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The Development of G. G. Coulton’s Critique of a Roman Catholic School of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Alec Corio
Alec Corio*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

      Coulton tells the Cambridge youth
      That Roman Catholics doctor truth:
      While Abbot Aidan Gasquet cries:
      Your English History’s packed with lies!

This essay focuses on the polemical historical writing of G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), chiefly his attacks on Francis Aidan Gasquet (1846–1929), whom he believed was the leading member of a mendacious and well-organized Roman Catholic school of history. Apart from the personal animosity which grew up between them as a result of Coulton’s aggressive attitude, this was an ideological and historiographical conflict between the progressive values of an agnostic Anglican priest turned Cambridge academic and the romanticized medievalism of an English Benedictine who was eventually elevated to the rank of cardinal.

Type
Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 417 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

1 ‘Cambridge Squib’, quoted in Leslie, Shane, Cardinal Gasquet:A Memoir (London, 1953), 103.Google Scholar

2 Other studies of the conflict between Coulton and Gasquet include Gerald Christianson, ‘G. G. Coulton: The Medieval Historian as Controversialist’, CathHR 57 (1971), 421–41; Knowles, David, Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (London, 1956); idem, The Historian and Character, ed. Christopher Brooke and Giles Constable (Cambridge, 1963), 240–63 Google Scholar; Leslie, , Gasquet, 103–34 Google Scholar; Bentley, Michael, Modernizing England’s Past (Cambridge, 2005), 59–60.Google Scholar

3 On the nationalizing authority of ‘scientific’ history, see Iggers, Georg G., Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT, 1997), 23–30; idem, ‘Nationalism and Historiography, 1789–1996: The German Example in Historical Perspective’, in Berger, Stefan et al., eds, Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999), 15–29, at 19.Google Scholar

4 Persuasively argued in Hempton, D., Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), 176–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Lloyd Mecham, J., An Evaluation of the Work of Cardinal Gasquet in the Field of Pre-Reformation History (Berkeley, CA, 1920), 15–16.Google Scholar

6 Knowles, Historian and Character, 259, 262.Google Scholar

7 Gasquet, Francis Aidan, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, 2 vols (London, 1888–9), 1:290.Google Scholar

8 Ibid. 1: xi. Gasquet’s claim simply to present archival material to show the truth of the past was a conscious attempt to identify himself with the ‘scientific’ movement in history categorized as modernism by Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, 11–13.

9 ‘Literary Notices’, The Liverpool Mercury, 20 June 1888, 7.

10 Abercrombie, Nigel, The Life and Work of Edmund Bishop (London, 1959), 146.Google Scholar

11 Gasquet, F. A., The Eve of the Reformation (London, 1919; first publ. 1900), 285.Google Scholar

12 Gasquet, , Henry VIII, 1: 493–4.Google Scholar

13 On Belloc’s distributionism, but not Gasquet’s influence on it, see Lothian, James R., The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950 (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), 54, 70, 122–7.Google Scholar

14 Coulton, G. G., Medieval Studies No. 1: The Monastic Legend: A Criticism of Abbot Gasquet’s ‘Henry VIII and the English Monasteries’ (London, 1905), 2.Google Scholar

15 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 14: The Roman Catholic Church and the Bible (London, 1921), 23.Google Scholar

16 Coulton, Medieval Studies No. 1, 11.

17 Ibid., title verso.

18 Coulton, G. G., Medieval Studies No. 17: Roman Catholic Truth: An Open Discussion (London, 1924), 48.Google Scholar

19 London, Archives of the English Province, Society of Jesus, Thurston Papers, 39-3-5.5, Letter from David Knowles, 15 November 1937.

20 Ibid., Ethelbert Home to Thurston, 3 November 1938.

21 Gasquet, Henry VIII, viii.

22 Coulton, G. G., Medieval Studies No. 6: The Truth about the Monasteries (London, 1906), 16.Google Scholar

23 Coulton, G. G., Ten Medieval Studies (Cambridge, 1930), 203–61.Google Scholar

24 Mackinky, J. B., Saint Edmund, King and Martyr: A History of his Life and Times, with an Account of the Translations of his Incorrupt Body (London, 1893). Coulton dealt imaginatively with the controversy in his time-travelling fantasia, Friar’s Lantern (London, 1906), 80–7.Google Scholar

25 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 14, 8.Google Scholar

26 Coulton, G. G., Fourscore Years (London, 1945), 332.Google Scholar

27 Coulton, G. G., Five Centuries of Religion, 2: The Friars and the Dead Weight of Tradition (Cambridge, 1927).Google Scholar

28 Coulton, G. G., Medieval Studies No. 13: The Plain Man’s Religion in the Middle Ages (London, 1916), 12.Google Scholar

29 Sweet, Alfred H., ‘Coulton as an Interpreter of the Middle Ages’, The Historian 2 (1939), 28–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 34. This article was originally submitted to the Jesuit journal Thought, which refused publication after contacting Herbert Thurston: Thurston Papers, 39.3.5.5, Letter from Samuel K. Wilson (president of Loyola University, Chicago, IL), 29 March 1937.

30 Christianson, ‘G. G. Coulton: The Medieval Historian as Controversialist’, 427, 436, 439. On Coulton’s view of justice and providence, see G. G. Coulton, Medieval Studies No. 19: Mr Hilaire Belloc as Historian (London, 1930), 3–5.

31 Coulton, G. G., Medieval Studies No. 15: More Roman Catholic History (London, 1921), 14.Google Scholar

32 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 19, 9.Google Scholar

33 Coulton, G. G., The Scandal of Cardinal Gasquet (Taunton, 1937), 3, quoting James Patrick Broderick.Google Scholar

34 Watson, E. W., Review of Five Centuries of Religion, EHR 43 (1928), 621–3, at 623.Google Scholar

35 Thurston Papers, 39.3.5.5, undated copy of letter to the editor of the Western Morning News.

36 Ibid., Newspaper clipping, ‘Letters’, Western Morning News and Mercury, 13 July, no year marked.

37 Coulton, G. G., Sectarian History (Taunton, 1937), 7.Google Scholar

38 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 19, 7; idem, Sectarian History, 13; idem, Scandal, 6.Google Scholar

39 Coulton frequently cited Leo XIII’s letter on the education of the clergy, Depuis le Jour (Rome, 1899), which called for greater scientific and historical training of clergy, within limits, as ‘a magnificent and conclusive demonstration of the truth and divinity of Christianity’: online at <http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_08091899_depuis-le–jour_en.html>, accessed 5 January 2012; he also quoted Acton’s criticisms of papal infallibility and Newman’s statement that to be a good Roman Catholic one must doctor truth: Coulton, G. G., Romanism and Truth (London, 1930), 7–8, 9, 10.Google Scholar

40 Coulton, , Sectarian History, 61.Google Scholar

41 Coulton, , Scandal, 6.Google Scholar

42 Ibid. 6, 7. Coulton thought that their immorality justified the legal supervision of Roman Catholic clergy. Only in ‘Protestant countries’ and ‘under a system of law and police such as no man even dreamt of in the Middle Ages’ did they observe a pure life: Coulton, Medieval Studies No. 6, 12. On the regulation of monasteries in Victorian England, see Arnstein, Walter L., Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, MO, 1982).Google Scholar

43 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 17, 48.Google Scholar

44 Coulton’s suggestion was also an aggressive development of the value which the historical profession had begun to place on collaborative works of historical scholarship, such as the Cambridge Modern History, through which the collective purpose and credibility of the historical community was asserted.

45 Coulton, G. G., ‘Some Problems in Medieval Historiography’, PBA 18 (1932), 155–90, at 172.Google Scholar

46 The ‘revisionism’ of J. J. Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy now sets the tone for the historiography of the late medieval church, notwithstanding the criticism of some of Duffy’s conclusions by Ethan Shagan. Generally speaking, contemporary writers on the pre-Reformation church emphasize its strength rather than its vulnerability, which creates obvious difficulties in explaining the eventual popularity of Protestantism in England. They also focus on the importance of lay devotion and the parish, rather than – as Gasquet did – viewing monasticism as the fullest expression of Catholic Christianity. However, the use of parish records, sermons and visitation reports to trace the reception of religious instruction among the laity, and the vibrancy of their devotional lives, utilizes archival sources whose investigation was pioneered by both Gasquet and Coulton. See in this volume, Dairmaid MacCulloch, ‘Changing Historical Perspectives on the English Reformation: The Last Fifty Years’, 282–302

47 Coulton, , Medieval Studies No. 6, 19.Google Scholar