Journal Article Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720, by William Gibson Get access Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720, by William Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp. 256. £75). Peter Nockles Peter Nockles Manchester, UK peternockles@hotmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, ceac198, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac198 Published: 15 September 2023

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There is a vast corpus of writing on the life and thought of Cardinal St John Henry Newman. Studies abound of Newman the theologian, philosopher, educational theorist, poet, novelist, and literary stylist. However, relatively little attention has been paid to Newman’s deep and abiding interest in other key elements of the arts—music, liturgy and sacramental signs, architecture, sculpture, and painting—all of which profoundly influenced and informed his thinking. Fr Guy Nicholls’s Unearthly Beauty, which began life as an Oxford doctoral study of Newman’s idea of beauty, admirably redresses this lacuna in Newman studies. This is a highly scholarly and deeply researched analysis of Newman’s thought on the subject of beauty in its various forms and of its function in his life and work. Beautifully and appropriately illustrated with 64 coloured plates, it is based on numerous sources, unpublished and published, and even extends to contemporary observations on Newman’s voice...

Reviewed by: The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780–1829 by Antonia Fraser Peter Nockles The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780–1829 BY ANTONIA FRASER New York: Doubleday, 2018. 319 pages. Paper: $17.00. ISBN: 9780525564836. The subject of the Catholic Church and the campaign for Emancipation in England and Ireland has been well studied. The classic accounts remain W. J. Amherst's two-volume The History of Catholic Emancipation and the Progress of the Catholic Church in the British Isles from 1771 to 1820 (1886) and Monsignor Bernard Ward's three-volume study The Eve of Catholic Emancipation (1911–1912). In recent years there have been several learned articles and monographs by eminent scholars, including R. W. Davies, and the Rev. Ambrose Macaulay.1 The literary context of the path to Catholic Emancipation has not been neglected, though not always treated in an accessible way.2 However, the main scholarly emphasis in studies such as Ambrose Macaulay's has been on the intricacies of sensitive diplomacy between the British government and the Holy See as the context for a detailed consideration of the struggle for the relief of Catholic "disabilities" and grievances. Catholics were considered to owe allegiance to a foreign power, the papacy. Therefore, the key question was as to how far the Catholic Church authorities in England and Ireland, in return for abolition of the penal laws, should by means of oaths of allegiance to the monarch provide "securities" to the government of the day who would in turn have a "veto" over Catholic affairs such as episcopal appointments. Much of the standard narrative has focused, sometimes in a narrowly Anglo-centric way, on the divisions and controversies among English and Irish Catholics themselves over the veto question. Differences of approach between lay aristocratic or gentry-dominated Cisalpine clubs and Catholic committees on the [End Page 151] one hand, and the bishops (in the case of Ireland) or Vicars-Apostolic (in the case of England) on the other, are highlighted. In most accounts, Bishop John Milner (1752–1826), Vicar-Apostolic of the Midland District, figures as the anti-vetoist "ultramontane" champion of the church over the aristocracy and against a "Cisalpine" movement that was deemed to be too accommodating towards the government of the day. Antonia Fraser's highly readable, accessible, elegantly written, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated study, does justice to most of these familiar issues and themes but paints on a refreshingly broader canvas. The balance is on the later, rather than earlier, portion of the period. Significantly, Ireland rightly receives as much treatment as England. In particular, the varying positions of holders of the office of Viceroy or Lord Lieutenant on the Catholic Question are justly considered to be significant. Commencing with the bloody Gordon Riots in London in 1780 and culminating in the "Bloodless Revolution" of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, at the heart of the book are the twin interlocking themes of the rival pressures of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation on the one hand, and resistance represented by the "Royal Conscience" of the monarch's scruples over his Coronation Oath on the other. The Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791 were certainly legal milestones, but the granting of political rights by full emancipation was to be bitterly opposed for another generation or more. George III had a genuine personal rapport with leading Catholic magnates such as Thomas Weld of Lulworth and Lord Petre of Thorndon Hall (where he was lavishly entertained on a royal visit in 1778). Notwithstanding this, royal concerns over the terms of the Coronation Oath ensured that the promise of emancipation after the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801 was to be repeatedly thwarted by George III and later by his son the Prince Regent as George IV (in spite of his own highly successful visit to Ireland in 1821). This resistance to the granting of political rights to Catholics was aided by the Protestant constitutionalism of the ultra-Tories (such as Lord Eldon, the then Lord Chancellor), some of whom founded Brunswick Clubs, and by more populist "No Popery" sentiment. The...

The authoritative Oxford History of Anglicanism, volume two, covering the period 1662–1829, makes no mention of the subject of David McCready’s highly informative intellectual biography, Alexander Knox (1757–1831), though Knox does receive a fleeting mention in Volume three.1 Nor does Knox’s name appear in Jeremy Morris’s acclaimed and seminal The High Church Revival in the Church of England, published in the same series as McCready’s volume.2 Nor does Knox appear even in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Given that the sub-title of McCready’s

Reviewed by: Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 by David Cannadine Peter Nockles Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 BY DAVID CANNADINE USA: Penguin Books, 2019. 602 pages. Paperback: $20. ISBN: 9780525557913. Sweeping grand narrative history, with an unapologetic emphasis on high politics, which characterises this masterful, highly readable, and nicely illustrated study by one of Britain's most eminent historians, Sir David Cannadine, is no longer in academic fashion. In recent years it has been rarely found outside the confines of such multi-volume projects as The New Oxford History of England series, to the authors of the "long" nineteenth-century volumes of which, notably Boyd Hilton's A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (2006), Cannadine acknowledges his debt in an appended "Note on Further Reading." In fact, while in no way derivative, Cannadine recognizes that he is contributing to a rich literature. Pride of place in the genre must go to G. M. Young's brilliant and evocative Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936) hailed "as the greatest single study of the age in any language" and by Simon Schama as "an immortal classic." To this can be added G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1922) and Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement: 1783–1867 (1959), while the more recent confident overviews of Victorian society by Simon Heffer are a worthy model. In an age when specialist or niche studies of concepts like the history of race, gender, the emotions and the senses, and material culture, each of which have their due place, have become commonplace, it is refreshing to find a historian tackling a broad canvas and panorama, while not losing sight of the local and particular. Nor in his "big picture" macro-study approach does Cannadine overlook the importance in themselves of race and gender issues. For example, he discusses gender inequality both in relation to employment, marriage, law, and the franchise, while race is treated in relation to slavery, the colonies, and the rise of racial hierarchical theories based on a misapplication of Darwin's ideas concerning evolution. Cannadine's perspective tends to privilege the state and corridors of power, and his "top down" high political, parliamentary, and electoral focus (every general election gets a mention, as do many of the budgets) means that the [End Page 161] great nineteenth-century statesmen—Pitt, the Earl of Liverpool, Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, the Earl of Derby, Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury—loom large. Nonetheless, Cannadine is no less interesting and perceptive in his analysis of the "condition of England" and also of wider cultural, intellectual, social and economic trends, covering the arts, music and literature, architecture and design, the sciences, transport and the railways. For example, generous space is given to the building and funding of the Crystal Palace and Great Exhibition of 1851 and its iconic significance. The title "Victorious Century" in itself captures a triumphalist Whig interpretation of nineteenth-century British history in terms of expanding democracy, rapid population growth, industrial expansion, colonial and imperial extension, all appearing to help shape a British global hegemony by the end of the period. The book opens with the Act of Union with Ireland (1800) and Britain's struggle with Napoleonic France, culminating in Wellington's triumph at the Battle of Waterloo (1815), a victory aided by an increasingly efficient apparatus of tax collection and public borrowing. The Radical challenge and popular agitation of the late 1810s and 1820s, the rise of Liberal Toryism and political realignments, along with the financial and banking crises of that period, are expertly analyzed, leading in to a reassessment of the 1832 Reform Act. That apparently seismic political milestone is shown to have been hedged in with restrictions and is claimed by Cannadine as being most noteworthy for inaugurating a two-party parliamentary system linked to class interests with the working-class remaining disenfranchised and also becoming subject to a harsh new Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) bearing the hallmarks of Benthamite Utilitarianism. Cannadine shows how the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s struggled in vain to enfranchise the workers and that it was only in 1867 with a Second Reform Act that "respectable...

It is clear that interest in the life and writings of Cardinal John Henry Newman transcends the various Christian denominations and indeed extends beyond that. The Symposium held at St Margaret's Westminster on 18 October 2019 to celebrate Newman's Canonisation was testimony to this fact. This in itself is significant surprising given Newman's well known ability to become a focus of controversy and to be a sometimes polarising figure during his own lifetime - a trait that has been bequeathed to posterity as scholars and commentators have contended over his disputed legacy, even though the contestation in recent times has tended not to be drawn along denominational lines. Newman spent half his life as an Anglican and so it is fitting that his relationship to the Church of England should loom large in the literature and historiography in Newman studies and to have been a prominent element in the recent Symposium.

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An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Ambrose Macaulay, author of The Holy See, British Policy and the Plan of Campaign in Ireland, 1885–93 (2002), is an authority on the complex political and diplomatic interplay of forces with which the Catholic Church in the British Isles had to deal in its struggle to win religious and political rights for Catholics. His mastery of the details of this recurring and ongoing struggle is evident in this new book. Macaulay shows how Catholics in Ireland and England in their campaign for relief from the penal laws and, later, for emancipation, had to deal not only with the Holy See but with governments in Dublin and in London. At the heart of the book lies a detailed examination of the ebb and flow of the movement for Catholic relief and changing political and diplomatic contexts of the government’s consideration of, and response to, Catholic grievances. In return for concessions, governments required the Catholic Church authorities to provide ‘securities’ in the form of oaths that included allegiance to King George III and his successors and a repudiation of the alleged ‘claims’ of the papacy that might be used to undermine the lawful authority of the British Crown. Much of this study focuses on details of the conditions that were sought in granting relief and the precise wording of oaths to be offered as ‘securities’ and how this provoked divisions and controversy among Catholics themselves, notably in England between a lay aristocratic or gentry-dominated Catholic Committee (forming itself into the Cisalpine Club in 1792) and the vicars apostolic, and (after 1803) especially with Bishop John Milner. Moreover, a clear difference of opinion also emerged and widened with time between the conservative aristocrats and gentry in England who made up the Cisalpine club, who were keen to take seats in parliament, on the one hand, and the middle-class activists in Ireland, who opposed the interference of the state in their religious affairs on political grounds, on the other. Disputes from within the ranks of the vicars apostolic, notably during vacancies, are also covered in detail.

treatment of the problematic Eighth Stromateus, which has otherwise not received attention in the recent turn to the fragmentary works. Indeed, the last monograph on it was composed in Latin, back in the days when that was an acceptable language for scholarly dissertations. Havrda provides a lemmatic commentary on the text, together with a Greek text, English translation, and a 77-page introduction which engages closely with the problems of the origin and purpose of the book. His interlocutors are the handful of scholars who have engaged with this problem over the last four centuries. His own arguments are fresh and incisive. He identifies a portion of the extant material as likely to be dependent on Galen, and argues that it probably derives from Galen’s lost On Demonstration. For ancient philosophers, this is one of the greatest reasons to take an interest in Clement’s eighth book. Havrda also shows how parts of the work are related to earlier books of the Stromateis. For scholars of ancient literary culture, this is valuable for understanding Clement’s working method as a miscellanist: the evidence of the ‘liber logicus’ suggests that he composed excerpt books, choosing material without special regard to its original context, but a view to its relevance for his Christian purpose. Later he would rework it into his own composite argument. Havrda’s study is a work of consummate erudition, published at an apposite moment for patristics, ancient philosophy, and potentially early imperial literary scholarship—though his own weight of attention and interest is clearly pointed toward the philosophical tradition.