John Lingard

• 1. Introduction

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  John Lingard was born on the 5th of February 1771 in St Thomas Street, in the center of Winchester, to parents who had kept their Catholic faith when it was dangerous to do so. His mother came from an old Catholic family that had been persecuted for their beliefs. His father, a carpenter by trade, had converted to Catholicism when he married her. Neither of them was originally from Winchester; they had each migrated from Claxby in Lincolnshire, met again in London, married there, and eventually settled in Winchester.

  From that modest beginning, Lingard would go on to write an eight-volume history of England that drew on Vatican archives, French diplomatic dispatches, Italian and Spanish state papers, and English document collections. He was the first British historian to do so. Yet the British intellectual establishment accorded him no recognition, and he is no longer widely read. What happened between that carpenter's house in Winchester and the Vatican's reading rooms? And what does it mean that England's most scrupulously sourced early historian was a Catholic priest, writing at a time when Catholics could barely participate in public life? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Dangerous Beginnings

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  Bishop Challoner recommended the young Lingard for a burse at the English College at Douai, in France, and Lingard entered the college in September 1782. He was not yet twelve years old. At Douai he excelled in the humanities before moving on to theology, and he was retained as professor of grammar at one of the lower schools at the end of his philosophy course.

  The college's existence in France became precarious when war broke out between Great Britain and France during the French Revolution. Lingard narrowly escaped attacks by mobs and returned to England in 1793, responsible for two brothers named Oliveira and for a young man named William, who would later become Lord Stourton. For nearly a year he served as tutor to the young Stourton at Baron Stourton's residence near York.

  When Lingard learned that students from Douai had gathered at Arthur Storey's school in Tudhoe, he asked the Baron's permission to join them. In 1794, Bishop William Gibson asked Thomas Eyre to take charge of those displaced Northern students, who were then temporarily at Tudhoe under Lingard's care. Eyre relocated Lingard and the students first to Pontop Hall, near Lanchester in County Durham, and then to Crook Hall, all within a few miles of Durham. There, though his title was nominally professor of philosophy, Lingard also served as vice-president, prefect of studies, procurator, and professor of Church history. He was ordained at York in April 1795.

• 3. Retiring to Hornby

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  Upon the death of Eyre in 1810, Lingard governed St. Cuthbert's College while continuing to teach theology. The following year, in 1811, he stepped away from institutional life entirely and retired to take charge of the secluded mission at Hornby, in Lancashire. He spent most of the rest of his life there.

  Residents of Hornby knew him as a quiet and gentle man, and he was well liked. The offers he received during this period say something about his reputation: he was asked to take the presidency of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, and of Old Hall Green. He declined both. Writing was where he intended to spend his remaining years, and Hornby gave him the solitude to do it.

  He was offered no honors by the British intellectual establishment. But his work drew attention elsewhere. When he traveled to Rome for research in 1825, Pope Leo XII presented him with a gold medal generally reserved for cardinals and princes. There is strong evidence that Leo XII made him a cardinal in pectore, meaning "in the breast," in 1826. Under that arrangement, the Pope could have announced the appointment publicly at some future time, but never did. Lingard died at Hornby on the 17th of July 1851, at the age of eighty-one. At his request, he was buried in the cloister of the college cemetery at Ushaw.

• 4. Anglo-Saxon Roots

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  The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church grew out of informal talks Lingard gave at Ushaw. The talks were compiled and edited, and the finished book was published at Newcastle in 1806. Lingard was insistent that he drew his information wherever possible from original works, not secondary accounts.

  His central argument was that the English church did not arrive as a foreign imposition but grew alongside the expanding political structures of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. He traced the institutional church planted by Augustine of Canterbury as something that developed within its surrounding social and political environment. On the question of Latin learning, he quoted his own text directly: "By preserving the use of the Latin tongue, they imposed on the clergy the necessity of study, kept alive the spirit of improvement, and transmitted to future generations the writings of the classics, and the monuments of profane and ecclesiastical history."

  The book also made a quietly pointed argument aimed at Lingard's contemporaries. In his discussion of Ecgberht of Ripon, Willibrord, and Boniface, Lingard suggested that a number of practices many English Protestants dismissed as "Romish" were actually exported to the continent by Englishmen in the early medieval period. By tracing a line of continuity between Anglo-Saxon Christians and nineteenth-century Roman Catholics, he was making the case that English Catholics were not foreign in their loyalties. They were, by this reading, among the most English of Englishmen. The argument would become a template for the larger history to come.

• 5. Writing for Protestants

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  In 1819, the first three volumes of The History of England were published. The first volume was originally intended as a textbook for schools. As each additional volume appeared, the History's reputation grew. A fourth volume followed in 1823, bringing the history up to the reign of Edward VI. With the proceeds from that fourth volume, Lingard built St. Mary's Church, which he referred to in jest as "Henry VIII's Chapel." The church is a Grade II listed building. Subsequent volumes appeared at intervals until he completed the work in 1849.

  The edition most commonly seen is a ten-volume set covering English history up to the accession of William and Mary in 1688. An enlarged thirteen-volume set, his final revision, extends the account to the commencement of the reign of William the Third. That thirteen-volume edition was published just before Lingard's death.

  What drove the work was a specific strategic purpose. In a letter of the 18th of December 1819, Lingard wrote to Kirke: "...my only chance of being read by Protestants depends upon my having the reputation of a temperate writer. The good to be done is by writing a book which Protestants will read." He gave no indication on the title page that he was a priest. He described himself, emphatically, as an impartial historian. Yet the impartiality itself was a form of Catholic argument. By presenting facts soberly and letting readers draw conclusions, Lingard was demonstrating that Catholic scholars could reason without sectarian distortion.

  Lingard articulated his guiding principle in a passage later published in the sixth edition of the History: "to weigh with care the value of the authorities on which I rely, and to watch with jealousy the secret workings of my own personal feelings and prepossessions. Such vigilance is a matter of necessity to every writer of history... Otherwise, he will be continually tempted to make an unfair use of the privilege of the historian; he will sacrifice the interests of truth to the interests of party, national, or religious, or political."

  Most of the earnings from the History, and from his other writings, were directed toward funding students for the priesthood. William Cobbett later used the History as an unbiased reference source for his own History of the Protestant Reformation, which argued that the Reformation had disastrous consequences for ordinary English people. Cobbett's work, in turn, contributed to the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.

• 6. Translation and Hymn

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  Lesser known than the History is a translation Lingard published anonymously in 1836. The title page identified the work only as being "by a Catholic." The subject was the Four Gospels, and Lingard's approach departed significantly from standard Catholic practice. Rather than working from the Latin Vulgate, he used early Greek manuscripts as his principal source. This produced renderings that differed from the familiar Catholic versions; where traditional Catholic practice read "do penance" at Matthew 3:2, Lingard wrote "repent."

  His willingness to depart from Catholic convention coexisted with a sharp skepticism toward what he saw as the Protestant idea of private scriptural interpretation. In a note to John 1:1, he wrote: "Hence it happens that men of every persuasion find confirmation of their peculiar opinions in the sacred volumes: for, in fact, it is not the Scripture that informs them, but that they affix their own meaning to the language of Scripture."

  The translation influenced Francis Patrick Kenrick, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Philadelphia and later Archbishop of Baltimore, who was born in 1796 and died in 1863. Kenrick published his own translation of the Four Gospels in 1849. By 1851, Lingard was confident enough in the reception of his own version to republish it under his own name.

  Lingard also authored the Catholic hymn Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star, loosely based on the medieval Latin plainchant Ave maris stella. J. Vincent Higginson described it as "one of the oldest English vernacular hymns commonly found in Catholic hymnals," a judgment that suggests the hymn outlasted much of Lingard's wider reputation.