ancestors, and that it exhibited the alterations which took place in this respect between two and three centuries ago, in disagreeable colours. If this were the case it was no fault of mine. I was an historian, not an orator; as such it was my duty to represent facts in their true light.68
Yet, Milner would by no means have denied that such a favourable
depiction of Catholicism, the work's value as controversy, was a tion, indeed the chief justification, for its publication. One may indeed observe that he drew a distinction between 'historical' and 'controversial' compositions; but the difference was merely one of form and method, not purpose.69 The controversial purpose of his antiquarian magnum opus was declared in its preface with a statement that he had written with a view to 'thwarting many deep-rooted opinions of the present age' and was conscious that such a course was likely to raise enemies.70 Fault has been found with Milner for the striking assertion of the propriety of sial history, expressed in his criticism of his fellow priest, John Lingard, on the grounds of his failure to make his History of England a zealous
enough defence of Catholicism. The eirenic style adopted by Lingard
67 [Milner], 'Pastoral charge', p. 6.
68 Milner, Letters to a prebendary, p. viii.
69 Ibid., p. 4.
70 Milner, Winchester, i, p. xx.
has been represented as having been a manifestation of commitm
to 'genuine historical research'.71 This criticism of Milner - leaving as its assumption about the incompatibility of controversial history and 'genuine historical research' - misrepresents the matter of the protrac debate.
In the first place, it might be observed that no one engaged in concerned with the dispute, including Lingard, expressed doubt t
history might very properly serve apologetic purposes. If they rejec
Milneťs criticism, they did not reject the basis of it. Lingarďs m
notable defender, albeit that defence of Lingard himself was of second ary concern to him, was an unidentified correspondent of the Orthod Journal who used the pen-name, Candidus. He considered that too mu
apologetic might harm a work intended for the provision of instructi literary pleasure, but held that Lingard had succeeded in his apologet purpose, 'to remove the prejudices' of English Protestants, and that t work would be found 'highly gratifying to the feelings' of Catholics Another of Lingarďs defenders, John Kirk, suggested that the mission in Hornby would have wished to be more forthright in his apologetic. errors in judging when he might have been were to be overlooked: f 'if he attains his grand object, which is the undermining of Hume an Co. as historians, he will have done much'.73 Kirk was representing h friend's view well. Lingard had fixed his attention to a very marked degree on a particular part of the Catholic apologist's task - that of winning audience among Protestants, as a preliminary to removing what he h to be their prejudices. 'The good to be done is by writing a book whi protestants will read.'74
Despite Lingarďs sincerely held apologetic intent, Milner had reaso to be suspicious of his work. For it was supportive not only of Catho views, but also views of the English past much influenced by the thoug to the Enlightenment. It was reflective of a mind in which one moder admirer of it has found the best depiction 'of the essential structure Cisalpine thought'.75 It was, in fact, other Cisalpine writers on histo cal topics - Joseph Berington and Charles Butler, as well as Alexande Geddes, a biblicist whose contribution to antiquarianism was small, a John Eustace, normally described as a travel writer - who were Milne
primary target in reviewing Lingarďs work. Lingarďs 'abilities a learning' were noted and he was distinguished from 'the above m
71 Norman, English Catholic Church, p. 291.
72 Orthodox Journal, vii, no. 74 (July 1819), pp 268-69.
73 John Kirk to Bishop William Poynter, 23 July 1019, A. A. W., Poynter Papers, Abö.
74 Quoted trom a letter trom Lingard to John Kirk, 10 Dec. 1019, in hdwin jones, John Lin
and the pursuit of historical truth (Brighton, Sx., 2001), at p. 23.
75 J. P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine movemen
1780-1850 (Shepherdstown [W.Va.], 1980), p. 117.
tioned betrayers of their religion'. However, he had failed in his duty to try to repair the damage they had done.76 It was the provocative defence by Candidus, in the following issue of the journal, of those Milner did attack, which is probably to be accounted the cause of an extended dispute.
Milner himself, of course, was by no means averse to the practice of
attempting to gain a Protestant readership. However, it was Protestants
whose beliefs might make them allies of a Catholicism struggling
against doctrines he took every opportunity to point out as destructive
of a common Christianity, with whom he sought concord. Cisalpine
discourse was never truly able to transcend its political origins in the desire for Catholic relief and was thus habitually regulated by the desire to depict Catholicism in a form agreeable to the English political nation, designated uniformly as Protestant. In practice, this latter purpose was realized in a depiction of a changed Catholicism, likely to be agreeable to that part of the elite influenced more by fashionable tury opinions than the religious beliefs inherited from sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England. Milneťs purposes encompassed politics;
but his politics were far wider in its concerns and more contemporary than theirs. His concerns were with the politics not merely of England, but of Christian Europe, in a generation which endured the momentous trial, in the Revolution, of a further upsurge of a long suppressed evil and to which the response would come in the form of ideologies of Revolution and restoration and of Ultramontanism. If we regard this interpretation of modern history as best studied in Catholic and larly French Catholic sources, taken from the whole nineteenth century and beyond, it was by no means unfamiliar at the beginning of the century to British Protestants, who indeed contributed considerably to it. Burke and that less gifted conspiracy theorist, John Robison, come at once to mind; but the pattern of interpretation can be observed to be extensive in British wrings.77 This was a literature with which Milner was well acquainted.78 Since Milneťs dominant concerns could be seen by many English Protestants as at least close to their own, his approach to them could appear more positive, in advancing common purposes, and more honest, in depicting his own beliefs, than was possible for Cisalpines. 76 Orthodox Journal , vii, no. 73 (June 1819), pp 228-31.
77 See, for example, C. D. A. Leighton, 'Antichrist's revolution: some Anglicani apocalypticists
in the age of the French wars' in Journal of Religious History, xxiv, no. 2 (June 2000), pp
42.
78 See, for example, M[ilner], End of controversy, pp 61-2, where Robison and Henry Kett, an Oxford don who offered an extended apocalyptic interpretation of the history which culminated in the French Revolution, are quoted at length.
Milner was indeed apt to seek advantage from this, by drawing attent to what the latter were anxious 'to conceal from Protestants'.79
In view of the unceasing expression, in one form or another, of Cisalpine anxiety about Milneťs capacity to alienate his non-Catholic
fellow countrymen, it should be observed that he gained approval from many and that his forthright Catholicism was by no means a barrier to all of them in receiving his views. The success of Milneťs approach to Protestants is recorded by the reception of his History of Winchester. It certainly provoked hostility in the clerical establishment of the diocese of Winchester, to members of which the presence of the large number of émigré priests had already been proving alarming. John Sturges, the
chancellor of the diocese, produced a response to the History which
called forth the Letters to a prebendary . However, Milner, his bishop, John Douglass, and - representing the High Church part of the alliance Milner sought to advance with this attack on the religion of the Enlightenment - Samuel Horsley, then bishop of Rochester, were able to make cal use of Milner' s appearance under the High Church banner (if in a clearly Roman surcoat), that both the History and the Letters represented. The party sentiment he roused was sufficient to defeat an anti-Catholic measure proposed in parliament, originally desired by the Winchester clergy,80 and, Husenbeth recorded, sufficient too to lead ministers to explore means of preventing any further such appearances.81
As Milner surveyed the published criticisms of his chief antiquarian endeavour, he was able to note a great deal of commendation. True, the Critical Review was abusive and denounced the author as 'an enemy to the progress of knowledge, improvement, and national prosperity', but still had compliments for his work. Those reviews which were most likely to describe the disposition referred to more positively and which therefore mattered to Milner, the Anti-Jacobin Review and the High Church British Critic , were decidedly favourable. The latter' s reviewer found himself won over, even on matters of traditional historical dispute between Catholic and Protestant, by Milneťs scholarship, judged superior in some topics, at least, to the most distinguished historians, and praised his style as 'vigorous, lively, and sometimes luminous'. The Anti-Jacobin' s reviewer,
also, praised his historical and antiquarian skills; relished the
sion of High Church sentiments; and took, Milner recorded, 'particular satisfaction' in his accomplishment in refuting and displaying the equacies of Hume82 - an accomplishment which indeed gained him an enduring reputation.83 In brief, Milner was judged a right-minded author, 79 Milner, Instructions, p. 13.
80 Mather, High Church prophet, pp 105-12. 81 Husenbeth, Milner, pp 74-75.
82 Milner, Winchester, ii, pp 283-97.
83 The effectiveness of Milner as an critic opponent of Hume's historical writings was noted in
well able to write good apologetic history. That his work contained apology for the particular beliefs of Roman Catholics was no real obstacle to those otherwise disposed to receive it well. That a work did not, seeking favour promiscuously, pretend religious indifference, gave indication that, in a phrase used in the British Critic , the author was truly 'dignified in minď. If a matter of religious controversy arose in the course of an historical discourse, it was to be treated in a review appropriately, using historical or historiographical argument and not straying too far into the ing field of controversial theology.84 The Anti-Jacobin reviewer might have been expected to oppose Milneťs exemplification of the perdurance of the miraculous in the Church, as he did; but this was debate about historiographical principles, as Milner made clear even within the work reviewed.85
The History of Winchester, however, raised few matters of the kind
which required a negative response from that Protestant readership
which Milner sought. Indeed, when they viewed the work as a whole, High Churchmen had cause to see in it an eloquent support of their own discourse. There is error in a statement which represents the work to have been - leaving aside its character as an antiquarian history - a piece of Roman Catholic apologetic tout court . It may be remarked, firstly, that such a description offers tribute to Milner by excluding Cisalpinism from the place usually given to it by historians - appropriately or ately - as a species of the genus Roman Catholicism; for it can certainly be read as anti-Cisalpine controversy.86 Its advocacy of the medieval Church as a model, for example, was clearly, as Roger Smith observes, subversive of the ecclesiology adopted by the Catholic Enlightenment.87 However, it is also to be noted that it was equally subversive of other Enlightenment
ecclesiologies, including that propagated by Locke and his followers,
such as Hoadly, in England and which it was the vocation of the High Churchman to combat. Indeed, the attractions of medievalism to High Churchmen were numerous and they might look back on a long tradition of its supporting scholarship, particularly among Non-Juror scholars. If it was the primitive age Christianity which they regarded as perennially mative, some medievalism was to be found among them. Jeremy Collier, of whose monumental Ecclesiastical history of Great Britain Milner made
Rome and was recalled there some two decades later. See Jos[eph] Hodgson to [John] Kirk,
4 July 1817, B.A.A., Milner Papers, C 2201.
84 It was on such grounds that Milner complained of Sturges's treatment of the History of
Winchester. See Milner, Letters to a prebendary , pp viii-x.
85 Milner, Winchester, ii, p. 284.
86 Berington testified to this, by reacting with violence against it, in support of Sturges's attack, an imprudence which brought the removal of his faculties as a priest of the English mission. See his letter in the Gentleman's Magazine, lxix (Aug. 1799), pp 653-54 and the account of the matter in Ward, Dawn, ii, pp 212-15.
87 Smith, Gothic bequest, p. 128.
such extensive use, had made that primitive age stretch to and overl somewhat with the high middle ages.88
Those Anglicans who were likely to be won over to, or at least attract by the History ofWinchesteťs identification of the Christian standard with the middle ages, would have found little enough to alienate them in author's treatment of the post-Reformation period. It was not merel that he offered indications of good will and common sentiment, thoug there were such indications. There was the praise of the Caroline bisho of the diocese, Lancelot Andrews, Richard Neile and Walter Curie, an expression of regret that Caroline standards of piety were no longer preva lent.89 Most notably, there was the remark about Hoadly, which broug down upon him the wrath of the Winchester clergy. Noting the structural consequences for the cathedral of the erection of the bishop's funera monument, he observed that even in death this prelate had undermine the Church of England. Much more significant than such remarks, w
Milner' s adoption and consistent exposition a High Church, and p
ticularly Non-Juror interpretation of Reformation and post- Reformat English history. If Non-Juror argumentation was pre-occupied with t assertion of ecclesiastical authority in relation to the state, this reflected a more general concern to defend clerical power, threatened by a laity p ceived to be infected with the anti-clericalism of the early Enlightenment. Owing much to the Non- Juror, Collier, but also the Laudian, Peter Heylyn Milner' s story of the Reformation was pre-eminently one an avaricio laity despoiling the Church.91 Indeed, wherever High Church views co be profitably adopted, they were. The criticism of Queen Elizabeth a an abettor of rebellions against legitimate monarchical authority, fr Collier and Anthony Wood, for example, melded with the Catholic perc tion of that the history of the Enlightenment and the Revolution was to b begun in the era of the Reformation. It was accordingly reproduced.92
The use of Protestants' statements in the composition of Catho
controversy was, as remarked above, no novelty. However, in the Histo of Winchester , Milner went well beyond a mere utilization of Protesta
texts and adopted, though not without omissions and redirection
Protestant viewpoint. It was now one with which Catholics might identify. In speaking of the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century, for examp they were clearly invited to do so. 'Winchester being now completely
88 C. D. A. Leighton, 'The Non-Jurors and their history' in Journal of Religious History, xxix,
3 (Oct. 2005), pp 250-51.
89 Milner, Winchester, ii, pp 9-11 and 121.
90 C. D. A. Leighton, 'The religion of the Non-Jurors and the early British Enlightenment study of Henry DodwelT in History of European Ideas, xxviii (2002), pp 247-62, at pp 25
91 Milner, Winchester, i, pp 247-97. See esp. pp 262-65, 271 and 283-84.
92 Ibid., pp 291 and 297.
the power of parliament, a second reformation of religion was here set on foot, and carried on by much the same means as had been employed in effecting the former/ There followed a description of the afflictions of the Church of England in the period.93 And if the conflicts teenth century echoed those of sixteenth, they also anticipated those of the late eighteenth. Milner' s treatment of the era of the Great Rebellion made no reference to constitutional matters. The enemies of the crown were simply denominated as 'Calvinisti - 'that bold and powerful sect, who, under the pretence of reforming, are bent on the destruction of the Established Church7.94 This use of the present tense should be noted. Milner had no habit of distinguishing between orthodox Dissenters from those who espoused the Socinianism or Arianism, were so often the tagonists of the ideas of English Enlightenment and were now tarred with Jacobinism. Neither had many of the churchmen he addressed. An identification of, at least, a genetic relationship between Calvinism and Jacobinism was common to much English High Churchmanship and the Counter-Enlightenment thought of Catholics.
The History of Winchester should be read as a work of the late 1790s,
serving immediate, indeed urgent purposes. True, it was a work of Catholic controversy; but it was also a statement of the grounds for
alliance between Catholicism and Anglicanism in the face of the threats both faced, from Enlightenment argument and Revolutionary violence. If it was made plain that the author held that it was the faith of the Roman Church which lay at the heart of what was to be defended, this was not, for many of his readers, an obstacle to the reception of his message. He
was to repeat the proposal of alliance, theologically elaborated, in his
Letters to a Prebendary and again, this time politically elaborated, when he addressed the matter of royal hostility to Catholic Emancipation.
In 1799, the year after the publication of the History of Winchester began,
the Camaldolese, Mauro Cappellari, later Gregory XVI, published II
trionfo della Santa Sede e della chiesa contro gli assalti dei novatori. The location of such a title and the substance of the work, assailing innovators 'whose day was swept away by the Revolution'; allows it to serve iently as a marker of the point of change from Counter-Enlightenment to Ultramontanism. The impetus for the change is seen in the diate occasion of this 'cry of resistance to the revolution'; for it came in response to one climax in the violent assault on the Church by the
93 Ibid., ii, pp 18-22.
94 Ibid., p. 11.
Revolution, the seizure of Pius VI.95 Milneťs lifetime saw but the eme gence of Ultramontanism, the name reused for a doctrine reiterated, but as a response to new threats to the mission of the Church. In cons quence, the themes of Ultramontanism found in Milner, though prese by virtue of the character of the threat to which he and nineteenth-centur Catholicism responded, were still but weapons, and undeveloped at tha rather than constructive programmes. Medievalism was being fashion
in his lifetime by such as de Bonald and de Maistre, into a profou
social and political critique of modernity.96 The drive to create a unifi structure of Christian thought, capable of responding to contempora
intellectual needs, from a reinvigorated scholasticism was a featu
chiefly of the later nineteenth century.97 In brief, there was no body programmatic thought devoted to the restoration of the thought and structures of the middle ages for Milner to embrace and propagate. H own contribution to its emergence, in the fields of architectural histo and antiquarianism, was necessarily limited by the pastoral demands the English mission.
Like his commendation of alliance with an acceptable kind
Anglicanism, Milneťs commendation of the middle ages should be see chiefly as a response appropriate to his own age and its afflictions. T point is made clear by its most appropriate contextualisation, Milneťs apocalyptic beliefs, which may well be thought to have owed a good de albeit indirectly, to the theological tradition and contemporary preo cupations of British Protestantism. As to the latter, it is probably no unnecessary to elaborate on the contention of William Oliver's work, 't prophecy ... was a normal intellectual activity in early nineteenth-cen tury England'.98 This vigorous flourishing of apocalyptic thought, wh it owed much to reflection on the events of the age of Revolution, w in a tradition very far from moribund in any case. With new anxiet and hopes about the world, guidance was sought from a familiar stud resting on the conviction that the biblical prophecies, particularly those the Book of the Apocalypse, remained quite extensively unfulfilled, th inviting temporally extended or 'enlarged interpretations' of the book, they were called. This conviction was far less common in Catholic th in Protestant thought, which had, early in the Reformation era, fou a polemical need to develop it - a demand particularly well met in th 95 Owen Chadwick, A history of the popes 1830-1914, Oxford history of the Christian chur
(Oxford, 1998), p. 2.
96 See, for brief exemplification, the treatment of Traditionalist thought in W. J. Reedy, 'Ideol
and utopia in the medievalism of Louis de Bonalď in Leslie Workman (ed.), Medievalism Europe , Studies in medievalism, vol. v (Cambridge, 1994), pp 164-75.
97 G. A. McCool, Nineteenth-century scholasticism: the search for a unitary method (New Yo
98 W. H. Oliver, Prophets and millennialists: the uses of biblical prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland [N.Z], 1978), p. 11.
theological traditions of the British Isles. It is thus perhaps not surprising that one of the few Catholic scholars to accept the practice of enlarged
interpretation was an English bishop, a much older contemporary of
Milner, Charles Walmesley, who wrote under the pseudonym of Signor
Pastorini." Milner was willing to adopt and commend the exegesis of the deceased vicar apostolic, though he differed somewhat in detail
and, indeed, in his broad vision of Christendom's history. Pastorini' s perception of what was likely to take place in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, while fearful, possessed a positive aspect: it was to culminate in the ending of the fifth age of the Church's history, marked by the pouring of the fifth prophesied vial of the wrath of God being 'poured upon the throne of the Beast ... over his whole kingdom, the realm of the Reformation'.100 This prophecy, interpreted as a revelation of a sudden destruction of Protestantism, was memorably influential in Ireland in the period of the Rockite disturbances.101 Milner did not share the optimism of the Rockites. He declared that he and his contemporaries had already entered the sixth age, 'the age of increased warfare and desolation, ... of infidelity and apostasy, ... of Antichrist's coming and persecution'. In this light, the enthusiasms attending the contemporary Catholic politics of the British Isles manifested a marked trivial-mindedness. He urged English Catholics 'to prepare for fresh calamities, and for a dreadful persecution, rather than for temporal benefits', such as were sought in Emancipation.102 Nineteenth-century Catholic concern with prophecy by no means ally tended to exclude anticipation of the recreation of the culture and political order of medieval Christendom.103 However, the pessimistic cast of mind displayed by Milner when he addressed the subject of prophecy allows the belief that his approach to medieval studies - and consequently the objectives of his writings in the field - should be clearly distinguished from those for whom medievalism was the dominant element in a grammatic restorationism.
The vision of the past derived from a reading of Walmesley, as that to be derived from most apocalypticists, is fairly consistently dismal. The seven trumpets that speak of the seven ages of Christian history 'always 99 Walmesley acknowledged, of course, only Catholic authorities as direction of his
interpretation, significantly mentioning by name only the late seventeenth-century writer,
Joachim de la Chétardie. Charles Walmesley [Sig. Pastorini, pseud.], The general history of
the Christian Church: ... chiefly deduced from the Apocalypse of St John the Apostle ([London?], 1771), pp i-iv.
100 Ibid., p. 268.
101 J. S. Donnelly, Jr., 'Pastorini and Captain Rock: millenarianism and sectarianism m the Rockite movement of 1821-4' in Samuel Clark and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds), Irish peasants : violence and unrest 1780-1014 (Manchester, 1983), pp 102-39.
102 Milner, Instructions, pp 8 and 9.
103 See, ior example, Ambrose Phillipps, afterwards Phillipps de Lisle, Mahometamsm in its
relation to prophecy ... (London, 1855), pp 211-13.
