In January 1815 a priest from the Catholic chapel at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, came very close to performing an exorcism on a young man, Peter Moore, a member of a distinguished Irish family. In August, however, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, William Poynter (1762–1827) definitively refused a licence for the ritual. A previously unnoticed series of letters about the proposed exorcism of Peter Moore is the only collection of documents pertaining to a Catholic exorcism in a British public archive. The correspondence provides a unique insight into the process for authorisation of exorcisms in the English Church and the attitudes of Poynter and his clergy towards the rite. This article analyses Poynter’s response to the proposed Moore exorcism, which contrasted with the positive evaluation of exorcism by some Ultramontane Catholics, most notably that of the Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, John Milner. Analysis of Poynter’s correspondence enables the historian to situate the Catholic Church in England within a wider discourse concerning possession and exorcism in the period of the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’. The contrasting approaches to exorcism adopted by Poynter and Milner reveal a profound cultural and theological fissure within the English Catholic community on the eve of legal emancipation that extended even into the realm of the preternatural.
Although most scholarship on possession and exorcism remains resolutely focussed on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, recent years have seen a small but growing number of studies on the relationship between the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ and increasingly hostile clerical attitudes towards exorcism. Erik Midelfort has examined the significance of the idea of ‘animal magnetism’ in the late eighteenth century Church as a naturalistic explanation for the phenomena of possession,Footnote 1 while Elena Brambilla has addressed the Roman Church’s changing approach to exorcism in the eighteenth century and the development of naturalistic interpretations of alleged demonic possession among Catholics.Footnote 2 Jean-Louis Quantin has drawn attention to the Curia’s anxiety that high-profile cases of ‘mystical fraud’ were being greeted with derision by French philosophes,Footnote 3 and the work of Massimo Mazzotti and Brian Levack has revealed that Augustinian theology, as well as an interest in naturalistic explanations, lay behind the scepticism of Catholic theologians such as Giovanni Cadonici and Benito Feijoo.Footnote 4 Euan Cameron has likewise revealed the crusade against belief in witchcraft (and associated belief in possession) by the German Theatine Ferdinand Sterzinger and the Italian priests Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Scipione Maffei.Footnote 5 The changing place of exorcism within eighteenth-century Catholicism is also addressed by Ulrich Lehner in his recent survey of the Catholic Enlightenment,Footnote 6 and a chapter is devoted to this subject in my own comprehensive survey of the history of Catholic exorcism.Footnote 7
Scholars have also drawn attention to notable exceptions to the trend against exorcism. Midelfort has analysed the career of the German priest and exorcist Johann Joseph Gassner in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1770s.Footnote 8 Further afield, Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks’ illuminating study of possession and exorcism in colonial New Mexico in the 1760s reveals the tensions between the missionary practices of local Franciscan friars and the caution of the Mexican Inquisition.Footnote 9 Through a case study of one Spanish village, Maria Tausiet has shown that a gap between the laity’s demand for exorcism and clerical reluctance to perform the rite continued to exist in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 10 Some attention has also been paid to exorcisms in England at this time; Owen Davies was the first historian to notice the exorcism performed in the Midland District in 1815 (Edward Peach’s exorcism of Mrs White),Footnote 11 which I have further examined in my study of the significance of exorcism on the Catholic mission in post-Reformation England.Footnote 12 The existence of the correspondence on the proposed exorcism of Peter Moore might suggest that this exorcism was not the isolated incident it first appears.
Exorcism in the eighteenth century
The eighteenth century saw a dramatic decline in official approval for exorcisms across Catholic Europe. At the start of the century, between 1703 and 1710, Rome’s Sacred Congregation of the Index banned virtually all manuals of exorcism apart from the officially approved text in the Rituale Romanum of 1614.Footnote 13 By mid-century, in most Catholic countries, exorcisms could only be performed under a licence issued for a specific exorcism by the local bishop (although there continued to be numerous exceptions to this practice). On 22 June 1744 Pope Benedict XIV issued a brief to the bishops of Italy urging caution in using the rite of exorcism, and in October 1745 the scandal caused by the supposed possession of Crescentia Höss (d. 1744), a Franciscan nun from Swabia, provoked another papal brief aimed partly at restricting exorcism, Sollicitudini nostrae.Footnote 14 In 1776 the Papacy again sent a clear message against unauthorised exorcisms when Pius VI intervened personally to prevent further exorcisms by Gassner, who had been touring the Holy Roman Empire.Footnote 15 Although the Pope did not deny the reality of possession or the efficacy of exorcism, he censured Gassner’s ministry and made clear that bishops needed to bring exorcists under strict control.
Rome’s attitude was consistent with the approach adopted by Catholic governments, such as that of the Empress Maria Theresa who prohibited exorcism in her dominions in 1758.Footnote 16 Enlightenment regimes took the view that, by offering exorcism, the Church encouraged witchcraft and possession panics, thereby causing civil disorder and retarding the refinement of public morals. Ironically, the close relationship enjoyed between Church and state under the European ancien régime meant that the Church was reluctant to upset Catholic monarchs by authorizing exorcisms. The need to compromise with secular regimes in the political aftermath of the French Revolution further weakened the Church’s adherence to ancient practice, and even in Spain (where exorcisms remained common in the eighteenth century) conflict broke out in 1812–14 between ‘demoniacs’ in the village of Tosos and priests who refused to exorcize them.Footnote 17
Books and pamphlets published in eighteenth-century England routinely deplored the practice of exorcism in Catholic countries, but exorcism was not an entirely non-existent phenomenon in England. In 1788 a Church of England clergyman, Joseph Easterbrook, assisted by Methodist preachers, exorcized a tailor named George Lukins (the ‘Yatton demoniac’) in a Bristol church.Footnote 18 Jonathan Barry has observed that, although ‘polarities’ between religious and secular (medical) explanations of Lukins’s ‘possession’ often featured in subsequent discussion, there was also a reluctance on the part of commentators ‘to deny the possibility of possession by, or the casting out by prayer of, evil spirits, given their gospel credentials’.Footnote 19 For large sections of the press, the idea of demonic possession was not self-evidently ridiculous, even though they deplored the lack of evidence that prevented the public from making up their minds about the Lukins case.Footnote 20
Barry has advocated a more subtle understanding of eighteenth-century English attitudes to the invisible world than the traditional polarity of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘superstition’, arguing that in the ‘discourse of spirits’ in eighteenth-century England, ‘public discourse may be only an approximate guide to private belief’.Footnote 21 In other words, people were less sceptical in private writings, such as letters and diaries, than they were in public, and regularly transgressed the boundary between enjoying supernatural tales (which was socially acceptable) and endorsing them (which was not).Footnote 22 Methodist belief in spirit possessions was not exceptional, and simply reflected the widespread belief of many ordinary English people and therefore ‘the broad popular basis of the movement’.Footnote 23 However, contemporary commentators on the Lukins case often returned to the claim that Easterbrook’s belief in the power of exorcism resembled the tenets of the ‘Romish church’.Footnote 24 It may not have been safe to deny the existence of spirits, but it was always safe to attack Catholics, and anti-Catholicism was common ground between the most extreme sceptics and more conservative defenders of the invisible world. Catholics endangered their credibility in British society by talking about possession and exorcism, not because no-one accepted the reality of these things, but because they were Catholics.
In 1815, British Catholics were a religious minority who enjoyed de facto (if not yet complete) toleration under an increasingly conservative Protestant regime vehemently opposed to the French Revolution and all its works. Furthermore, by 1793 Britain was granting asylum to French priests fleeing the Revolution and this was accompanied by an outpouring of sympathy from the British aristocracy towards French Catholic aristocrats, priests and nuns. For the first time, the British establishment was making common cause with persecuted Catholics, thereby disrupting the traditional national narrative of anti-Catholicism. By 1815 the English Catholic community enjoyed freedom of worship, thanks to the Second Catholic Relief Act of 1791, but had yet to receive political rights. The argument over the best way to achieve full legal emancipation had been dividing Catholics since the 1780s, with the Cisalpines arguing for an oath of allegiance acceptable to Catholics which would include a renunciation of the temporal power of the Pope. Ultramontanes, on the other hand, advocated no compromise and urged unquestioning loyalty to the Papacy.Footnote 25 The French Revolution only heightened the division, since both parties recognised that the circumstances were uniquely favourable to Catholics receiving a sympathetic hearing from the British government. Matters came to a head in January 1810 at a London meeting of lay Catholics to which the Vicars Apostolic were invited. Poynter and the Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, Peter Collingridge, signed a petition for toleration drafted at the meeting. Milner refused to do so and recruited the Irish bishops to his cause, arguing that Poynter was trying to place the hierarchy under government control. Milner subsequently succeeded in halting a Catholic Relief Bill in 1813, when Parliament became aware of the division amongst Catholics on the issue of a royal veto on the appointment of bishops.Footnote 26
To a certain extent, the Cisalpine-Ultramontane divide was also a cultural and theological as well as a political one. In 1796 the Cisalpine priest Joseph Berington (1743–1827) published a pamphlet on recent reports of miracles associated with a holy image in Italy, in which he attacked ‘the abuses of image-worship’ and ridiculed the idea ‘that no untruth can come from Rome’, as well as claiming that no miracles had taken place since the time of the apostles. In 1797 Berington was answered in print by Milner, then a missionary priest in Winchester, who accused him of ‘bare cowardice of treachery’ towards his own Church.Footnote 27 For the Cisalpines, the Ultramontanes were dangerous and superstitious extremists whose views had the potential to scandalise the British government, as well as providing material for anti-Catholic propagandists. For the Ultramontanes, the Cisalpines were disloyal and unbelieving Catholics (indeed, scarcely Catholics at all) willing to sell out to the Protestant establishment.
The issue of exorcism was a particular area of sensitivity for Catholics opposed to the Ultramontane position. There was a long history of stories of abusive exorcisms and fake possessions in anti-Catholic rhetoric.Footnote 28 Furthermore, the necessity of co-existence within a society in which many people self-consciously identified themselves with ‘rational’ belief meant that many Catholics were very sensitive to the views of their Protestant neighbours. In fact, it would be wrong to see English Catholics as passive passengers of the British Enlightenment, obliged to come along for the ride but privately cherishing conservative views. As Geoffrey Scott, Joseph P. Chinnici and Francis Young have shown, some British Catholics were at the forefront of the ‘Age of Reason’.Footnote 29 Ultramontanes like Milner, however, downplayed the role of reason, and argued that the fact that a belief or practice was part of the ancient deposit of faith was enough to authorise it. Milner admonished his flock in his Lenten Pastoral of 1816 that ‘it is not the Catholic Rule of Faith that every individual should judge of the reasonableness of the different articles of this faith; but he is to believe them on the authority of the Catholic Church’.Footnote 30
The rise of Ultramontanism was not the only factor with the potential to destabilise the Enlightenment consensus against exorcism. The influx of French priests brought a different set of attitudes to the preternatural,Footnote 31 and although there is no evidence that any of the exiled priests performed an exorcism whilst in England, at least one of them, Jean Mandé Sigogne, was later involved in an exorcism in 1803 in Quebec which was, at this time, under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District.Footnote 32 Furthermore, the Act of Union of 1801 incorporated Catholic Ireland into the United Kingdom. Although Irish Catholics still suffered under legal disabilities, in practice a burgeoning Catholic middle class was becoming increasingly assertive, challenging the dominance of the old Protestant ascendancy. Urban populations of poor Irish Catholics in England attracted accusations of ignorance and superstition,Footnote 33 but a mercantile class of Irish extraction was also taking its place in Britain’s cities, and did not share the English Catholics’ instinctive desire to avoid doing or saying anything that might scandalize Protestant neighbours.
There can be no doubt that, in practice, exorcism itself was a vanishingly marginal feature of English Catholic life in the early nineteenth century, but the political significance of arguments about exorcism and possession was potentially very great indeed. Such arguments pertained to the future position of Catholics in public life and their cultural integration into a society in which supernatural explanations of mental illness were no longer publicly acceptable. In other words, the argument about exorcism touched on the question of whether unbridgeable differences of culture and belief existed between Catholics and British public discourse on the supernatural. Poynter was reticent in the extreme in discussing the subject of exorcism, even in private letters, because discussion of any kind risked heightening the profile of Catholic ‘superstition’ and raising the spectre of popular anti-Catholicism. The practice of exorcism was circumscribed by the need to show sensitivity within an English cultural context.
William Poynter and the exorcism of Peter Moore
Peter Moore belonged to an important Irish family, the Moores of Ashbrook and Moore Hall. Although the family was originally Protestant, Peter’s father George Moore the elder (1729–99) converted to Catholicism at around the same time he moved to Alicante in Spain in the 1760s, where he established a business as a wine and grain merchant and married Catherine Killikelly in 1765.Footnote 34 In 1783 George Moore inherited the estate at Ashbrook, County Mayo from his brother Robert, and in 1792 he began work on Moore Hall. His family was living there by 1796. Peter Moore’s eldest brother John (1767–99) trained at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in Dublin in 1795, although he never practised. On 31 August 1798, after French troops had attacked and plundered Moore Hall during the rising of the United Irishmen, George Moore sent John to meet with the French general Jean-Joseph Amable Humbert at Castlebar. Humbert was so impressed with John that he appointed him ‘President of the Government of the Province of Connacht’ in the ‘Irish Republic’ and charged him with obtaining 1000 guineas from the local gentry to support French troops. John was arrested a few days later and, after a series of trials and courts martial, in 1799 he was sent to Waterford for transportation, but he fell ill and died before leaving Ireland.Footnote 35
George Moore died the same year, and Ashbrook and Moore Hall were inherited by his second surviving son, George Moore the younger (1770–1840), who was well-known in the nineteenth century for his History of the British Revolution of 1688–9 (1817).Footnote 36 However, the Moore family was becoming increasingly concerned about the erratic behaviour of the youngest brother, Peter. In 1806 George was in England, staying at Clifton near Bristol. Peter travelled from Ireland to Falmouth and came to meet him, whereupon the two brothers made their way to Ulverston in Lancashire, on the pretext of seeing the Lake District. On 5 May 1806 Peter wrote to his mother in Alicante that ‘We mean going to Ulverston when George intends seeing the lakes for his first time’.Footnote 37 Their real destination, however, was a Catholic boarding school run at Ulverston by an Irish priest, Patrick Everard.
Everard had a distinguished academic pedigree. He began his studies for the priesthood at Salamanca in 1778, where he was ordained in 1784.Footnote 38 He became a Doctor of Divinity of the University of Salamanca and President of the Irish College there, before serving for ten years as President of the Irish College at Bordeaux before its suppression by French revolutionary authorities.Footnote 39 The imprisoned Archbishop of Bordeaux, Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cice (1781–1801) made Everard his Vicar General and entrusted him with the administration of the diocese, and in October 1793 Everard narrowly escaped a violent mob when the old soutane he was wearing tore off in their hands. He fled to Spain and then to England. Everard would later serve as Archbishop of Cashel and Emly.Footnote 40 Peter Moore’s brother Thomas later told William Poynter that the purpose of the visit to Everard was a religious retreat: ‘[Peter] was originally brought up in the Country in Ireland without much notion of any thing except the ordinary practice of his Religion such as hearing Mass. He was subsequently placed with the Reverend Mr Everard at Ulverstone in Lancashire where he went thro’ all its forms, Confessions, Communions, spiritual Exercises &c.’Footnote 41
Thomas Moore may have been exaggerating the extent of Everard’s involvement, since it is clear from a letter sent to their mother from Ulverston by Peter and George on 31 May 1806 that Everard attributed Peter’s illness to natural causes. Peter reported that ‘by the united counsel of Mr Everard & my Brother We set out today for York to consult Doctor Hunter upon my case, whom I am told is very successful in curing disorders of my kind’. In the same letter, George noted that Hunter was ‘a man of great celebrity for soothing & assuaging any agitations of the mind’.Footnote 42 It would be reading too much into this correspondence to suppose that George took Peter to Ulverston in the hope of an exorcism and was disappointed, but it is evident that Everard considered a physician more helpful to Peter than a priest. In this way he anticipated the sceptical stance that would later be adopted by Poynter.
By 1814 George had fallen out with his brother Thomas, largely because Thomas was encouraged by his mother to make a claim on the family’s property in Alicante. Thomas lost a lawsuit against George, although George allowed him to go to Alicante to revive the family business, yet the Peninsular War soon made trade with Britain impossible.Footnote 43 The care of Peter had fallen to Thomas, who, belonging as he did to ‘the more Irish and the more Catholic portion of the family’, embarked on a more aggressive course of action.Footnote 44 Thomas was convinced that Peter would benefit from an exorcism. In November 1814 Thomas was in London with Peter, staying at Hatchet’s Hotel in Dover Street. He sent a servant, James Ryan, to call on the Vicar Apostolic of the London District at his house in Castle Street, Holborn. Poynter was not at home, but on 21 November he wrote to Ryan stating his position on the request for exorcism:
… on the case you propose, tho’ there can certainly be no doubt of the possibility of such a species of affliction as Mr Moore apprehends, yet it is absolutely necessary that the reality of it, in the particular case, should be evidently stated beyond a doubt, before it would be lawful for a minister of the Church to employ those means which are prescribed in our Rituals. There are so many symptoms of natural disorders which bear a resemblance to some of those which are observed in the case supposed by Mr Moore, that the judgement of medical men declaring that this is not a natural effect nor removeable by the application of natural causes or the use of natural means, would be requisite. Besides if the state of the person be not a derangement of mind, he should by prayer, by the use of the sacraments & other such spiritual means, dispose himself for the spiritual blessing of being delivered from his affliction. Without observing the precautions which the Church wisely prescribes, the power & sacred rites of the Church might & would be exposed to ridicule, especially in this Country.Footnote 45
Poynter’s response was consistent with the advice to bishops on exorcisms contained within the Rituale Romanum of 1614: ‘Let [the exorcist] not easily believe that someone is obsessed by the devil; but let him have those known signs, by which a person obsessed shall be distinguished from those who labour under an atrabilious or some other sickness’.Footnote 46 The ‘known signs’ were speaking an unknown language ‘in many words’ (pluribus verbis) or understanding one, the ability to reveal distant and unknown things, and manifestation of strength ‘beyond [the demoniac’s] age or natural condition’ (supra aetatis, seu conditionis naturam). In Sollicititudini nostrae (1745), Benedict XIV instructed that ‘In exorcizing energumens it is above all important, that it should be distinguished before anything else, whether he who asserts such a thing is genuinely obsessed by a demon’.Footnote 47 This instruction placed the obligation to distinguish between possession and illness at the forefront of a bishop’s role in dealing with alleged cases of possession.
However, Poynter was determined to go further than these instructions by insisting on ‘the judgement of medical men’. In other words, only if a physician could find no natural explanation for Peter’s condition would Poynter consider authorizing an exorcism. Most telling of all, however, was Poynter’s admission of the chief reason for his reluctance: ‘the power & sacred rites of the Church might & would be exposed to ridicule, especially in this Country’. Thomas Moore replied directly to Poynter a few days later, pointing out that Poynter’s requirement that he obtain the opinion of a physician on whether his brother was possessed was impossible to fulfil, since no physician in England believed demonic possession possible:
I beg leave to observe that you must be aware that it would be impossible to obtain the judgement of medical men declaring his case to be ‘a natural effect nor removeable by the application of natural means’ because they do not believe in any others. Mr Ryan might have stated to you that in St Luke’s Hospital for example they are so far from believing in supernatural causes that they would consider a Person a Lunatic till he ceased to believe in such. At Brook House Clapton under the care of Dr Monro, his Brother in Law Mr Holmes told me when I took away my Brother that tho’ he had the management of that House forty years & heard much of supernatural spirits he did not believe in their existence.
In answer to Poynter’s suggestion that Peter should seek relief through prayer, Thomas replied that this would be difficult, since
[Peter] does not appear to believe in God … He too thinks that the inward torment which he experiences can be removed by the application of natural means – And ascribes the effects which he feels to a Worm or some material Body … In this consists his Insanity – He feels & experiences certain effects & symptoms – Medical men deny the possibility of their existence from natural causes & do not believe in supernatural ones … I was anxious to try whether it might not be consistent with the ways of the Divine Providence to convince him … that there exists an all Powerful God who attends to the proper supplications of his Creatures, for if he should find relief … he could no more doubt of its being effected by supernatural means than he would have hesitated to attribute it to a natural means if Dr Gardiner to whom he applied had extracted a worm from him & with it removed the source of the feelings to which he is subjected.Footnote 48
Thomas was arguing that exorcism might be a way to bring Peter back to faith if it should prove effective. Although this argument was consistent with the ‘missionary’ deployment of exorcism by priests in England in the seventeenth century,Footnote 49 it was unlikely to convince Poynter, even when Thomas added the barbed comment, ‘Your Lordship will allow that the fear of Ridicule should not be an obstacle to doing what one believes to be right’. Thomas adopted a tone of demand rather than supplication to the bishop. A French priest had told him that any exorcism would require Poynter’s permission, and Thomas knew that Poynter was about to leave the country:
I should wish you would leave the necessary authority to some fit Person who must necessarily really believe in the existence of supernatural spirits in order as I presume to be qualified to afford the probability of relief in the manner which I expect – I conceive that I am only fulfilling my duty in making this application to your L[or]ds[hip] & shall not therefore apologize for doing so.
Poynter was, in fact, travelling to Rome in order to meet with Cardinal Litta, whom he hoped to convince of the need for English Catholics to take some sort of oath of allegiance in order to secure full participation in British civic life. Poynter’s view was stridently opposed by John Milner and the Irish bishops.Footnote 50 In January 1815 Poynter made clear in his diary whom he blamed for the lack of respect that was shown to him in Rome: ‘I had reason to complain of the treatment I had received from some Cardinals, of the manifest disposition in Rome to sacrifice the English Vicars Apostolic & Catholics to Mr M[ilner] & the Irish’.Footnote 51 Poynter continued travelling in Italy and Germany until his return to England on 12 June 1815.Footnote 52
At some point after receiving Poynter’s letter of 21 November 1814, probably in early December, Thomas Moore called at the bishop’s house but found that Poynter had already left for Rome. He then called on the Vicar General of the London District, Joseph Hodgson (1756–1821). Hodgson had been appointed Vicar General to Poynter’s predecessor Bishop Douglass in 1795 and was also secretary to the Chapter of the secular clergy.Footnote 53 Thomas received ‘only evasive answers’ from Hodgson, and was left unclear as to whether a Vicar General had the authority to license an exorcism in the absence of the Vicar Apostolic.Footnote 54 He then made his way to the home of the senior chaplain of the Catholic chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (originally the Sardinian Embassy Chapel), Thomas Rigby (1747–1815).Footnote 55 Rigby was not at home, and Thomas met instead with another priest, Richard Broderick (1771–1831).
Of the clergy approached by Thomas Moor, Broderick came the closest to agreeing to perform the exorcism. Although born in London he was, like the Moores, of Irish extraction, and began his studies at the English College at Douai in 1785. In February 1795 he was liberated from imprisonment by the French revolutionary authorities and escaped to England, where, in August of that year, he became a member of Old Hall Green College at Ware.Footnote 56 However, Broderick was unhappy at Old Hall Green (where Poynter was then Vice President) and he asked Bishop Douglass, in January 1796, for permission to migrate to Oscott or Crook Hall.Footnote 57 Douglass agreed, but only on condition that the London District would not pay for Broderick’s training, so Broderick consented to continue his studies at Old Hall Green and he was ordained in December 1798. Broderick joined the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in October 1799 and, apart from a brief period in Shropshire, he remained there until his death in 1831.Footnote 58
According to Thomas Moore,
… on hearing our business & what we had to state in support of our anxious wish upon this subject [Broderick] was so kind as to offer to do every thing in his power, & intimated he did not consider any particular authority necessary – as he professed himself perfectly satisfied of the possibility of Possession & obsession he said that he would assume the particular fact of his being so upon my authority from the peculiar circumstances of my experience in the manner detailed to him, as he added upon a subsequent occasion that it would require supernatural knowledge to decide upon the fact – for the Ritual lays particular stress upon the difficulty of doing so in consequence of the arts used by the spirit to deceive both Patient & Exorcist.
However, Broderick insisted on meeting with Peter Moore, the supposed demoniac, ‘for a week or two previous to his performing the ceremony in order to endeavour to bring him round to some sense of his duty to God’. Peter accordingly met with Broderick ‘3 or 4 times & promised to use prayer … and I believe occasionally to make the sign of the Cross on the part where he feels affected’. By this time it was almost Christmas:
The Christmas Holydays coming on Mr Broderick wished to postpone the exorcism till they were past – & subsequently wished my brother to be prepared for the nature of the ceremony – for which purpose I took him out a Ritual, & was agreeably surprized that instead of objecting thereto, he was prepared to hope for relief, as he discovered in himself some of the symptoms pointed out in the Ritual, but when we all met at Mr Broderick’s chambers as agreed upon … he said he could not do it.Footnote 59
The day ‘agreed upon’ was the day before the proposed performance of the rite, probably between 6 and 12 January 1815. However, on 4 January Thomas was already in possession of a written note from Hodgson confirming that he had no authority to authorize an exorcism,Footnote 60 suggesting that he was prepared to go along with Broderick’s view that such authorization was not necessary.
Thomas Moore either did not take Hodgson at his word, or Hodgson softened his own position in the absence of no clear canonical guidance on the extent of a Vicar General’s authority in the matter of exorcisms. Ryan paid another visit to Hodgson in April, asking him to authorize a different priest to exorcize Peter:
I represented to him the conviction which I entertained as well as of those persons who had frequent opportunities of witnessing his affliction, that he was really possessed of a spirit, & I urged to him the propriety of his appointing some Clergyman to ascertain by a careful inspection of your Brothers state the accuracy & truth of my representation.
However, Hodgson expressed a desire to avoid adverse publicity which matched Poynter’s own:
I could receive no other direct reply than that he feared the misconstruction by Protestants & other Dissenters of the attributes which our belief attached to the mere performance of the ceremony of Exorcism; & that this feeling completely subdued every other of expected efficacy in such an appeal to the Mercy of our Creator in behalf of a suffering fellow creature. In vain did I urge the pusillanimity of such departure in a Minister of the Church; & that Exorcisms have been practiced in the Protestant Church; he was quite deaf to all my entreaties & seemed inexorably fixed in his determination not to comply in any manner with our desires.Footnote 61
Ryan was not even able to persuade Hodgson to allow a priest to examine Peter Moore and reach his own conclusion. Ryan noted that ‘Mr Hudson admitted to the full extent that the affliction was possible & likewise that many instances of Exorcisms have been attended with complete success’, but his ‘fears of ridicule’ made it absolutely impossible for him to contemplate authorising the exorcism.Footnote 62
Poynter returned to England in June, and Ryan called on him shortly after the bishop’s arrival. Ryan ‘enquired whether H[is] L[ordship] would give Dr B[roderick] the necessary license & understood that he would but that he wished to see him personally first’. Having received what he interpreted as a positive response from the bishop, Ryan called on Broderick, ‘& after making some difficulties [Broderick] gave him a note, stating that his private opinion was that Mr P[eter] M[oore] was not possessed, but that if Dr P[oynter] would give him permission to perform the Exorcism He would try it with the blessing of God’. Ryan delivered Broderick’s note to Poynter ‘who said he would before giving such permission require to see Dr B[roderick] & give him his instructions’. On 21 July, Ryan and Thomas Moore then tried to call on Broderick together but received no answer; eventually a boy came to the door with a note:
[Mr Broderick] begs leave to say that he is authorised by Dr Poynter to say ‘that in consequence of the firm conviction there is upon Mr Broderick’s mind that Mr Peter Moore is not possessed, Dr P[oynter] does not require nor wish that Mr B[roderick] should perform the ceremony’. Mr B[roderick] hopes this answer will terminate the business as far as it relates to Mr B[roderick].Footnote 63
Thomas Moore’s response to this rebuttal was to write to Poynter, complaining about Broderick’s change of heart, in spite of the fact that Poynter had never approved an exorcism performed by Broderick in the first place: ‘it must be perfectly evident that his conduct at present is at direct variance with his promises and assurances at that time [January 1815] to Mr Ryan & to me’. Thomas thought that one possible reason for Poynter’s reluctance to authorize exorcism was that he had heard a rumour that the Moore brothers had an insane aunt, but he was adamant that Peter was not insane:
I know very well that a sceptic who does not believe in the possibility of possession will say that he is mad & that I was so too, but I knowing the reverse with regard to myself can suppose him afflicted in the same manner as I was – Any one who really believes in the possibility of possession can easily conceive that the conflict of contrary impulses to which a Person who is no longer a free agent in subject will of necessity … have to a by stander the appearance of what is called Insanity.Footnote 64
Thomas again tried to shame Poynter into approving the rite by an implied accusation of disbelief, and complained that Broderick should have been frank about his doubts at the start rather than stringing Thomas along for so many months. Thomas demanded that Poynter find another priest willing to perform the exorcism, ‘as I certainly shall not rest till I ascertain whether it may not be consistent with the ways of the Divine Providence to relieve my Brother in this manner’.Footnote 65
It is possible that Broderick genuinely changed his mind about Peter Moore’s possession in January 1815. On the other hand, it is also possible that pressure was brought to bear on Broderick by the Vicar General (in the absence of the Vicar Apostolic) to fall into line with Poynter’s view, especially since Broderick’s original offer to perform the exorcism was based on ignorance of the strictures of Canon Law and Poynter’s own views. Although Poynter’s diary for the period 1815–24 survives and has been edited by Peter Phillips, Poynter makes no reference to the exorcism of Peter Moore. Poynter primarily recorded which letters he had written to whom, whom he had met with and which faculties and permissions he had granted that day. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that Hodgson as Vicar General took charge of the affair and attempted to interpret Poynter’s probable wishes, especially as he spent long periods out of the country. Poynter’s first mention of Broderick in the diary occurs on 23 July 1815, when he assisted at the ordination of James Shaw to the priesthood.Footnote 66
Poynter made no record of his curt letter to Thomas Moore in late July, either because the matter was not sufficiently important or because the subject-matter was embarrassing:
I beg leave to inform you, that no Clergyman can perform the ceremony of Exorcism in this District, without an express license from me for that particular purpose. With respect to the particular case in question, I have only to say, that if any one of the three English Chaplains at Spanish Place Chapel, shall state to me, in a satisfactory manner, that your Brother is possessed, I will grant him the necessary licence to act.Footnote 67
Poynter was offering Thomas a small chink of hope, and accordingly Thomas headed to the chapel of the Spanish Embassy at Spanish Place. There is some evidence, however, that Poynter prepared the ground with the chaplains at Spanish Place, since one of them, Joseph Francis Carpue (1766–1849), already had a letter from Poynter when Thomas arrived, instructing him to attend on a member of the Moore family. However, as soon as Thomas mentioned the matter of exorcism Carpue made an ‘involuntary gesture of ridicule’. On 1 August Thomas returned to try another of the priests, Peter Gandolphy:
All I could get from him was that Exorcism had never been performed in England & if it was done in Spain I had better send my Brother thither – he said I would not obtain your Lordship’s licence … I remarked upon the proofs of possession he had required of Mr Ryan such as walking against the cieling pulling out a grate with a little finger & reading People’s thoughts … and I read him different signs stated by Thyraeus as proofs of Possession & urged his perusing that & other treaties in the British Museum … but he said he required no reading on the subject & that the proofs he had stated to Mr Ryan were the first that occurred to him but that the proposition he meant to lay down was that to prove that my Brother was in possession of a supernatural being it was necessary that he should be able to do something supernatural or that nobody else could do adding ‘If he could read my thoughts for example’.Footnote 68
Gandolphy was wrong in believing that Catholic exorcisms had never been performed in England, although none had taken place since 1696, when a young man was exorcized by a group of Jesuits in Lancashire.Footnote 69 However, his suggestion that Thomas might take his brother to Spain made sense, given that the brothers’ mother, Catherine Moore, lived at Alicante and exorcisms were still a regular feature of Spanish Catholic life, especially at pilgrimage shrines. These included the hermitage of the Mare de Deu de la Balma in Zorita, Nuestra Señora de la Fuente de la Salud in Traiguera (both in Castellón), the collegiate church of Santa María in Cervera in Lérida, the chapel of Santa Orosia in the Cathedral of Jaca and the monastery of Cilla (both in the diocese of Huesca) and the shrine of Santo Cristo de Calatorao in Zaragoza itself.Footnote 70 Exorcisms at some of these sites continued up to the end of the nineteenth century.
During the conversation, Thomas appealed to the writings of the seventeenth-century Jesuit theologian Peter Thyraeus (1546–1601), the author of such works as De demoniacis liber unus (‘One book on demoniacs’, 1594) and Daemoniaci cum locis infestis et terriculamentis nocturnis (‘Demoniacs, with infested places and nocturnal terrors’, 1604).Footnote 71 Writing before the publication of the official rite of exorcism in 1614, Thyraeus represented an earlier tradition of demonology, at odds with the later conservativism articulated by Benedict XIV and Pius VI and embraced by bishops like Poynter. Gandolphy’s ignorance of Thyraeus is not surprising; the last publication of Thyraeus’ best known work, Locis infestis, was in 1631.Footnote 72 Thomas Moore embodied a new kind of lay self-confidence that was also distinctively British—few countries at the time had national public libraries, and by challenging Gandolphy on the basis of his own private reading in the British Museum, Moore undermined the usual distinction between the laity and the learned clergy. Thomas Moore’s rediscovery of seventeenth-century Catholic demonology in the British Museum also prefigured the research of Montague Summers (1880–1948) by over a century.
Gandolphy showed his ignorance of demonological literature by suggesting that Thomas take the book to another priest, John Earle (b. 1749), who had been the head chaplain at Spanish Place since 1792,Footnote 73 since ‘he understood a little Spanish [and] perhaps he would read the Book’; ‘I told him it was in Latin’, Thomas wrote acidly, ‘& a French abbé entering I took leave of him’. Nevertheless, Thomas did write to Earle on 3 August and received a curt reply from the priest, who ‘begged to be excused and that he would have nothing to say to it’.Footnote 74 Thomas Moore had exhausted his options, having followed Poynter’s advice and consulted all three chaplains at Spanish Place: Carpue, Gandolphy and Earle. The priests seem to have communicated this to Poynter, since on 5 August he put a definitive end to the affair in a last letter to Thomas:
By my letter of 2nd inst[ant] I referred you in the case proposed to the English Chaplains at Spanish Place Chapel that being the chapel to which you are attached by situation of your dwelling. I request you to understand that I must decline granting a license for the purpose in question to any other clergyman.Footnote 75
Peter Moore was still alive in 1840, when ‘poor witless Uncle Peter’ was provided for in George’s will.Footnote 76 There is no sign that anyone else in the family offered anything other than a naturalistic explanation for Peter’s mental illness. The eleven letters regarding the proposed exorcism in 1814–15 now held in Maidstone are all contemporary copies in a single hand, although there is no indication of who the transcriber was. The end of Moore’s letter to Earle of 3 August and Poynter’s letter to Moore of 5 August are missing in manuscript, but a mid-twentieth-century typewritten transcription of documents in the Archives of the Archbishops of Westminster (AAW) supplies the endings.Footnote 77
Poynter’s reluctance and finally refusal to authorize the exorcism of Peter Moore was in strong contrast to the attitude adopted by John Milner in the same period. In August 1815 the Birmingham priest Edward Peach exorcized a woman called Mrs White at King’s Norton, and a detailed account of the exorcism appeared in the June 1816 number of The Catholicon, an Ultramontane Catholic magazine.Footnote 78 No evidence survives that Peach received authorisation to perform the exorcism from Milner, but in August 1816 The Catholicon printed a letter, signed ‘X’, written by Milner and praising Peach.Footnote 79 This would suggest that Milner did indeed authorise the exorcism. Twenty years later, in 1836, Peach’s account was published as a separate pamphlet.Footnote 80
Whereas Poynter was reluctant to discuss exorcism even in a private letter, Milner was prepared to promote exorcism in print. However, Milner’s letter in The Catholicon revealed that he was less interested in demonstrating the reality of demonic possession than he was in promoting unquestioning faith in the power of the Church’s sacramentals:
In some Catholics the event may excite surprise, but that feeling can only be a momentary one, and must be followed by the fullest credence in all who know the reliance that is to be placed in a statement of the pastor, who in the hands of God was the instrument of such a victory over Satan, and, impressed as they must be that the institution of the rites and prayers ordained by the Church as proper to the exercise of the promise of Christ to his apostles, that ‘in his name they should cast out devils,’ is a further evidence that demoniacal possessions were to continue in the subsequent ages (though such cases are not so frequently observed in Christendom as heretofore) to afflict mankind; for as infinite wisdom does nothing in vain, so it would be in the highest degree inconsistent to imagine that the Church, which is guided by that spirit, should provide a permanent remedy against an evil which had ceased to exist … there never was a time in which the consolations arising from the sensible effects of God’s merciful providence, could be better published, than at a period in which the afflictions of the faithful are heavy, and the delusions of those who are opposed to them are active, powerful and vigilant. To those whose exquisite prudence is ever on the flutter and alarm at every manifestation that might attract the notice or the censure of the tepid or incredulous, I have little to say, because the ‘fears’ of such over wise people ‘betray the succour that reason offers;’ but to all others, with Tobias, I will say, It is good to hide the secrets of the King: but it is honourable to reveal and confess the works of God.’Footnote 81
It is conceivable that Milner’s swipe at ‘those whose exquisite prudence is ever on the flutter’ was directed at Poynter, but it is more likely that it was intended as a general attack on Catholics who did not share his Ultramontane views. We cannot know whether Milner knew anything of the affair of Peter Moore, nor whether this influenced his decision to promote an exorcism in his own District, but it is certain that Milner had in mind exactly the sort of fear of scandal and Catholic Enlightenment caution that emerges from the letters of Poynter and Joseph Hodgson to James Ryan and Thomas Moore. The coincidence of Edward Peach’s exorcism and Poynter’s final refusal to authorize Thomas Moore’s request (both in August 1815) is a striking instance of the theological and pastoral differences that separated Poynter from Milner and the Ultramontanes at this crucial time in the development of the English Church.
Although reports of Irish exorcisms continued to appear in the British press up to Catholic Emancipation in 1829, thereafter the issue of exorcism receded from view entirely until the rise of Spiritualism provoked renewed discussion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 82 The proposed exorcism of Peter Moore never came to light in the press and Poynter successfully avoided the scandal he feared. The republication of Edward Peach’s account of the King’s Norton exorcism in 1836 was the last example of public discussion of exorcism by English Catholics until the very end of the nineteenth century. One reason for this may have been that the faithful were less interested in (and less edified by) stories of exorcism than Milner imagined; but it seems most likely that negative representation of Irish exorcisms in the British press during the 1820s – adduced as evidence that Catholics were superstitious, barbaric and unworthy of political rights – made Catholics reluctant to discuss the subject.Footnote 83 To this extent, Poynter and Hodgson were proved right that ‘the power & sacred rites of the Church might & would be exposed to ridicule’ if exorcisms were permitted. A tradition of reticence in referring to such preternatural phenomena has persisted in the English Church, so in this matter Poynter’s pastoral legacy endures.
