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John Mason Neale and ‘Sacrilege’: Spelman (1643) Re-Invigorated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2015

RICHARD W. PFAFF
RICHARD W. PFAFF*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1846 a new, greatly expanded, edition of Sir Henry Spelman's History and fate of Sacrilege (1643, published in 1698) appeared, edited anonymously by ‘two priests of the Church of England’. These priests were John Mason Neale and his friend and apparent assistant Joesph Haskoll. The monograph-length introductory essay and other editorial contributions show, as well as vast learning, an aspect of Neale's multi-faceted achievement hitherto unnoticed, that of a stringent critic of great families and other lay people who possessed former church property (Spelman's definition of ‘Sacrilege’) and, more widely, of political and economic conditions in mid nineteenth-century England.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 578 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 The fullest life is still the first one, Towle's, Eleanor A.John Mason Neale, D. D: a memoir, London 1906Google Scholar. Four years later the same publisher, Longman, issued a selection of the Letters of John Mason Neale, D. D., edited by his daughter, Lawson, Mary Sackville. A. G. Lough's two small volumes, The influence of John Mason Neale, London 1962Google Scholar, and John Mason Neale – priest extraordinary, Newton Abbot 1976Google Scholar, are only a slight improvement over Towles's memoir; the same is true of Chandler's, MichaelThe life and work of John Mason Neale, 1818–1866, Leominster 1995Google Scholar. Litvack's, LeonJohn Mason Neale and the quest for Sobornost, Oxford 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a truly scholarly work, is devoted to Neale's fascination with the Eastern Church, while Susan Drain's entry in the ODNB (xl. 299–303), emphasises the hymnological work. Also lacking is any full bibliography of Neale's writings in print; all of the works just cited contain partial lists, and Lough, Priest extraordinary, 152, states that a full list is available at the East Grinsted Branch of the West Sussex County Library. None of the Neale papers in Lambeth Palace Library or of the scanty documents concerning his collaborator is relevant to the present enquiry.

2 In brief, his work, ‘The History and Fate of Sacrilege, although sent to the printers in 1663, was delayed in the press and temporarily lost during the fire of London. It was subsequently recovered by Edmund Gibson, but remained unpublished until 1698’: Stuart Handley, ODNB li.791–93. The fuller story is that the potentially controversial nature of the work – in particular, the likelihood of offending powerful landed families – seems to have led Spelman not to pursue publication; his manuscript was (re-) discovered by Edmund Gibson in the context of a great flourishing of antiquarian studies, and sent by him to Oxford University Press: Sykes, Norman, Edmund Gibson, … 1669–1748, Oxford 1926, 21–2Google Scholar.

3 This specialised and somewhat oblique sense of the word will be signalled by capitalising it throughout this essay, save when it has not been capitalised in direct quotation.

4 Towle, Memoir, 128. In fact Neale spent the summer of 1845 in Madeira, where he could not have had access to many of the works – county histories and the like – which she credits him with consulting then.

5 See Strong, Rowan, Episcopalianism in nineteeth-century Scotland, Oxford 2002, 249–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Unless otherwise specified, all references will be to this second edition.

7 He seems to have collaborated with Forbes in a translation and adaptation ‘to the Use of the Anglican Church’, of the Memoriale vitae sacerdotalis, or Solemn warning of the good shepherd Jesus Christ to the pastors of his church, by the French spiritual writer Claude Arvisenet, London 1853: so the COPAC union-list catalogue, but Haskoll's name is not included in the list of Forbes's works in Strong, Rowan, Alexander Forbes of Brechin, Oxford 1995, 261–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The only book that Haskoll appears to have written as sole author is A history of France for children, from the time of Julius Caesar to the present day, London 1855. In 1854 Haskoll became rector of East Barkwith in Lincolnshire, where he remained until his death; he was involved in controversy over Ritualism in that county: Yates, N., Anglican ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910, Oxford 1999, 111Google Scholar.

8 It was also during that year that Neale was appointed to the Wardenship of Sackville College, in East Grinstead, Sussex, the seventeenth-century Almshouse foundation which was to be his base, though often a shaky one, through the years of conflict with his bishop, until his death.

9 The standard history of the society and its work is still White, James F., The Cambridge Movement: the ecclesiologists and the Gothic revival, Cambridge 1962Google Scholar, now supplemented by a spirited collection of essays edited by Webster, Christopher and Elliott, John, ‘A Church as it should be’ : the Cambridge Camden Society and its influence, Stamford 2000Google Scholar.

10 A recent translator, Thibodeau, Timothy M., of the same portion of the Rationale (New York 2007)Google Scholar, remarks of Neale's version that it ‘is suffused with the same literary charm and poetic sensibilities as his hymn translations’ (p. xxv) – and also that the 195 pages of translated matter are prefaced by an ‘apologia’ of 132 pages: proportions that were to be replicated in the Spelman edition.

11 The summary description of this itinerary (p. xxv) makes plain that the journey is shaped by the relatively new network of railway lines, for example from the Northamptonshire hamlet of Weedon Bec to York.

12 Neale, J. M., Hierologus; or, The church tourists, London 1843, 22Google Scholar. The last family cited as living at Breadsall is that of the Darwins: Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, died there in 1802.

13 Gough provides lengthy summary and extensive quotations from the book: Influence, 42–51. The actual recommencement of cenobitic religious life in Anglican Christianity begins two years later, wth Pusey's establishment of the Park Village West women's community in 1845.

14 The Christian Remembrancer vi (1843), 213–38 at p. 237.

15 Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church, i (London 1966)Google Scholar, covers the years of Neale's manhood, to about 1860.

16 It is symptomatic that there is no notice of the Neale-Haskoll edition in Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: the social and political thought of the Oxford Movement, Oxford 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the only mention of Neale is a brief reference to two of his novels.

17 H. Spelman, History and fate of Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, p. xii. It is possible that by ‘the Oxford edition’ they mean Spranger's, but much likelier that the reference is to either the 1668 or 1676 editions, both printed at the University Press. The editions of De non temerandis of the 1660s include a signed ‘To the Reader’ preface by Clement Spelman that runs to fifty-two pages.

18 This history would be worth trying to clarify, but not here. One example is that Neale and Haskoll insert two paragraphs from Hearne's edition of Leland's Itinerary which purport to be from Spelman (vol. vi of that edition, Oxford 1710, but pp. xiii–xiv, not 15 as in Neale–Haskoll).

19 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, p. ix. The donor was Francis Edward Paget (1802–82), rector of Elford in Staffordshire and a minor Oxford Movement figure; his fiction included an 1841 novel St Antholin's, or Old churches and new: a tale for the times, ‘which dealt with the problems of raising funds for church restoration’, a subject of vital interest to Neale: G. Herring, ODNB xlii.351.

20 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, pp. xvi–xviii. They list also the editions used to cite four writers: Ambrose, Jerome, Calvin and, surprisingly, ‘Soto, from the Lyons edition of 1585’. Dominic de Soto op was a notable figure at the Council of Trent.

21 An odd topical note is introduced in a somewhat offhand reference to disobedience to parents as a sin comparable to sacrilege: ‘the signal obedience of the Rechabites to a remote ancestor is illlustriously rewarded by a continuance of their descendants to the present day’ (p. 11). This may reflect knowledge of a curious temperance society called The Independent Order of Rechabites, founded in 1835.

22 ‘Who disbelieved all religion. “The Voltaire of Paganism”, as he has been neatly called, when seeking for his most pointed stigma, cannot get beyond calling an action – Sacrilege (hierosulia)’: Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, p. 17.

23 Jean Crasset sj (1618–92), L'Eglise du Japon (1689). An English translation was published in 1705–7, but the reference is to the original French.

24 On the same page (p. 30) are singled out sites of poverty in London (St Giles's and Saffron Hill) or churchlessness (St Pancras) or ‘destitute condition’ (Brentford, Turnham Green, Hammersmith), listed in relation to the houses of magnates.

25 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, 51. The amatory and marital adventures of the poet's father, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron are scarcely summed up by the term ‘separation’. The elder Byron died in 1791, his son in 1824.

26 H. C. G. Matthew, ODNB xxx. 26, s.v. Jermy, Isaac.

27 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, 80. The reference is of course to the notorious – to adherents of the Oxford and related movements – Church Temporalities Act of 1833, the immediate cause of Keble's ‘National Apostasy’ sermon of that year.

28 In the second edition of the Neale-Haskoll edn pp. 93–7 expand page xcvi of the first.

29 By the time of the 1853 edition (preface dated 17 June) the earl of Derby had succeeded to that office (in February 1852), the earl of Aberdeen from 19 Dec. of that year until early 1855.

30 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll 1846 edn, p. xcivGoogle ScholarPubMed.

31 Ibid. second edition, 117. The impassioned rhetoric continues for hundreds more words.

32 Ibid. 5. In various stages between the imposition of the Napoleonic constitution in 1812 and 1835 (in Spain; 1833 in Portugal) the Iberian religious houses were suppressed.

33 Ibid. 6. The ‘worm-eaten folios’ are doubtless the three vols of the Diplomataria et scriptores historiae Germaniae medii aevi, edited by Schoettgen, J. C. and Kreysig, G. C. (Altenburg 1753–60)Google Scholar, not the more familiar Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the first volume of which appeared only in 1826.

34 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, 169. How either Neale or Haskoll could have had opportunity for the kind of study necessary to winkle out this anedcote almost defies imagination: a matter at the heart of the present enquiry.

35 Ibid. 267. The puzzle is where (or what) is Hambledon Manor. The information here, taken from Manning, Owen and Bray, William, History and antiquities of the county of Surrey, London 1804–14Google Scholar, does not match that in VCH, Surrey, iii (1911).

36 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, 297. The fourth duke died of rabies from the bite of a pet fox (1819); one of his sons had drowned by falling overboard from HMS Blake in 1812; and a son of the fifth, current, duke perished in the loss of the steamship SS President on his return voyage from New York in 1841.

37 ‘Art. IX. The history and fate of Sacrilege’, Dublin Review xxi (Sept. 1846), 246–58.

38 The timing was perhaps especially propitious, in Wiseman's view because he had recently (late October of 1845) confirmed John Henry Newman in the chapel at Oscott.

39 Christian Remembrancer xii (1846), 543–4.

40 Who called for it, and where, remains to be discovered. Wiseman's review seems by far the fullest.

41 Spelman, Sacrilege, Neale-Haskoll edn, p. xix. A striking example is Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, which ‘had brought great misery on its lay occupants; but we are not at liberty to enter into the particulars’ (p. 304).

42 Even that is problematic in the case of Neale, who by 1846 had published under his own name at least Hierologus, The symbolism of churches, Triumphs of the cross (stories for children), the four novels noticed earlier, and a number of sermons. On the other hand, other works of his, like the History of Portugal and History of Greece, both aimed at children, had appeared anonymously.

43 I am most grateful to Alison Felstead, Head of Resources Description at the Bodleian, for providing an image of the original slip and pointing out that ‘the note of the priests’ names was added at the point of cataloguing the 1846 edition, and the shelfmark of this edition (46.1510) indicates that it was received in 1846. The names were not a later addition to the catalogue record’. In a subsequent communication she observes that the editors' preface mentions collating the Bodleian manuscript from which Jeremy Stephens prepared his text for the 1698 printing, and speculates that library staff members might have noticed the two and thus added their names to the catalogue slip.

44 My copy of the 1853 edition includes advertising matter for sermons preached in 1863 and 1864.

45 A German translation of Wiseman's review precedes the text itself.

46 An ill-informed guess. In Notes & Queries 6th ser. iii (1881) ‘C.W.S.’ had enquired about the names of the ‘two priests’ (p. 109); a few weeks later C. F. S. Warren answered with the names of Neale and R. F. Littledale (a collaborator on some of Neale's later projects), while one Edmund Randolph offered Neale and Webb (p. 138); finally Webb himself wrote to provide the correct name of Neale's colleague (p. 178). The timing of the reprint is aggressive – 1888 was exactly forty-two years, the period of protection afforded by the 1842 Copyright Act, after the 1846 edition – and suggests that the new publisher, Hodges, thought the title a highly saleable one.

47 Warren's interest seems to have been mainly in genealogy, as when he points out that in the ‘family of Austen-Knight there were two instances, almost or quite contemporaneous, of marriage within the forbidden degrees’, the letters of Jane Austen being cited. His notes are much likelier to have appealed to Austen's Sir Walter Elliott than to the readership at which Neale-Haskoll had aimed.

48 Rowell, Geoffrey, The vision glorious: themes and personalities of the Catholic revival in Anglicanism, Oxford 1983, 98–115Google Scholar.