When Sir Robert Peel, as leader of the House of Commons in the Duke of Wellington’s administration, dramatically resigned his seat for Oxford University in the spring of 1829 to obtain its approval for his change of front in regard to the concession of Catholic Emancipation, he was ignominiously rejected for his constituency at the very time when O’Connell had been triumphantly returned for Clare. Peel’s defeat was the climax of a long conflict between the two men. It had begun when Peel came to Dublin as Chief Secretary in 1812, a young man of twenty-four, at the opening of his ,career. The conflict between them was thus symbolical of the forces that were arrayed on each side in the last and most bitter phase of the agitation for Catholic rights.

Peel had come to Dublin full of self-confidence and energy, wealthy, backed by powerful interests, and as the rising hope of the English Conservatives, keenly interested in politics, hard working and determined to assert his mastery in a position which could be made important or insignificant according to his own abilities and success as an administrator. Miss Ramsay in her admirably sympathetic study of his life points out how chance favoured him in the first year of his new office. Neither the Viceroy nor the Chief Secretary for Ireland in those days had a seat in the Cabinet, and ‘the division of authority between them varied according to the character of the individuals who held the posts.’

There is a well-known passage in Lord Macaulay’s History, in which he describes the Catholic country gentleman of penal days. The typical Catholic squire (so he tells us) ‘if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more clownish than they. The disabilities under which he lay prevented his mind from expanding. His fields, his greyhounds, his gun occupied almost all his thoughts.’ This has always struck us as an entirely mistaken idea. For, so far from the Catholic squire being more insular than his fellows, he was from the very nature of the case usually far less so. In most instances he had had a foreign education, and consequently some opportunities for foreign travel. His uncles or younger brothers (denied a career in their own land) might be in the service of the Catholic princes of France, Spain, or Austria, while sisters and cousins would perhaps have entered English religious houses on the Continent. Among his correspondents would probably be relatives whose Jacobite proclivities had made them exiles abroad. He could hardly help being something of a linguist, and from time to time would receive parcels of foreign books and journals and scraps of international gossip; and (more likely than not) his domestic chaplain and family tutor—a daily companion—would be a man of scholarly tastes and literary ability. His outlook would as a natural consequence be altogether wider and more cosmopolitan than that of his neighbours.

One Catholic family of penal days in which the characteristics we have in mind were markedly prominent in many of its members was that of the Swinburnes of Capheaton in Northumberland.

Mr. Coulton is consciously out to break idols, and he does so effectively. In moderation it is healthy and exhilarating; pursued for long stretches, it leaves one a little weary, invites reaction and confuses issues. A more eirenic perusal, for instance, of M. Maritain’s Art et Scholaslique—the contents of which he realises so inadequately—would have shown him that the scholastics held art to be a contemplative activity in the natural order, entirely engaged in the right way of making things. It may use religious symbols for material; it does not ‘express’ religion. The only thing it expresses is the form in the artist’s mind. If the artist happens to be a mystic, his work, however secular the subject, will be religious art: it results from his being. In any given civilisation the artist will use the symbols common to it. During the Middle Ages these were religious. It by no means follows that specifically Christian art was abundant. Indeed, it becomes increasingly rare as we descend from the Byzantine heights to the dreary flats of naturalism.

We think also that Mr. Coulton has not escaped confusing a discussion of medieval civilisation—that brief period in the history of the Church of Christ— with a polemic against, or an apologetic for, the truths of the Catholic Faith. This imperils judgment, evokes unnecessary passion, and fogs objective vision.

‘It would be a mortal error,’ M. Maritain has written, ‘to confound the universal cause of the Church with the cause of a particular civilisation….