Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/327

Rh in the Royal College of St. Patrick, Maynooth, but the former holder of the office, Matthias Crowley, had gone over to the established church, and Lingard refused to accept a chair which had been ‘infected by the leprosy of hypocrisy’ (, Irish Wits, pp. 90, 91). At a later period he declined an offer from Bishop Poynter of the presidency of the seminary at Old Hall Green.

On retiring from Ushaw he withdrew to the secluded mission at Hornby, nine miles from Lancaster. In this quiet village he spent nearly all the remainder of his long life. His residence, near Hornby Castle, the seat of his devoted friend Pudsey Dawson, was a small, unpretentious building, connected with a little chapel, built by himself, where he regularly officiated. There he pursued his literary studies without interruption, and soon after his settlement at Hornby he began to work at his ‘History of England,’ which was originally intended to be a modest ‘abridgment for the use of schools.’ In April 1817 he left England with a party of friends on a tour to Rome and the southern states of Italy, having been commissioned by Dr. Poynter to negotiate some matters of importance with the holy see. He was graciously received by Consalvi, the cardinal secretary of state, who granted him facilities for obtaining transcripts of unpublished documents in the Vatican archives. When he left Rome he was able to inform Dr. Poynter that he had succeeded in his mission, and that, among other matters, the English College was again restored to the government of the secular clergy.

Before the close of 1817 his work was so far advanced that he made proposals for publication to Mr. Mawman, who purchased for a thousand guineas so much of the ‘History’ as should extend to the death of Henry VII, and early in 1819 the three volumes embracing that period made their appearance. The portion embracing the reigns from Edward III to Henry VII was written in seven months and under great pressure. ‘It was a greater labour,’ Lingard subsequently wrote, ‘than I ever underwent in my life; nor would I have done it, had I not found that unless I fixed a time, I should never get through’ (letter to Kirk quoted in Memoir, p. 28). To the graces of style Lingard avowedly paid little attention (ib.) In 1820 the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI appeared in a fourth volume; those of Mary and Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, and Charles II followed at various intervals, and in 1830 the eighth and concluding volume brought the ‘History’ down to the revolution of 1688.

The work met from the first with a good reception. Its reputation grew with the appearance of each succeeding volume. Its temperate tone, especially on religious topics, commended the work to the attention of protestant readers, who seemed surprised to find a Roman catholic ecclesiastic treating controverted questions in a spirit of candour and truthfulness. Many of the mistakes and misstatements of Hume and other historians were unostentatiously exposed and refuted in the notes, in order that—to use Lingard's own words—he might not repel protestant readers, while furnishing every necessary proof in favour of the catholic side. Indeed, his avowed object was to shock popular prejudices as little as possible, and to do good to the cause he had at heart by writing a book which protestants would read. ‘I succeeded,’ he says in one of his letters, ‘in awakening the curiosity of some minds in the universities, in provoking doubts of the accuracy of their preconceived opinions, and in creating a conviction that such opinions were unfounded.’ As early as 1825 this was fully understood at Rome. ‘Your History,’ wrote Dr. Gradwell, ‘is much spoken of in Rome as one of the great causes which have wrought such a change in public sentiment, in England, on Catholic matters.’ The work was nevertheless regarded with suspicion from the outset by the ultra-papal party, who disliked Lingard's Gallican tendencies, and who were offended at the timid, apologetic attitude which he often assumed. As early as 1819 Bishop Milner attacked the ‘History’ in the ‘Orthodox Journal,’ and in 1828 Father Ventura, in some anonymous ‘Osservazioni sulla Storia d'Inghilterra,’ bearing the imprint of Bastia, though really published at Rome, described Lingard as a dangerous enemy of the rights of the church.

From the protestant point of view the work was subjected to severe criticism in two articles in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ by Dr. John Allen (April 1825 and June 1826). The first article discussed Lingard's treatment of Anglo-Saxon history and the second his account of the St. Bartholomew's Massacre. Throughout the critic charged Lingard with suppression and perversion of the facts. Lingard replied to the second article in ‘A Vindication of certain Passages in the fourth and fifth Volumes of the “History of England,”’ London, 1826. In the fifth edition (1827) Lingard answered a reply by Allen and defended himself from Todd's strictures on his character of Cranmer and from an attack on his account of Anne Boleyn in the ‘Quarterly Review’ (vol. lxv.) Macaulay, while admitting that Lingard was ‘a very