About the Author: Wade Loach recently finished his Master’s Degree in History at the University of Ottawa, where he wrote his thesis on the life of Ann Fenwick, an 18th-century English Catholic woman. Wade was converted -as a result of this research and was received into the Church in 2024. He currently works as an historical interpreter at the Upper Canada Village.
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“My object is the truth: and in the pursuit of truth I have made it a religious duty to consult the original historians. Who would draw from the troubled stream, when he may drink at the fountain head?”
With these words, written in the preface to his Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church published in 1806, Father John Lingard, a sallow, illness-prone priest in a rural English village, changed the way in which history was written. His reasons for doing so revolved around a deep desire to defend his faith against a harshly anti-Catholic population. In his day-to-day life, Lingard was a pillar of the small community in Hornby, Lancashire. He was a friend to Protestant and Catholic alike to the point where, when the Anglican pastor in town had died, Lingard inherited the man’s dogs. Uniquely, a plaque to Lingard’s memory can be found both in the chapel he had built as well as in the Anglican church across the road. If present-day Catholics do not recognize his name, they will recognize the hymn he wrote: “Hail, Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star,” which is one of the oldest English-language Catholic hymns still in use today. Despite Lingard’s collegiality with Protestants in his personal life, he was not a universalist in any sense of the word. He wished to demonstrate the truth of the Catholic faith through a methodical presentation and examination of the facts as taken from primary source material. He accomplished this by combatting “Whig history,” which was the predominant way in which the past was being presented in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.
The writing of history at this point in 19th-century Britain often began with the premise that the past was worse than the present and that the ideological direction that the state was taking the nation was ultimately for the better. This was known as “Whig history,” taking its name from the political party in Britain opposite the Tories. The Whigs believed in the supremacy of the Parliament above the monarch, the centralization of government, and in preserving the Church of England through the deprivation of Roman Catholicism and Protestants who did not conform to the established church. Fittingly, it was the Whig historian’s job to trace how and why parliamentary democracy, the constitutional monarchy, Anglicanism, and other British institutions and principles emerged out of an ostensibly desolate past. Perhaps the best summary of Whiggish history comes from one of its most notable writers, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote in his own History of England in 1848 that “The history of our country . . . is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.” Coming from a family which had been impoverished and persecuted as a result of remaining faithful to the Catholic Church, John Lingard did not quite agree. Writing a letter to a colleague that same year, he deemed Macaulay’s work full of “claptrap in every description.” For Lingard, history was not teleological (marching steadily towards a certain end) and therefore should not be presented as such. It was not simply that these authors were virtually always anti-Catholic; some seemed to speak out against the tenets of Christianity itself. The (likely deist) philosopher David Hume, in an especially popular Whig history published in the mid-18th century, denied the existence of miracles and cast doubt upon the reality of the supernatural, denounced both the principles of Roman Catholicism and of the fanaticism brought about by the Protestant Reformation, and believed that the established church ought to primarily focus its efforts upon worldly and social matters rather than the spiritual world. Fr. Lingard’s solution to this overly ideological way of writing history was to fully commit himself to an unimpeachable form of historical methodology: research which was based upon primary source material such as manuscripts, state papers, and dispatches. While this idea likely sounds banal and obvious now, this was not the case in the 19th century. These were days in which accessing the sorts of primary source documents historians rely upon today was prohibitively expensive and often muddled by bureaucracy. Lingard, however, refused to accept any information without seeing it in primary sources either firsthand or through a trusted colleague. He would spend the latter half of his life conducting this research and writing his History of England.
As a Catholic priest writing for an Anglican population in a time in which his faith was viewed with fear and anxiety and stifled by the laws of the land, Lingard faced attacks upon his literary career which questioned his reliability and motives. Dr. John Allen, a fellow historian, published a critique of Lingard’s Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, which claimed that “it would be unreasonable . . . to expect that a Catholic clergyman, zealously attached to his communion, should be able to write with impartiality.” These were not words which Lingard could simply ignore. Dr. Allen was a deeply learned and respected man whose critiques seriously detracted from Lingard’s credibility amongst Protestant intellectuals. Fr. Lingard was discouraged and considered quitting his foray into history and returning to writing apologetic pamphlets defending the Catholic faith against slander. His publisher, a Protestant, offered him blunt and practical advice that drove him to continue his histories: “After all, what is the use of these pamphlets? Few Protestants read them. If you wish to make an impression, write books that Protestants will read.”
Fr. Lingard, who had sworn himself to pursue the truth, would not simply pander to Protestant sensibilities in any of his histories in order to increase his readership. Instead, he hoped to win the respect of all readers by presenting the source material exactly as he had found it, even if it risked offending those close to him. While he praised the virtues of Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, John Fisher, and other Catholic figures of the English Reformation, Lingard also presented a low picture of the monks in England during the Reformation, who he claimed all submitted to Henry VIII with few exceptions. When challenged on this assertion by a critic, Lingard doubled down, responding that from the manuscript evidence he had seen, it appeared as if “the monks of the period were men of little reputation, and had entirely degenerated from their original institute . . . [they were] a degenerate, time-serving class of men.” We now know that this was incorrect. Documents made available only after Lingard’s death revealed that many men across various religious orders risked their lives by refusing to submit to Henry VIII and were forced to flee to continental Europe. Refusing to whitewash anything, Lingard’s unabashed commitment to what he believed was the truth vindicated his personal fidelity to the sources which he possessed. For this impartiality, the historian gathered detraction from his fellow Catholics. The most outspoken of these critics was Bishop John Milner, the Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, who found it reprehensible that Lingard’s histories did not show the appropriate “tone of piety.” No doubt familiar with Whig history, Milner was looking for a work of apologetics, not a work of impartial history. This put the aging priest in an awkward position: he was simply too outwardly Catholic for many Protestants and too secular for certain Catholics. Fr. Lingard saw the irony and humour in the situation, commenting to a friend in correspondence that “though Catholics cannot discover my religion in my work, I have not been able to conceal it from Protestants.”
It was 1811 when John Lingard, who had been teaching at Ushaw College in County Durham, retired to Hornby, Lancashire. There were just over 400 people living in the village, and his congregation was made up of approximately forty labourers. Because Catholicism was still quite illegal at this point in time, Mass was celebrated in a small chapel hidden away within Lingard’s home. Other than the occasional trip across Europe to consult manuscripts for his research, the middle-aged priest would spend the last forty years of his life in the idyllic environs of the Lune Valley writing his histories. Published volume by volume and finally completed in 1830, they sold in impressive quantities. The volume of Lingard’s history which focussed upon the English Reformation sold so well that he was able to finance the building of a Catholic church in Hornby, St. Mary’s, which he saw fit to dub “Henry VIII’s chapel,” still standing today. One reader of Lingard’s histories, the Protestant William Cobbett, a farmer from Surrey, despised the poor treatment of the Catholics in Britain. With Lingard as his inspiration, Cobbett wrote a history of the Protestant Reformation which portrayed the Church of England negatively, thereby inciting many to the cause of Catholic emancipation. The more lasting fruit of Lingard’s works of history has been the survival of the methodology their author employs. G.K. Chesterton, in his 1925 biography of Cobbett, went so far as to say that modern scholars were, in many ways, “pupils of Lingard.” Though underappreciated, Fr. Lingard ought to be remembered as a man who boldly dedicated himself entirely to truth despite any consequence, which could have included imprisonment or worse at this time under English law. In this manner, he is not only a shining example for historians and scholars, but especially for the clergy who dedicate themselves above all else to the way, the truth, and the life despite any potential cost to their personal status or safety.
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