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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Conservatism and Catholicism have been synonymous in Britain during the past two hundred years. How that identification came about is debatable. Catholics for tactical reasons may have wished to conciliate opponents of Catholic Emancipation by emphasising their essential social and political conservatism. That image allowed the Church to capitalise on the public sympathy for the French emigre clergy who were pouring into Britain during the French Revolution: Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, (1790) was unwittingly the finest modern Catholic apologist. That expedient became, in the wake of the Oxford Movement a permanent feature of a Church still dependent to a degree on wealthy patrons and increasingly conscious of its social status; its hallmark dreamy spires rather than social democracy. If the Church had joined the Tory Party— or the Tory Party at prayer seemed about to return to Rome—then that was grist to the Liberal mill. If anti-Catholicism was the anti-semitism of the intellectuals, then militant liberalism could mobilise those nonconformist sentiments, temperance, disestablishment and evangelical schooling into a crusade against the whore of Babylon. It was in their political interest to portray Roman Catholicism as the bastion of conservatism. With the excesses of European Catholicism during this period the Church was indelibly identified with the most conservative forces in society. But that is to ignore another tradition, that of radical Catholicism whose most outstanding figure is Dr. William Maxwell.
1 Fiaser, William. Book of / Carlaverock, 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1873, I. 601Google Scholar.
2 Records of the Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh: Matriculation Album, Edinburgh University, Archives. 1778‐1789; Maxwell, W., Experimentum quorundum cum diversis Aerum speciebus in animalibus institutorum, phaenomena edhibens, Edinburgh, 1787Google Scholar.
3 Smith, R. Angus, A Century of Science in Manchester, Memoirs and Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society, Manchester, v.9, X 3rd series, 1883Google Scholar, centenary volume: Malone, Dumas, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783‐1839, New Haven, 1926Google Scholar; Knight, Frida, The Strange Career of Thomas Walker, London, 1957Google Scholar;Robinson, Eric, “James Watt Jr.”Cambridge Historical Journal, v. II, 1953‐55, pp. 349‐55Google Scholar.
4 Times, 12, 13 September, 1792; State Trials, ed. T. B. and T. S. Howell, v. 24,510 and 525; Ward, Bernard, The Dawn of Catholic Emancipation, 2 vols. London, 1909Google Scholar, vol. I passim; Good, John Mason, Alexander Geddes, London, 1803Google Scholar; Hutt, M. G., “The Cures and the Third Estate: the ideas of Reform and the pamphlets of the French lower Clergy, 1787‐1789”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, v. 8, 1957, pp. 74–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 State Trials, v. 24,490, 509‐10, 525; v. 25,154,157,160.
6 Edmund Buike to Lord Grenville, 18 August 1792, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, eds. Marshall, P. J. and Woods, John A., Cambridge, 1968, v. 7 215‐17Google Scholar.
7 See copies of letters sent by James Maxwell to Dundas, H. O. 42/22, Public Recoid Office, London.
8 So Alexander Geddes wrote to Rev. A. Wilks, 26 August 1792, GD 237, Box 165, bundle 3, Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh.
9 Maxwell, W., Declaration de W. Maxwell, Citoyen Anglais, Relativementa ľAssemblee qui devoit se tenir chez lui a Londres, le 12 septembre 1792, pour ouvrir ube sous‐cription en faveur des Patriotes Francoises, Paris, 1792Google Scholar. Times 12,13 Sept. 1792. Also see H. O. 42/22 and H. O. 42/21 which contain numerous letters regarding Maxwell's activities.
10 Ibid.
11 See Alger, J. G., Englishmen in the French Revolution, London, 1889, pp. 77–8Google Scholar, and his “The British Colony in Paris, 1792‐3”, English Historical Review, v. 13, 1898, pp. 672‐94. Also Earl Gower's Despatches, English Ambassador at Paris, from 1790 to August 1792. ed Browning, O., Cambridge, 1885, pp. 260,268‐9Google Scholar.
12 Parliamentary History, v. 30,189.
13 Times, 28 February 1793 and Parliamentary History, v. 30, 551‐54. Also W. Maxwell to E. Burke, 28 February 1793, Burke Mss, Sheffield Public Library.
14 “To Dr. Maxwell, on Miss Jessy Staig's Recovery” in The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. Kinsley, James, 3 vols, Oxford, 1968, vol. 2. 258–9.Google Scholar
15 E. Jenner to W. Maxwell, 19 March 1821, and also Maxwell's correspondence with Menzies in GD 237, Box 165, bundle 3, Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Society, v. 21, 1824, pp. 72‐78 and vol. 22,1824, pp. 9‐14.
16 Bishop Gillis in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, v. 3,1857‐60, pp. 239‐44.
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