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The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

John Wolffe
John Wolffe*
Affiliation:
Open University
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Extract

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 48: The Church and Literature , 2012 , pp. 308 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

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