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John Lingard and the catholic revival
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 14: Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History , 1977 , pp. 313 - 327
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1977
References
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24 Published as the eleventh volume of the History of England . . . by John Lingard With an introduction by His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, 11 vols (London 1915).
25 Lingard to Kirke, 18 December 1819, Haile and Bonney pp 166-7.
26 The gulf between Hume and Lingard is shown in Hume, David, [The] History [of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688. With notes . . . exhibiting the most important differences between this author and Dr. Lingard], 2 vols (Philadelphia 1856)Google Scholar.
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43 Joseph Berington to Thomas Berington, 13 July 1819. Berington family papers, Worcester County Record Office.
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50 He wrote privately that ‘the zealous in the time of James knew no more how to accommodate themselves to the public feeling than the ultras lately in the reign of Charles X ... There were things which I could have wished to suppress: but I dared not.’ Lingard’s foe John Allen also had access to Barillon’s despatches, and ‘if he can find any pretence for a charge of partiality, will not suffer it to escape him. I have therefore mentioned the follies or madness of James and the Jesuits, but at the same time omitted nothing which I could discover in their favour.’ Lingard to Gradwell, 27 November 1830, A[rchdiocesan] A[rchives of] W[estminster].
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