The recovery of England's Saxon, medieval, and Reformation inheritance opened up a wellspring for debate within the early modern nation. Slowly displacing the primacy of the classics in public life, old English texts were rediscovered, and long-dead kings, statesmen, and scholars re-entered elite discourse, with mythic memories ransacked for the service of the body politic. In the political sphere, the defenders of an English ‘ancient constitution’ invoked the common law tradition to joust with advocates of a more absolute regal power.Footnote 1 Elsewhere, the confessional tone caught within much of the writing of English history showed how far national identities owed to the experience of the European reformations. Contests within the Church of England pitted Foxe's line of proto-Protestant witnesses against a more conservative vision, stressing the continuities within an Anglican religion ‘reformed not made new’.Footnote 2 Current secondary scholarship has, however, offered fewer insights into the public implications of the study of history beyond the 1688 Revolution. R. J. Smith argues that its urgency ‘relaxed’ with the attainment of ‘political stability’, and Paulina Kewes has suggested that there was ‘less “use” for partisan historiography’ in an Augustan age of ‘politeness and urbanity’.Footnote 3 The nation's antiquarians are perceived to have withdrawn into their libraries as memories of regicide and revolution faded, their labours once again left to the province of amateurs and eccentrics.Footnote 4 The result is a comparative neglect of those reflections on the past that fell between the scholarship produced under the Stuart realm, and a later Augustan turn towards ‘Enlightenment history’.Footnote 5 This article will aim to highlight the persistence of English mythology, medieval history, and Reformation narratives as an influence on public religious discourse for more than half a century after 1688. It will do so by showing how the usage of the national past was more than a Protestant phenomenon.
Despite the growing attention paid to the religious hinterland behind eighteenth-century culture and society, the writings of the English recusant community after 1688 comprise, in one judgement, ‘a surprisingly neglected subject’.Footnote 6 The void has stemmed from the perception of a community ‘forced into quietism to protect itself’, defeated and disabled, when – despite unease in several quarters – the fall of James II appeared to prove that Protestantism was a stronger national bond than obedience to monarchy.Footnote 7 One political result of the Revolution was to return the old apparatus of penal laws and constrictions against Catholics, intensified after the fatal participation of a minority of recusants in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion. Its scholarly legacy was to tighten the grip of whig narratives, inscribed in the historical works of White Kennet, John Oldmixon, and Lawrence Echard: a literary turn that threatened to leave Catholicism with no function beyond service as the alien ‘other’ in the English national consciousness.Footnote 8 However, the half-century after 1688 saw a rejuvenation of Catholic interest in the national past, and a burst of scholarly activity that reached beyond the recusant fringe and into the public domain. Framing the struggles of their community within 1,000 years of English ecclesiastical history, a generation of authors confronted their compatriots with an alternative conception of national religious identity, challenging the spirit of a time when ‘much Fabulous matter springs up in place of Truth, [than] which nothing can be more precious, especially in History’.Footnote 9 The study of the past armed Catholic writers to resist the gloomy prognosis of co-religionists who feared themselves fated to remain ‘Englishmen in Vaine’.Footnote 10
This article will concentrate on the works of the priest Hugh Tootell, writing under his clerical pseudonym Charles Dodd, whose career climaxed with the publication of a Church history of England (1737–42) written especially but not exclusively ‘with regard to Catholicks’.Footnote 11 As the self-anointed spokesman of the English recusant gentry, Dodd's works traced the ideological dilemmas and anxieties overhanging eighteenth-century Catholic life. Inheriting from past scholarly co-religionists the tone of an Erasmian search for moderation, he also looked outwards, beyond his own community. His scholarship evolved through affinities with Gallican and Jansenist theologians writing to reappraise the relationship of the church in France with the See of Rome. He appropriated the materials of Anglican historical writing, and addressed the secular concerns of a scholarly reading public seeking to trace the origins of English constitutional rights and liberties. Increasingly, Dodd infused his work with a critical method and set of values close to the temper of the Enlightenment, seeking to position himself with an international, cross-confessional literary community, and contending that scholarship guided by principles of ‘Christian reason’ could eclipse the ‘pulpit-topics’ of plotting, persecuting papists from the English imagination.Footnote 12 Contrary to recent estimations of the early ‘republic of letters’ as an inward-looking and de-politicized community, Dodd's works were created to serve a public purpose.Footnote 13 He endeavoured at once to shift English recusant attitudes, to reduce the claims of the militant Counter-Reformation over his community, and lodge a new and provocative reading of national religious history inside libraries across the confessional divide. Dodd's work enjoyed a rich legacy. Later in the century, the Church history was resurrected by Catholics who pressed the case for civil emancipation by rejection of obscurantist tendencies residing within their church.
For Dodd and his contemporaries, reflections on the Reformation and the medieval inheritance became an out-working of the suppressed political imagination, conferring space for meditation on questions of national birthright, relations between civil and religious estates, and the authority of the international Catholic church. As members of a small missionary congregation, English recusants had long been obliged to adopt rhetorical defences that diverged from the methods and assumptions of the European Counter-Reformation. This article argues that Dodd's work, and its reception, allows us to locate at least a section of the recusant community within the movements for cultural and intellectual reform in European Catholic life probed by Derek Beales and T. C. W. Blanning.Footnote 14 For English Catholics no less than their Anglican contemporaries, a ‘war on enthusiasm’, and a counterblast to narrowly confessional readings of history, could readily appear within the ranks of the clergy.Footnote 15 Beginning with the wider context of Catholic historical scholarship, this article will proceed to look at the political stance, intellectual purpose, and scholarly influences steering the work of Charles Dodd. I will then show how he channelled his ideas into a study of the medieval past, conceived to promote dialogue with Anglican scholars and work towards a new interpretation of the English Reformation. However, the serenity of Dodd's later reputation belied the scale of the controversies his work aroused within his own lifetime: trapped in a series of bitter disputes among the Catholic clergy, he has been branded ‘malignant’ in one secondary verdict.Footnote 16 In representing themselves to the public domain, Catholics stumbled against the clashing perspectives of Jesuits and secular clergymen, and faced the problem of how to reconcile patriotic feelings with sympathy for the regal claims of the banished house of Stuart. Further, attempts to reach concord with Protestant opinion carried contentious implications for the relationship with the wider Catholic world. The allegation that Dodd's ecumenical purpose had led him to push at the boundaries of Tridentine tradition threw the author into discord with voices of orthodoxy within his church. Conceived to construct a more comfortable cultural and intellectual place for his co-religionists within their national community, Dodd's works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.
I
A rich tradition in recusant scholarship had always looked to historical as well as devotional contemplation in order to defend the Catholic confession as representing not merely the true faith, but the truly English stripe of religion. Catholic writers made much of the common sentiment, expressed in a set of verses in the papers of the Dicconson family: ‘That little which antiquity assures/Falles upon the Romish Church, not yours.’Footnote 17 Since the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholic vision of English history had been realized in a high polemical style, under émigrés in Counter-Reformation Europe, such as Thomas Stapleton, Robert Persons, and Richard Verstegan, who had mined the experience of the past to suit the cut and thrust of theological controversy.Footnote 18 However, the zeal of the continental seminary was matched by an enthusiasm of a different kind among the patrician lay leaders. Sceptical of exclusively classical or confessional learning, Stephen Tempest of Broughton urged his son that ‘The History of your own nation is what you ought to make yourself master of.’Footnote 19 Study of the past gratified the gentry cult of family virtue, recovering traditions of service to the commonwealth that offset the private identity taken from their faith. Sir William Swinburne of Capheaton viewed his ancestral pedigree as a monument to ‘the continuance of our family, with relation to the steadiness of principalls for consciences sake, by wandering through ye adversity of difficult times’.Footnote 20 Others turned their manors into treasure houses of England's pre-Reformation inheritance. Medieval missals stocked the library at Harvington Hall, where Charles Dodd ministered as chaplain to Sir Robert Throckmorton, while household prayers recalled the crusades, pilgrimages, and vigils undertaken by their ancestors, to preserve a deep consciousness of the family's place within English Christian history.Footnote 21
In pursuing their relish for antiquities, the squires could enter into a scholarly community that subverted the religious dividing lines. Sir Robert Throckmorton enjoyed a long friendship with the antiquary Anthony Wood, while his correspondent Charles Eyston of East Hendred had by 1720 become an ‘Honoured and Much Esteemed’ confidant of Thomas Hearne and Richard Rawlinson, rallying Catholic subscriptions for the works of a circle of Oxford high-churchmen who did much to define the Augustan interest in the English past.Footnote 22 Shared interests created more than just a social affinity. Catholics could occupy a cultural terrain with those Anglicans whose feelings for the medieval inheritance fostered yearnings to restore the ‘beauty of holiness’ to church liturgy, and moved them to forlorn reflections on, in Hearne's words, ‘the poor monks’ who ‘exceeded in what is really laudable those that supplanted them and afterwards took all opportunities of traducing them’.Footnote 23 Indeed, after 1660, high-church scholarship, with its lament against Calvinist excesses and its self-conscious recovery of the pre-Reformation inheritance, had the unintended effect of sending a wave of Tory Anglican notables into the Catholic fold – Lady Anne Hyde attributed her conversion to a reading of Peter Heylin's History of the Reformation.Footnote 24 The scholarship of the English recusant community owed a conspicuous debt to a generation of converts whose religious consciousness had been nourished less by the international post-Tridentine ethic than personal ruminations on the ancient matter of Christian Britain. The monk Hugh Cressy used his own Church history (1667) to place the papacy at arm's length in the rise of the English church; the sermons of Philip Michael Ellis, vicar apostolic to James II, drew more heavily upon the Anglo-Saxon kings than the saintly icons of the Counter-Reformation, as guides to spiritual virtue.Footnote 25 The claim of unbroken religious continuity informed the official history of the English congregation, prised out from calendars and chronicles, annals and hagiographies by another convert monk, Benet Weldon, in Paris after the 1688 Revolution.Footnote 26
Among the generation writing after 1688, the small number of Catholic historians who entered publication were similarly shaped by the dual influences of seminarian education and scholarly consumption among recusant squires. Some, such as Charles Eyston, could enlist high-church supporters to find a route into the print market.Footnote 27 Others covered up their confessional voice to forge a commercial reputation: the former Jacobite soldier John Stevens published an acclaimed History of ancient abbeys (1722) that won the patronage of Sir Hans Sloane and three Anglican bishops.Footnote 28 But a more openly Catholic perspective emerged from secular clergymen nurtured in the intellectual traditions of the English College, Douai. Robert Manning had served as professor of humanities and philosophy at Douai before arriving on the mission in 1692, to compose his account of England's conversion and reformation compared (1725).Footnote 29 Twelve years later, the baton was taken up by another Douai alumnus, when Charles Dodd brought a thirty-year scholarly career to a culmination with his Church history of England, followed by an extended Apology written in explanation of his purpose. In commercial success and enduring scholarly reputation, Dodd outstripped his recusant contemporaries. With three volumes published over five years, he would manage, according to one later account, to gain a foothold inside ‘the libraries of the curious’ and win a level of renown usually beyond the reach of his co-religionists.Footnote 30
The publication of Catholic apologetic in early Hanoverian England could be a perilous endeavour. Robert Manning's work was seized by government agents in 1725 as ‘seditious and impious’, and Charles Eyston's reflections of 1721 on the history of Glastonbury Abbey were lucky, according to his friend Thomas Hearne, to avoid a similar fate.Footnote 31 Recusant historians relied upon clandestine networks of Catholic printers and booksellers in London, often throwing up a mask by attributing the place of publication to Antwerp or Brussels – though the works of Dodd and Manning contained certain tell-tale signs of English production methods.Footnote 32 However, the commercial foundation of Dodd's work rested on a stream of subscriptions from the ‘Noblemen and Gentlemen’ of the recusant laity, who, the author later boasted, ‘have generously contributed considerable sums’.Footnote 33 Dodd's patron Sir Robert Throckmorton could tap into the funds of an active reading circle, centred on the manors clustered across south Warwickshire, the Thames Valley, and the Chilterns. Other influential recusant supporters included the duke of Norfolk and a scattering of landowning antiquarians from the Catholic heartlands in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Across the sea, he secured the advocacy of William Dicconson, the former lord treasurer at the exiled court of James II, who worked to elicit contributions from the community of Jacobites in Paris.Footnote 34 With the appearance of the final volume in 1742, Dodd's work was becoming a staple fixture in libraries across the transnational English Catholic world.
The history of Dodd's own family equipped him to voice the sentiments of English Catholics brought into contact with half a century of political tumults. His uncle, Christopher Tootell, had served in London as a secular clergyman through the reign of James II: in December 1688, he saw his chapel torched by a city mob.Footnote 35 Dodd himself, as chaplain first to the Molyneux family of Mossborough, had witnessed the rallying of the Lancashire gentry for the 1715 Jacobite rebellion – after his own chapel was smashed in a Protestant riot, he entered a four-year period of exile.Footnote 36 He poured these memories into an account of the national past that stretched from the retreat of the Romans to the fall of the house of Stuart: a synthesis that integrated the recent experiences of recusant Englishmen into the context of medieval and Reformation history, studied reign by reign. The last two volumes, centred on the post-Reformation environment, issued an explicit defence of recusant England, intended to ‘give such an account of their affairs as would … justify the whole body, as to those aspersions cast upon them’.Footnote 37 The Church history set the Protestant canon against the thoughts of Jacobean Catholic scholars, extrapolating the literary remains housed in continental seminaries and recusant mansions, and levelling broadsides against whig writers whom Dodd believed had relied upon dubious historical sources to reactivate animosity against recusants.Footnote 38 But, unsurprisingly when his commonplace notes were littered with quotations from Addison, Steele, and Defoe, Dodd endeavoured no less to cultivate a Protestant readership.Footnote 39 He promised that his design was expressly to avoid major religious quarrels, warning that both ‘Protestants and Catholics might expect to hear some accounts not very much to their advantage’ inside his text.Footnote 40
Charles Dodd acknowledged that, as a Catholic, his work would harbour ‘prejudices’, and he certainly retained more than a semblance of the old spirit of theological controversy. The Church history damned a ‘pretended Reformation’ carried through by ‘passion, ambition, revenge, lust, cruelty and all other worldly and vicious motives’. The ‘convulsions’ attending the Henrician break with Rome became the unavoidable consequence for a kingdom overturning its ‘centre of unity’ and expunging the ‘ancient practices and spiritual life’.Footnote 41 Moving into subsequent reigns, Dodd confronted the anti-Catholic tradition head on, attacking the belief that recusants aided and abetted the Armada, widely supported the Gunpowder Plot, conspired to murder Charles II, and smuggled in an illegitimate child on a warming pan to masquerade as the son of James II. The Church history concurred with whig scholars that all the landmark moments of the seventeenth century could be connected in a unifying narrative. But, for Dodd, the ‘secret springs’ behind this chain of events could be traced to the actions of anti-royalist ‘fanatics’, whose attempts to subvert the Stuart kingdoms had proceeded subtly under the guise of anti-Catholicism. From the Civil War, to the Exclusion Crisis, to the fall of James II, the same conspiratorial actors strutted upon the stage: radical Protestants whose stroke of genius was to tar loyal Catholics with the brush of subversion.Footnote 42
Yet Dodd's intention was not a simple reiteration of Catholic polemic. If he gave recusant readers much of what they expected to hear, the narrative was nonetheless softened by a variety of nuances, subtler hints, and unexpected qualifications. For Dodd, the original ‘discourse of reforming monasteries’ had offered a ‘very laudable undertaking’, before it had turned into ‘the undistinguish'd seizure of men's properties’.Footnote 43 He deplored the ‘excess of sanguinary laws’ that underpinned the Marian revival (albeit with blame attached squarely to the Holy See), and peppered his reflections with asides for ‘the instruction and edification’ of his fellow recusants.Footnote 44 It was correct for Catholics to uphold the ‘civil rights’ of Elizabeth; vital to denounce no less the persecution of Jews and Protestants, imperative that the veneration of martyrs should fall solely upon those such as Edmund Campion and Viscount Stafford, whose peaceful moderation recalled the example of ‘the Jews in their captivity’.Footnote 45 Conversely, if the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678 had been founded on lies, the Gunpowder Plot was all too real, and Dodd was contemptuous of Catholic whispers that the design had been concocted by Robert Cecil.Footnote 46 Whatever their qualms of conscience, Dodd believed that Catholics had no choice but to negotiate the cultural matrix of a country outside their faith, and ‘converse with Puritans, Independents … or other Protestants of what denomination so ever’, remembering that ‘when our blessed Saviour was upon earth, he was frequently found among Scribes, Pharasees, Herodians’.Footnote 47 For Charles Dodd, such pronouncements represented the conclusion of a long scholarly and political meditation. Behind the Church history stood a slew of earlier tracts, wrestling with the question of how Catholics might enlarge their sphere in English life, while refusing nonetheless to surrender the integrity of their claims on the national past.
II
Dodd's view of the purpose of Catholic historical scholarship evolved over the course of twenty years through his attempts to establish himself as a public advocate for English recusancy, deploying the precedents of the past originally towards more immediate polemical ends. Looking back into the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, he had aimed to refute, but also to understand, Protestant fears, examining the potential avenues towards Catholic accommodation in the English realm. Frequently disguising himself behind a Protestant voice, he had set up a series of dualities and dichotomies, between ‘Catholicks … loyal by principle’ and renegade ‘papists’, between ‘the Church of Rome’ and ‘the Court of Rome’, between true Catholicism and the ‘human inventions’ of ‘popery’. In a mark of partisanship tempered but not expunged within the Church history, he had charged the Jesuits with poisoning the relationship between recusants and their realm, by warping Catholic religion into a ‘strain of Bigotry, little less than Enthusiasm’.Footnote 48 In his anonymous History of the English College at Doway (1713), followed by a savage attack on The secret policy of the English Society of Jesus (1715), Dodd had reignited the bitter feud between the religious orders, arguing that it was Jesuits who had spread the canard of a papal right of ‘deposing kings’, Jesuits who had raised the power of the Holy See beyond its legal status, and that the Jesuit view of England as virgin territory to be claimed anew for Rome had opened up a gateway for the worst plotters and extremists in the Catholic world.Footnote 49 He had thrown his weight instead behind the old blueprint of the secular clergy, dreaming of the reconstruction of an ordered, visible church, disciplined under ‘dignified ecclesiasticks’ bound in oath to the laws of the kingdom. It was only by clearer delineation of the boundaries between civil and spiritual authority, bringing to an end the ‘kind of Anarchy’ that had grown ‘among the Papists’, that the sentiments of the great majority of patriotic recusants could find expression.Footnote 50 To the ends of peace in the commonwealth and their own eternal salvation, he laid before his co-religionists the witness of primitive Christianity and the wisdom of Tertullian: ‘We will fight for you, pray for you, trade with you … pursuing the same common end and public good of that community, of which Providence has made us joint members.’Footnote 51
Yet here Dodd stumbled against more recent political dramas. If all moderate Catholics had been able to agree upon temporal loyalty to the Stuarts in the previous century, the situation under George II was more perplexing. Half a century after the Revolution of 1688, substantial numbers of Dodd's contemporaries (including the leadership of the secular clergy) believed that the only king worthy of true allegiance was an exiled Stuart Pretender. Among his fellow historians, the principles of John Stevens were discernible in his lament for James II as ‘a prince so unfortunate as not only to lose his Crown, but to be also subject to the slanders of every malicious railing scribbler, and to have it thought a crime to vindicate him from unjust aspersions’.Footnote 52 The voice of Charles Dodd, however, was lacking in such clarity. There was certainly scant approval in the Church history for the events of 1688. Yet James could not be entirely exculpated. If his religious courage was worthy of admiration, the king had nonetheless promoted too many ‘treacherous proselytes and hot-headed Catholicks’ into the higher ranks of state, and presided over ‘illegal and irregular proceedings’ in the governance of the realm. The Revolution was captured primarily as the monarch's private tragedy; its political implications were far less lucid. Reviewing the 1689 settlement, Dodd lamented darkly that ‘though submission to lawful powers be a duty, both prudence and justice may be wanting in the administration’, before abruptly breaking off his work, ‘the ground being too slippery to come down any lower’.Footnote 53
The mercurial politics of the Church history were consistent with the details of Dodd's career. Twenty years earlier, he had ventured anonymously into print as a supporter of an abortive plan, marshalled by the eighth duke of Norfolk and the vicar apostolic, Bishop John Stonor, with milder support from the Throckmortons, to establish a new Catholic oath, pledging submission to George I.Footnote 54 Shocked by the consequences of the 1715 rebellion, Dodd had ‘stept a little out of his calling’, to propose a Catholick system of allegiance to the Hanoverian crown – backed up in a circulated manuscript treatise, ‘The free man or loyall papist’.Footnote 55 He had voiced a bitter lament for the decline in English Catholic numbers, and a tragedy compounded by taking ‘a wrong turn in their Politicks’, mistaking, in the Jacobite cause, ‘a private conceit for a Dogma of Faith’.Footnote 56 Dodd's pamphlets had adopted a language designed to shock, raising scriptural precedent, the gothic constitutions of Europe, and the law of nations to show that Catholic adherence to the Stuarts was not merely politically suicidal, but doctrinally errant. In a reading of the English constitution that turned completely against the prevailing Tory or Jacobite sensibility among Catholics, he had adopted the rhetorical devices of a radical whig to declare that James II had ‘violated the contract, by virtue whereof he wore the Sceptre’, allowing the community to claim ‘their Original Right’ as the ‘Supream Legislative Power’. The myth of indefeasible hereditary monarchy masked the reality of the world in which ‘Hereditary Claims are lost in the ocean of divine providence’, when only thirteen of the twenty individuals who had held the English crown between William I and William III had done so through lineal descent, and all-too-often ‘Hereditary Right has introduced Hereditary Miseries.’Footnote 57 To hold from scripture that Adam's patrimonial rule licensed absolute monarchy was no more valid than to suggest that primordial arrangements permitted ‘the marriages of brother and sister (because such conjunctions were there in the beginning)’.Footnote 58
For Dodd in 1716, a power could be judged legitimate only if it brought peace and protection. The dynastic contest between ‘Hanover and Barleduc’ should be stripped of its cosmic significance, and re-examined as a ‘civil schism’, between ‘two Pretenders’.Footnote 59 The Hobbesian language disclosed Dodd's debt to one of the most daring, imaginative, and iconoclastic ecclesiologies to emerge from within the recusant community. His thoughts on the matter of allegiance located him within the ‘Blacklowist’ tradition of Thomas White, Kenelm Digby, and John Sergeant, whose 1655 pledge of submission to Oliver Cromwell had fronted a rationalizing view of the relationship between civil and religious powers, accompanied by a call for the reduction of papal authority and a thorough reform of the Catholic faith.Footnote 60 Dodd retained lasting sympathy for this position, using the Church history to defend White as ‘a kind of enterpriser in the search of truth’ who ‘sometimes lost himself by treading in unbeaten paths’ but whose genius would be recognized when ‘time and recollection has plac'd things in a true light’.Footnote 61 However, such principles did not make the Catholick system any more viable as a political enterprise. The Blacklowist redescription of the church had been denounced for its theology within Rome, and reviled for its politics among recusants. Even Bishop Stonor believed that Dodd's Catholick system lacked sincerity, while its anti-monarchical strains were unlikely to please the court of George I.Footnote 62 By 1721, the plan for a Catholic oath had foundered on recusant scepticism and a hardening of whig attitudes, and Dodd's entanglement had become the secret that he tried to put to sleep. In his first work of history, a 1724 critique of the scholarship of Gilbert Burnet, he offered paeans of praise to the Catholic royalists of the Civil War.Footnote 63 Ten years later, chasing subscriptions from the émigrés in Paris, he incorporated laudatory remarks on the Jacobite exiles of 1688 into his Church history, together (as will be seen), with a highly monarchical view of the foundations of the English church.Footnote 64
Yet this vacillating stance towards dynastic allegiance did not obscure the ideological continuities connecting the Catholick system to the Church history. Dodd by 1737 still believed that Catholics could find the means of tranquil coexistence in a Protestant society. He remained adamant that God had created ‘two Independent powers of Church and State’, with intent to ‘let each be Umpire in their own Sphere’.Footnote 65 Within the Jacobite milieu, he found his closest ally in a fellow Douai clergyman, Edward Dicconson, brother to the Stuarts' royal treasurer, who had warned against any repeat of the mistakes of James II's reign, and argued that Catholic rebirth must be left to ‘the turn of providence’.Footnote 66 If he had been forced to de-emphasize the dynastic issue, it was also true that a Jacobite or Hanoverian identity was no longer the touchstone to define Dodd's long-term objectives for his community. His goal had shifted from pursuit of a defeated oath scheme to a broader challenge: an attempt to reframe the defence of the recusant community, and promote a rational, humanist form of Catholicism, made fit to participate in English civil society.
III
By the time he began the Church history, Dodd had become convinced that the route to Catholic re-engagement with the wider nation lay less in transient excursions into politics than a bid to rewrite his co-religionists back into the English past. He challenged English recusants to retrieve from their own history the humanist energy of More, Colet, and the first Catholic translators of the bible, and disavow ‘the wrangling temper of schoolmen’ who had promoted ‘undue attachment to Rome’.Footnote 67 He confronted Protestant authors too with evidence of the religious animus that had darkened their own scholarly traditions. The endurance of anti-popish myths was damned as a failing of intellectual rigour on both sides, when scholars had proved unable to lift their eyes above the detritus of ‘gossip’, ‘conjectures’, and ‘idle reports’, with the result that ‘an historian is no more than a mere journalist’. Urging historians to adopt higher critical methods, Dodd committed himself to a reform of learning that would purge Catholic and Protestant schoolrooms of the ‘ignorance, prejudice and passion’ that had disfigured the English civic domain.Footnote 68 Scepticism about grand providential narratives, allied to a distrust of using the past for easy analogous purposes, pushed him towards the spirit latterly understood as ‘Enlightenment history’, exemplified when his contemporary Viscount Bolingbroke sought through the study of the past ‘to purge the mind’ of ‘partialities and prejudices that we are apt to contract in our education’.Footnote 69 Dodd too wished to raise up readers prepared ‘to hold the scales … to look into intentions as well as words; to weigh the bag, as well as the goods, that are exposed to sale’.Footnote 70 Like Bolingbroke, his tone was self-consciously cosmopolitan, lamenting the Reformation in part as a severance from a time ‘when Englishmen resided in most of the universities abroad … learning the languages, laws, and customs of other nations’.Footnote 71 While acknowledging that he was using the intuitions of his narrative to disseminate a set of values, Dodd was convinced that such virtues offered the only way for a man to transcend the narrow horizons of his own community.
Dodd located the study of the past as the terrain on which to change the discourse between and within religious congregations, and so pitch the English Catholic case before Protestant opinion. He insisted that to be truly ‘Catholic’ was to repudiate the inquisitorial ‘Swords and Engines’ and understand that only wide toleration allowed an individual to mediate between conflicting claims to the truth.Footnote 72 Dodd raised a view of the soul balanced between ‘reason’ and the tugging forces of ‘ignorance’, ‘passion and partiality’ that acted ‘in a kind of confederacy to seduce mankind’. As passion had swept through ‘humane politicks’, so it had deluged, with tragic consequences, the part of the mind reserved for religion: ‘Such are our corrupt inclinations, that every man is apt to suspect his neighbour's veracity, who worships not God after the same manner: and by this means persons of different persuasions, in matters of religion, seldom do justice to one another upon the foot of common honesty.’ Moreover, because of its vulnerability to human invention, it was Dodd's rueful conclusion that ‘the pretended advantage of religion is a foreign consideration, when matters of fact are under debate’.Footnote 73 Even the judgements of the most saintly had to be called into question, when ‘true merit stands not upon any man's opinion, but upon more rational proofs’.Footnote 74 He recalled the axiom of Viscount Falkland that ‘the clergy labour under so many passions and prejudices, that the case of religion was never worse stated, than from the pulpit’.Footnote 75 The rewriting of English history therefore moved in step with an even more heightened ambition: reclaiming the true spirit of the gospels from the clutches of zealots to prove that Christianity carried potential as ‘a rational religion: that there is nothing in faith contrary to reason’.Footnote 76
Despite choosing a suspected Socinian – Viscount Falkland – as the authority for his ideas – many of Dodd's conclusions stood in homage to existing strains within recusant political theology. His tone echoed the treatises of a contemporary, the Douai professor Simon Berington, who exhorted the English clergy to rise above ‘scholastick contention’ by appealing to that ‘substance in man endow'd with the noble faculties of thinking, judging, chusing, forseeing’.Footnote 77 From earlier recusant authorities – Thomas Preston, William Barclay, and Leander Jones – he extracted a decentralized view of the church, steeped in the language of the conciliarist tradition, in which ‘ultramonani’ commands could be rejected with reference to ‘divines and bishops who would never own such a power to be lodged, either in the pope or in the universal church’.Footnote 78 Yet Dodd also turned towards a wider canvas of continental influences pushing for reform within the Catholic church. From the Gallican and Jansenist traditions in France, he could discover the works of Jean Mabillon, Noel Alexandre, and Louis-Ellies Dupin, who had ‘improved the world by historical labours, wherein they publish not only the facts, but the pretensions, arguments, and politick methods of every contending party’.Footnote 79 Through Gallican precedents, he could shape his belief in the semi-autonomy of national churches from the See of Rome.Footnote 80 As his commonplace notes disclosed, he took his plea for historians to expand their intellectual horizons from Mabillon's conviction that ‘all truth is of God, and by consequence one must love it. All truth can carry us to God.’Footnote 81 His search for dialogue with Protestant compatriots followed in the footsteps of Dupin, who had capitalized on the formation of the Anglo-French alliance in 1716 to open channels of scholarly and religious communication with Archbishop Wake of Canterbury.Footnote 82
The Church history moved with the cosmopolitan currents entering into domestic Catholic libraries as the result of education at Paris and Douai. The Throckmorton family manors were becoming especially established as centres of Anglo-French scholarly production, with Dodd's fellow chaplains, the Benedictines Bernard Wythie and Gregory Greenwood, translating Jansenist catechisms and publishing devotional treatises in homage to the Sorbonne theologians.Footnote 83 For the Catholic laity, Jansenist literature imparted a set of pastoral practices suited to the context of the domestic mission. With a focus on personal virtue and moral discipline over baroque ceremony, confining the role of the church to the dispensing of grace to the private soul, such works could be hewn to render Catholic spiritual allegiances more compatible with civic engagements in a Protestant country.Footnote 84 Latent in the Church history too were traces of the Critical essay (1729) on the history of Scotland penned by Thomas Innes of the Scots College, Paris – a close associate of Dodd's patron Edward Dicconson, who had taken the ‘letters, arts and sciences … the rules of chronology’ from Mabillon's school, in an attempt to strip his country of partisan myths.Footnote 85 Yet if these affinities highlighted a more authentically Catholic pedigree, they also confirmed the avant-garde character of Dodd's work. Though Parisian Jansenism had by the later seventeenth century tilted away from its original theological heresies, the movement was still denounced in Rome as a deviation from true doctrine, and it sat at odds with the confessional absolutism promoted by the French crown and ecclesiastical hierarchy.Footnote 86 Mabillon, Dupin, and Alexandre had all fallen under the shadow of the heresy-hunt under Louis XIV; for over fifty years, similar allegations had been directed at the English secular clergy in Paris and Douai, with Thomas Innes and Simon Berington forced to leave France after their refusal to sign up to the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus.Footnote 87 By weighting his work with influences anathematized in Catholic Europe, Charles Dodd was placing himself on precarious ground.
IV
The results of Dodd's ideological trajectory became evident in the first volume of the Church history, through an extended meditation on the origins of British Christianity, streaked with the deep-seated recusant notion of belonging to the ‘Church, not the court of Rome’, and infused with echoes of Gallican arguments. Here, he unveiled a vision of recusant religion animated by traditions stretching back to the cradle of the English church, that was pitched to meet the antiquarian enthusiasm of his gentry readership. Dodd rejoiced in the litany of martyrs and miracles burgeoning throughout the Diocletian persecutions, basked in the elevation of early British bishops, scholars, and missionaries across the Roman Empire and captured Christian virtue as a vital agent in the unification of the country, when ‘Religion and civil government commonly meet with the same fate in every age.’Footnote 88 To a larger audience, he began to manufacture his defence of a lost pre-Reformation age of learning, in which monks ‘guarded the springs’ of ‘the liberal sciences’ and scholarship rose above religious partisanship.Footnote 89 Dodd believed that a correct anatomy of the medieval church could provide the foundation for a more rational dialogue between receptive Anglicans and ‘the moderate men of his own party’.Footnote 90 The opening volume of the Church history positioned him to level his case against the Reformation, by pinpointing the religious changes of the sixteenth century as the destruction of a flourishing civil polity with a blessed spiritual inheritance.
Dodd's conception of English ecclesiastical origins made for a striking departure from the Catholic narratives forged through the Counter-Reformation. He did not conform to the anti-papal, Foxean notion of a hidden true church springing up in isolation from Rome, but neither did he accept the idea of historic English dependence upon the Holy See, disseminated through Persons's Treatise of three conversions. Instead, he was prepared to appropriate some of the tools of Protestant scholarship, assimilating the controversial founding myth that attributed the origins of British Christianity to the missionary efforts of Joseph of Arimathea, in order to craft his view of a pattern of correspondence between England and Rome that came without complete submission.Footnote 91 In tracing the endurance of this original church, he broke with the earlier Catholic position, which had drawn upon Gildas and Bede to argue that Celtic Christianity had been deracinated by years of corruption, requiring complete re-initiation into the Christian world. For Persons, every confrontation between Roman missionaries and British bishops had been brutally one-sided: the remnants of the older church were censured, overawed, and forced into line.Footnote 92 By positing instead an unbroken stream of religion passing from the Celtic kingdoms to the Saxon heptarchy, Dodd diminished the significance of St Augustine's venture. The gospel planted at Glastonbury had not withered – native saints and princes had guarded the primitive roots from which flowered ‘the constant tradition of the British Church’, free of ‘foreign influence or jurisdiction’. The establishment of the See of Canterbury did restore continental links, but Dodd painted Augustine's mission in an Erasmian hue. Despite many British customs ‘opposed’ to the rites of the church, Rome was ‘willing to sink every minor consideration, and demand their submission only in matters that are essential’. In adopting the Roman computation of Easter and the ritual of baptism, the priesthood would have ‘manifested their attachment to Catholic unity’ and could be at liberty ‘to retain their other customs, and enjoy whatever other immunities they may claim’.Footnote 93
This stand for the independence of a tenaciously national, authentically Catholic, ecclesiastical tradition was backed up by the discovery of monarchical principles embedded into the foundations of the English church. Dodd described Saxon kings who chaired synods, consecrated bishops, and enacted the laws concerning fasting, feasting, and clerical celibacy. The house of Wessex was exalted as providing a line of Christian warriors who replenished the church and planted ‘pious foundations’ as they reclaimed the land from the Danish yoke. He praised Edgar as the paragon of a reforming prince: a man who berated the bishops for their laxity – ‘they had slept over their duty’ – and wielded ‘the sword of Constantine’ to ‘purge the house of God’.Footnote 94 Moreover, English Christians had never been afraid to make a distinction between the spiritual bonds of the greater universal church and the temporal powers of the court of Rome. As his narrative moved from Saxon to Plantagenet monarchs, Dodd saw the ‘constant correspondence’ with the Holy See punctuated with ‘frequent controversies in every age’.Footnote 95 He attacked the ‘pretensions’ of the papal counsels upon the ‘ancient laws and customs of England’, bemoaning attempts to load the realm with taxes and bring foreigners into high ecclesiastical station. He refused to take the side of Becket against Henry II, and insisted that the actions of Thomas Cranmer did not undermine Henry VIII's legitimate power to appoint his own archbishop.Footnote 96 Indeed, he asserted that it was only through the prudence of the bishops that earlier princes had not been provoked towards an equally serious crisis with the Holy See.Footnote 97
By reimagining the relationship of the medieval church with the See of Rome, Dodd suggested that the polar opposites of Protestant and papalist tradition presented a false dichotomy, which ‘unprejudiced’ scholars were bound to rectify. For his ideas on the gothic bequest, he turned to guides from the Anglican high-church tradition, lacing his work with allusions to the works of Peter Heylin, George Hickes, and Jeremy Collier.Footnote 98 The ensuing picture of the past stirred several points of commonality with the thoughts of Tory divines retreating from continental Protestant alignments and setting their own church within the afterglow of an older spiritual and intellectual culture. Like his Douai contemporary Robert Manning, Dodd read sympathetically into Hearne's belief that the term ‘popery’ could be a legitimate description for the ‘Errors of the Church of Rome’, and the unwarranted innovations of the Council of Trent, but not an appellation to account for all Catholics.Footnote 99 Versed in high-church principles, he suggested that Catholics and Anglicans could converge towards an older, conciliarist notion of Rome as ‘a court of chancery to all nations that profess'd Christianity’, with its pontiff a ‘Chief Pastor’ rather than absolute law-maker to the churches of the world.Footnote 100 As Dodd would have been aware, it was not just Tory churchmen who had professed an interest in reasserting the ‘catholic’ identity of the Church of England. In the previous century, some prominent pamphleteers drawn from the ‘latitudinarian’ persuasion had agreed, in the words of the clergyman Michael Altham, that ‘as to all the Essentials of a Church, we hold the same Faith, the same Worship, and the same Government now, that we did before the Reformation’.Footnote 101 Among the occupants of the post-Revolution bishops' bench, Edward Stillingfleet and William Wake had both postulated a conception of Christendom composed of federated national churches, some of which stood outside the Protestant confession.Footnote 102 By 1719, as has been seen, Wake's embrace of the wider ‘congregation of the faithful’ had drawn him into a correspondence with Louis-Ellies Dupin that entertained the prospect of union between Anglican and Gallican churches.
In reaching out to Anglican sympathies over the construction of the English church, Dodd believed that he had acquired the tools to bid for a fair Protestant hearing when he came to describe its sixteenth-century demolition. He had shown himself sympathetic to reformations of learning, and committed to the ecclesiastical freedoms of national churches. However, even in this context, he contended that the Henrician transformation was unnecessary: the English church had already been subjected to ‘true reformations’ that had preserved primitive Christian teachings, and fended off the ambitions of the court of Rome. Moreover, while past princes had confined themselves to ‘the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that regards discipline only’, the innovators of the sixteenth century had ventured into forbidden territory: making the state supreme master of doctrine, conscience, and ‘the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that belongs to faith’.Footnote 103 Hence, ‘tho the See of Rome is a loser by this act of parliament, the Protestant clergy have gained nothing by it; they have only changed masters’; having put themselves ‘entirely under the power of the laity … their creed may ring the changes of the state’.Footnote 104 Dodd's reading of Anglican literature familiarized him with the emotive potential of these arguments. After 1689, high-church and nonjuring scholars such as Collier and Hickes had resurrected an anti-Erastian vision of the medieval church designed to resist encroachment by governments upon the liberties of the clergy.Footnote 105 In 1717, these concerns had broken into the Anglican mainstream with the vituperative bout of pamphlet warfare that marked the Bangorian Controversy: its outcome, the dissolving of the Anglican Convocation by George I, threatened to leave high-church voices disenfranchised.Footnote 106 Dodd's lament for the lost ‘monuments of British, Saxon and Norman glory’ was calculated to speak to such contemporary anxieties over the welfare of Anglican institutions in the hands of Lutheran, Hanoverian kings, tame whig bishops, and a centralizing civil power. He had not altered his opinion as to the temporal loyalties due to civil governments, but with a nod towards high-church readers, he rebalanced the argument to trace the limits of the sovereign power, and reassert the rights of national spiritual institutions, against popes and parliaments alike.
However, Dodd intended more than just an apology for Tory Anglicanism: his critique of Tudor tyranny was pitched to meet a range of temporal concerns felt among multiple constituencies within the kingdom. He contended that whenever ecclesiastical liberties suffered, the erosion of the civil constitution would be sure to follow. Dodd claimed to detect the starkest warning signs in 1066, when the Conquest had broken the balance of the Saxon kingdoms, with the result that ‘church and state began to struggle for power, and make reprisals on one another’ and ‘the English groaned under a slavish subjection’.Footnote 107 By pressing the unflattering parallels between Henry VIII and William I, he brought his case against the Reformation into contact with a language of Saxon liberties and anti-Normanism that supplied an enduring, popular critique of the Walpolean whig oligarchy.Footnote 108 The loss of the monasteries could be lamented in civic humanist terms as a state assault on a vibrant feature of the commonwealth, through which the poor were supported with charity, the king with ‘prayers and purses’. The Pilgrimage of Grace could be seen as undertaken in the cause of ‘liberty and property’, its defence of ‘ancient civil and religious rights’ compared to the Dutch revolt against Philip II.Footnote 109 Moreover, Dodd claimed that the tightening of the relationship between church and state had intensified the persecution of individual religious consciences. The Henrician government had set the private beliefs of its subjects against an unforgiving barrier of penal and sanguinary laws, creating a ‘large field, for politicians and knaves to range in, while religion and civil allegiance were so interwoven … that an impeachment in either kind serv'd to both purposes’. The conservative turn of later Henrician policy offered no improvement: the Six Articles no less than the earlier legislation violated a vital duality in human affairs, in which Christian worship had been kept separate from the temporal zone.Footnote 110 If his vision was built upon a somewhat rosy anatomy of the medieval church, Dodd believed nonetheless that he had amassed the material for a comprehensive indictment of the Reformation. The defence of the Catholic inheritance could be reframed through the argument that the loss of the gothic church had hastened the ruination of England's ‘gothic liberties’, civil and spiritual.
V
Charles Dodd had aimed to bring Englishmen into a more ‘rational attachment’ to their faith, and show that ‘neither church nor state can suffer … by representing a Catholic handsome, learned or patient under afflictions’.Footnote 111 In commercial terms, he could claim a modicum of success. Stored by Protestant London booksellers, the Church history had entered into the collection of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh by 1742 and appeared within an array of Anglican clerical libraries put up for auction later in the century.Footnote 112 According to a later Catholic scholar, no copies remained unsold.Footnote 113 Within twenty years, the Church history was being cited in Anglican Reformation narratives as an exemplar of the Catholic position. No admirer of Dodd, the clergyman Gloucester Ridley nonetheless sketched his account of the mid-Tudor reigns from the Church history, and the work was applauded by Timothy Neve as testament to an author more ‘modest’ and ‘sensible’ than most of his scholarly co-religionists.Footnote 114 Yet the continuing energy of religious polemic in England would confound Dodd's idealized notion of the space opened up by historical scholarship. ‘The Zeal of Popery hath lately revived many exploded misrepresentations against the Reformation’ was the verdict of the archdeacon of Lincoln, George Reynolds, as he set out on a point-by-point refutation of ‘the Pretended Friend to Freedom of Thinking’. For Reynolds, leading a chorus of Anglican invective, the sight of ‘the Reformation reproached by Papists from the Press’ was a mark of the degeneracy of the age: he urged the clergy to stand vigilant.Footnote 115 The identification of Jeremy Collier as ‘oracle’ to the work did not advance Dodd's case: in cleaving so closely to the thoughts of Jacobite-inclined high-churchmen, he had misjudged the mood of a wider swathe of the Anglican priesthood.Footnote 116 Gloucester Ridley believed that Dodd's narrative subtleties were unable to veil the ‘uniformity of the spirit of popery’ that connected the author of the Church history with the architects of the Marian persecutions, and a Stuart Pretender resident in Rome.Footnote 117 If they paid him the ironic compliment of presuming a wide readership, the zeal with which these clergymen raised the alarm made a mockery of Dodd's claim to have opened up channels of scholarly commerce across the confessional divide.
Dodd's adversaries did not just appear outside his own communion. In 1738, Edward Dicconson expressed his fear that sections of the work would be sent for critical scrutiny in Rome.Footnote 118 Three years, later, in a caustic Specimen of amendments, the Jesuit John Constable indeed claimed to detect inside the Church history a succession of heresies, shot through with repeated ‘Insolencies against the See Apostolick’. He alleged that reliance upon Jansenist divines had drawn the book into ‘very bad doctrine’, eliding differences between Catholic and Anglican teachings and misrepresenting the position of the French church, which would have been better understood had Dodd consulted the works of Bishop Bossuet.Footnote 119 The Specimen revealed a conflict over the purpose of ecclesiastical history that transcended the narrower disputes between seculars and Jesuits. For Constable, Dodd had undermined ‘the chief Beauties of Church-History’ by examining the Catholic community in terms of temporal affairs, without reference to the piety, devotion, and divine blessing that had saved them from extirpation. At best, Dodd was relating ‘dry facts’, reducing religion to a matter of politics; at worst, his belief that piety sat in tension with scholarly objectivity had turned him into a ‘favourer of Freethinkers’.Footnote 120 This was neither the first nor the last time that an English ecclesiastical historian would be accused of propagating the spirit of ‘these Times wherein Reason is often pretended to be so sufficient, as to make Faith needless’, and Dodd entered enthusiastically into the lists.Footnote 121 In a heated Apology, he invoked St Cyprian, herald of Christian reunion, and reasserted his conviction that ‘members of the true religion are as capable of lying as those of a false religion are of telling truth’. Yet the rejoinder was clouded by personal vitriol, and weighed down by tortuous attempts to dissociate himself from his Blacklowist tract, the Catholick system. In a resurrection of old enmities, he accused the Jesuits of betraying the moderate spirit of the recusant gentry, and corruptly manipulating the court of Rome: ‘To have recourse to Power, where there is a deficiency in the way of argument, has often been the method of those who desgin'd oppression.’Footnote 122 It was by Dodd's own acknowledgement that intramural conflicts would ‘throw down the whole fabrick, and bury the Catholick interest under the ruins’.Footnote 123 However, even later admirers regretted that he had succumbed too readily to the temptation of a clerical feud: the obsessive tone of the Apology threatened, in one judgement, to leave his career remembered for ‘too much asperity’ against Catholic opponents.Footnote 124 As Dodd's deathbed desire for reconciliation with the Society of Jesus served to signify, the thought had not escaped the author himself.Footnote 125
A generation after his death, Dodd enjoyed a literary afterlife that lifted the Church history out of its troubled environment. After 1765 and the death of the Stuart Pretender, the activities of the Catholic Committee, later reconstituted as the Cisalpine Club, brought greater visibility to a case for emancipation that rested on Anglo-Gallican ecclesiology, balancing the spiritual powers of the papacy with the rights of national churches and secular governments.Footnote 126 Dodd would have been gratified to see the grandsons of his patrons taking up the language of ‘reason’, ‘liberty’ and classical public virtue to place their claims before the British parliament. The Foxite whig Sir John Throckmorton brought the Church history to the forefront of the pamphlet campaign, offered as evidence that England's small ‘papistic party’ had never represented the Catholic majority of ‘men of loyal principles’.Footnote 127 For the clerical historians at the hub of the Cisalpine movement, Dodd was an ideological prophet, acclaimed by Charles Butler for ‘his absolute impartiality … the essential quality for an historian’, a view endorsed by Joseph Berington, who reflected, ‘I have seldom known a writer, and that writer a Churchman, so free from prejudice, and the degrading impressions of party zeal.’Footnote 128 In the following century, the conjunction of a medievalist consciousness with a reformist stripe of whig Catholicism was affirmed when John Lingard brought echoes of Dodd's own scholarly ethos into a History of England framed on the premise that ‘the good to be done is by writing a book which Protestants will read’.Footnote 129 In 1817, abridgements of Dodd would be reprinted in the journal Catholicon, as instructive religious and political apologetic from one of the ‘indefatigable worthies’ of the recusant faith.Footnote 130
Reflections on English history reveal the religious and political alternatives available to Catholics after 1688: the scope of intellectual life within the recusant community, and the barriers that prevented them from attaining their public objectives. Dodd pitched for an irenic tone, yet his struggle to define a via media between ‘papist’ and Protestant prejudices left a career scarred by literary controversy. Only two years after his death, the outbreak of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion served as a further reminder that the old questions stirred over Catholic allegiance could appear scarcely less urgent for recusants in the reign of George II than for the ancestors recaptured through the Church history. A century later, Dodd was a waning figure in the English Catholic imagination, his works offering little to feed the triumphalist, ultramontane hunger of the Victorian revival. Yet his scholarly career yields a number of more positive conclusions. Dodd allows us to locate the roots of Cisalpine arguments within an earlier rethinking of Catholic apologetic: a rhetorical pathway to emancipation mapped out through engagements with Anglican literature, in a time all too readily dismissed as one of aridity and seclusion for recusants. Developed in awareness of European theological debates, and conditioned by a conciliarist and cosmopolitan understanding of his international church, his work showed how patriotic, loyalist forms of English Catholicism could offer more than simply an insular search for self-preservation. For Charles Dodd, the contemplation of gothic glories need not be the preserve of Protestant partisanship or forlorn antiquarian nostalgia, but a means to lower the confessional boundaries, and impart an open, ecumenical spirit among the recusant flock. From the planting of the gospel to the rise of the ancient constitution, he showed recusant England how to enter into the codes and concerns of the Protestant tradition, and quietly subvert its conclusions.
