‘a trial for the patience of reason’? grand tourists and anti-catholicism after 1745

‘A Trial for the Patience of Reason’?1 Grand Tourists andAnti-Catholicism after 1745jecs_277 195..208

C L A R E H AY N E S

Abstract: It has been thought that anti-Catholicism faded from elite Britishthinking after the Jacobite rising of 1745, evidenced most obviously by thepassing of three Relief Acts between 1778 and 1829. This view needs somemodification because anti-Catholicism was still rehearsed extensively inGrand Tour literature well into the nineteenth century. Three common tropesof elite anti-Catholic discourse are explored: attitudes to Jesuits, monks andnuns; places of pilgrimage; and the construction of Roman Catholicism as atwofold system of faith. The conclusion is drawn that anti-Catholicism wasmaintained because it was essential both to Protestant identity and totoleration.

Keywords: anti-Catholicism, Popery, Grand Tour, national identity, twofoldphilosophy, religious, miracles, idolatry, Italy, toleration

I confess it is seldom pardonable, to deride the ceremonies of any religionsincerely professed by its followers; but, when the ceremonies of a religion arefarcical, and so palpably the instruments of oppression and tyranny, by whichthe common sense and civil rights of the world are enslaved to a proudpriesthood, it were virtue to laugh till men grew ashamed of their folly.2

These comments on Catholic ritual in Italy were unexceptional when theywere written, in 1766. Similar things had been said eighty years earlier, and,as we shall see, they were still being said eighty years later: anti-Catholicismwas one of the constant features of the literature of the British Grand Tour.This is a significant observation because it is frequently assumed that anti-Catholicism was largely the province of the non-elite in the latter part of theeighteenth century, most notably demonstrated in the Gordon Riots of 1780.An analysis of Grand Tour literature, the audience for which was largely anelite one, suggests that this view may need some adjustment, or at least somerefinement.

Colin Haydon argued, in his influential study Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, that in the later eighteenth century Roman Catholicism wasseen as less of a direct political threat by the elite. This had two differentcauses in his view: first, there were the events that modified the perception ofdanger from Catholic ambitions – such as the failure of the Jacobite rebellion,

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 2 (2010)

© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

changes in the Roman Church’s policy towards the Stuarts and so on; second,there was the development among the elite of Enlightenment values oftoleration, which were expressed in the gradual lessening of the legalpenalties suffered by Catholics at home. Haydon was surely right. However,anti-Catholic feeling continued to be rehearsed in the elite cultural sphere ofthe Grand Tour. This needs explanation.3

I. The Tour and its Literature

The Grand Tour was, of course, an elite phenomenon; there were others –servants, artists and tutors – who also participated, but their stories are moreelusive.4 Understood broadly as the primary means of furnishing the youngelite male with the necessary skills and experience for social and politicalleadership, the tour gave him knowledge of cultures different from his own, afamiliarity with a fairly fixed canon of cultural landmarks and opportunitiesto develop social ease through exposure to different places and peoples.5 TheGrand Tour was also undertaken by older men (and women), for whom theweather of southern Europe was an additional impetus to make what could bea very arduous journey. Tours varied in length from a few weeks to severalyears, and while there was no fixed itinerary, tourists tended to spend mosttime in France and Italy, their main goal being to visit Rome. A considerablebody of literature about the tour consisting of guidebooks, journals andletters was published, which addressed a broader audience than just thosewho had been, or were planning to go, on the tour. These published accounts,differing little from the manuscript letters and journals we have (except intheir intimacy), ranged widely, covering the diverse breadth of interests that itwas thought necessary for a tourist to pursue on his travels, which includedancient history, modern customs, art, manufactures, geography, socialrelations, music, religion, transport and politics. Often these subjects wereaddressed in an explicitly comparative framework, making clear how theobservation of difference from home was critical to the experience of the tour.

Thus, as a genre, Grand Tour literature was highly normative. It was alsointer-textual in character, as writers often referred their readers toauthoritative and established texts and made corrections or offered criticismof other accounts.6 These cohesive qualities, and the elite nature of the travelexperience being described, have perhaps led the Grand Tour to be ratherisolated in eighteenth-century historical studies, despite the diversity of thesubjects that its literature treats. Obvious exceptions to this narrow focus arethe interventions made fairly recently by those with an interest in gender,who have shown how it was significantly, and diversely, a sexualised andgendered experience with implications for travellers (and those they leftbehind) that transcended the tour itself. These scholars have explored, forexample, the role of the tour in educating the young male for his maturity, theopportunities it offered for sexual experience and experimentation, the

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© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

differences between women and men’s experience of the tour, the emphasisthat the tour placed on recognising and training sensual responses to art andso on.7

It is an obvious point that much of the Grand Tourist’s time was spent inCatholic contexts: in Flanders, Catholic Germany and, especially, in Franceand Italy. It is no surprise, therefore, that the experience of Catholicism was amajor theme of the literature of the tour and that the description of thepolitics, practices and culture of Catholicism was frequently the opportunityfor the expression of patriotic ideas about Britain.8 Thus, Grand Tourliterature provides rich materials for the understanding of elite anti-Catholicism and an exploration of Protestant identity more broadly. I haveinvestigated elsewhere how Catholic art was viewed and represented in GrandTour literature to c.1760, showing how tourists observed and dealt with theRoman Catholic context, and content, of much of the art they looked at onthe tour.9 This present essay argues a different and broader point: that anti-Catholicism was still an important element of elite discourse at the end of thecentury: it did not disappear as political measures of toleration were grantedin 1780, 1795 or even 1829. The implications of this will be discussed in theconclusion.

II. Italy and the Italians

Samuel Sharp, the writer of the comments quoted above, went to Italy in 1765

not for an education so much as for relief from the respiratory problems thathad dogged him for many years. Sharp was a distinguished surgeon, whoseworks on surgical methods were widely appreciated (two major works weretranslated into half a dozen European languages and ran to several editions),but ill health had forced him to retire. A decision to travel to Italy to improveone’s health was not an unusual motivation for the mature traveller; onethinks immediately of the other surgeon who famously took his first tour atthis time: Tobias Smollett. Sharp and Smollett had more than their professionand ill health in common: they both published their travels in 1766, on theirreturn home, and both were ridiculed for them by Laurence Sterne in ASentimental Journey. While Smollett earned from Sterne the glorious and well-known cognomen of ‘Smelfungus’, Sharp was rewarded with the equallydamning ‘Mundungus’. Both men were ridiculed by Sterne for being crabbedand unfeeling in their approach to the Continent. While Sterne accusedSmollett of distorting the truth through the lens of his misery, Sharp wasdamned for writing his travels without describing ‘one generous connectionor pleasurable anecdote’.10 Sterne’s view of Smollett and Sharp’s books seemsunfairly dismissive, although it is true that both laid some considerable stresson the discomforts of travelling in southern Europe.

Sterne’s use of these two recent and, initially at least, rather successfulexamples of travel literature can be seen to have been strategic, serving toremind the reader of the unusual qualities of the book of travels they were

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currently reading. Sterne’s book was certainly exceptional, but to put asidematters of genre, style and literary reputation, Sharp’s is actually the moreuseful in this discussion because of the range and conventional nature of hisremarks on the Catholicism he encountered on his travels. In addition,Sharp’s book, for no absolutely clear reason, engendered a rather heatedresponse from Giuseppe Baretti, which caused the Italian to write his ownaccount, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), whichincluded a chapter entitled ‘Idolatry of the Italians not so great, so absurd, orso blamable as is represented by fanatical protestants’, which we will considerbriefly later.

Sharp was no ‘fanatical protestant’, as Baretti may be thought to haveimplied. In fact, as Charles Dickens would do eighty years later in his Picturesfrom Italy, Sharp addressed English Catholics directly in his Preface:

Should the more reasonable Catholicks of England think I have been tooparticular in my Descriptions of the superstitious Practices of their Religion, Imust beg Leave to remind them of their own frequent Declarations, that, in thisenlightened Age, those Pageantries are continued abroad, merely to complywith the Weakness of the ignorant Multitude, who would imagine theFundamentals of their Faith shaken by any Retrenchment of those Ceremonies;and, if this be their Avowal, certainly what a Papist disapproves of, a Protestantmay describe without giving Offence.11

Such a statement seems equitable and has a certain logic, but it is ratherdisingenuous, given that in the course of the fifty-one letters that follow Sharpcriticises not merely the grand ceremonials of the papacy and local feast-daycustoms but rather more universal and essential aspects of Catholic religiouspractice, including the sacrament of confession, the invocation of saints,religious vocations for women, Catholic attachment to the Virgin and, ofcourse, the use of images. However, the simple acknowledgement of thefeelings of English Catholics is new and may, I think, be read as evidence ofthe shifting attitudes towards domestic Catholicism that Haydon observed.

Italian Catholicism was quite another matter for Sharp. His arrival in Romewas marked by disappointment:

the narrowness of the streets, the thinness of the inhabitants, the prodigiousquantity of Monks and beggars, give but a gloomy aspect to this renowned city[...] This is the first impression; but turn your eye from that point of view, to themagnificence of their churches, to the venerable remains of ancient Rome, tothe prodigious collection of pictures and antiques statues [and] you will feelmore than satisfied.12

Sharp’s satisfaction was not a complete one, nor was the gloom cast by thefigures of ‘monks and beggars’ ever dissipated, as a later letter, written fromNaples looking back at Rome, makes clear:

the excellent pictures to be seen in their churches and palaces, are ambrosia tosome palates; but, I confess, that after having paid my respects to fifty thousand

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of them, I am satiated, and grow indifferent in my visits to the second fiftythousand. [...] The churches at Rome are so splendid and rich, that they havedestroyed my appetite for that pursuit too; besides, to use a metaphysicalexpression, the association of ideas spoils my relish for these gaudy andsumptuous objects, as I cannot look on their golden altars, and their fat priests,without reflecting on their deserted Campania, and starving laity.13

In drawing this contrast between the landscape and the wealth of the Churchand its priests, Sharp was exercising a trope and rehearsing a commonplace.Joseph Addison had made the same point sixty years earlier in his hugelysuccessful Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), a book that was frequentlyreprinted over the course of the century.14 It went on being made by othertourists after Sharp, including Robert Gray, who later became bishop ofBristol, and a stout defender of the Protestant settlement. He went on the tourin 1791-1792 and published his travels two years later. In Gray’s view, thepoverty of the Roman countryside was due, rather concisely, to ‘castration,celibacy and bad government’.15 It was Catholicism that was to blame, andGray would later argue, in his opposition to Catholic emancipation, that thepoverty of Ireland had the same root cause: the Catholic religion.16 WhileGray appears to have been alone in assigning castration as one reason for thepoverty of the people, the landscape was very clearly a site for British touriststo articulate their perceptions of the debilitating civic effects of Catholicism.17

This was frequently underlined by recalling the fertility of the same landscapein ancient times.18

Directly or indirectly, the landscape recalled to tourists the benefits of livingunder a British constitution, protecting and supported by the Church ofEngland, which guaranteed the rights to liberty and property of theindividual. While these kinds of meditation may well have struck readers withmore force early in the century, when fears of a return of the Stuarts werereal, the association of Catholicism with despotism and poverty was still alivein the 1790s and beyond.19 Sharp’s caricatured association of the CatholicChurch with ‘golden altars and fat priests’ is pithy and might be dismissed,except that it neatly encapsulates the two main aspects of Catholicismaddressed by British writers on Italy: the figure of the Catholic religious andCatholic devotion. By exploring each of these in turn, it will be possible to seehow rich the discourses of anti-Catholicism were in the late eighteenthcentury, and to suggest what work they might have been doing.

III. ‘Chattering Abbés and Rude Monks’: Catholic Religious inGrand Tour Literature20

The literature features two different sets of ideas about Catholic religious, whowere the subject of great curiosity to British travellers: one consists of theirresponses to individual religious men or women they encountered, and theother is a set of generalities that explained the role of religious in Roman



Catholicism in general.21 It is clear that these two were frequently in tension,as one might expect. Many travellers seem to have sought out encounterswith Catholic religious, and many made journeys to visit monasteries andconvents, reporting what they saw and the conversations they had. BenjaminHobhouse took the opportunity while in Paris, in the early 1780s, to visitseveral, including that of the Carthusians, the austerity of whose regimeseems to have made it particularly interesting to tourists. Hobhouse recountstwo anecdotes about his visit in the Remarks that he published about histravels in 1796 (just before he entered Parliament). The first is a conversationhe had with a monk about the ‘political state of Europe’, the only subject onwhich the monk could be drawn, leading Hobhouse to conclude that‘entrance into an order sequestered from the world divests not the mind ofworldy [sic] interests’. The second deals with his being shown a painting in thechapel by the porter, who ‘while he was explaining the history of a painting,fell on his knees, prayed in silence for a minute or two, arose again, crossedhimself, and without taking any time to recollect himself, resumed thenarrative exactly where he left off’. Hobhouse continues: ‘is not this a solemnpiece of mockery? You who possess the substance of religion, must reprobateobservances, in which the soul bears no part?’ He observes in both thesemonks a kind of hypocrisy, although he amends his thought about the secondmonk in a footnote, where he says ‘I ought to have represented this man’sconduct as delusion, rather than hypocrisy’.22 We need not take thisamendment too seriously, although it is a significant one, as we shall see. Ineither case, Hobhouse’s description of these two nameless monks reveals apervasive scepticism about monastic life, which was based on two objections:the widespread belief among Protestants that celibacy and avowed povertywere at least mistaken, even sinful, corruptions of a good religious life, andthe idea that Catholic religious were hypocritical and corrupt in their morals,as well as their devotions.23

In some accounts crude stereotypes were still relied on to make these points,and their unsubtle nature was mobilised by some writers to make a strongeffect: in Sharp’s Letters monks feature as figures of fun, unworthy of respect,as they dress in women’s clothes to act in a sacred history play; in Brooke’sObservations there is an extraordinarily damning account of the current stateof monasticism, both male and female.24 Illicit sex is very often alluded to indiscussions of the religious, as is greed or, at least, high living (these imagesalso circulated at home in satirical prints). Such stereotypes have at theirheart the same charge of hypocrisy – that the religious of the Catholic Churchwere insincere and corrupt.

This accusation appears to be mitigated in travellers’ accounts by mentionof individual religious who acted with kindness or generosity or with whomthe traveller had interests in common. In A Sentimental Journey Sterneexplores in a dramatic way an experience that tourists must frequently havehad – a sudden awareness of the insecure truth of the stereotypes that werepart of the Protestant’s traditional armoury against Catholicism. Sterne’s

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traveller, Yorick, meets a monk in Calais. Just as in Hogarth’s O the Roast Beefof Old England (or, Calais Gate), the monk dominates Yorick’s arrival in France;he is a gatekeeper to the Continent, who is revealed to be (unlike Hogarth’scharacter) a kinder, better man than Yorick’s prejudices would at first allow.Many travellers must have had experiences like Yorick’s, but it is significantthat very few of them dispensed with the stereotypes. Take, for example,James Edward Smith, who published his travels in 1793. Smith was an eagerbotanist, who owned Linnaeus’s library and herbarium, and became the firstpresident of the Linnean Society, which he co-founded after his return fromthe Continent in 1787.25 Smith notes quite frequently in his Sketches the kindservices or intelligent conversation of monks and priests that he met in thecourse of his journey, with many of whom he shared scientific interests.26 Hewas particularly impressed by a visit to Monte Cassino, and praised theBenedictines as the most ‘learned, liberal, intelligent and polite’ of theorders.27 However, this approval must be set in the context of the rest ofthe book, in which there are frequent rehearsals of anti-monastic views. Forexample, at the start of his journey he celebrates the tranquillity of travellingby canal in Holland because it ‘leaves him [...] without fear of the disturbanceof any chattering Abbé or rude Monk obtruding their impertinence uponhim’. He records his first sight of a monk in a village on the way to Antwerp:‘his whole deportment was animated with zeal, and his eyes sparkled withenthusiasm.’ The negative associations of the words ‘zeal’ and ‘enthusiasm’are only underlined by what Smith goes on to tell us about the encounter: thathe had disturbed the monk ‘undesignedly [...] by abruptly entering the littleparlour where he was with the daughter of the landlord, a pretty plump lassabout sixteen’. ‘She was no doubt profiting by the holy father’s lessons ofpiety’, he concludes.28

Smith’s rehearsal of such stereotypes of Catholic religious as impolite,lascivious and hypocritical appears to be in unhappy conflict with hisexperience of individuals, but it is not one that seems to have concerned him,or of which he appeared aware. In sharp contrast, and one of very fewexceptions to this general pattern, was John Moore. Moore’s A View of theSociety and Manners in Italy (1781) was an enormously popular sequel to thefirst book of travels he had published, which dealt with France, Germany andSwitzerland. The two books together describe the travels he undertook astutor to Douglas, the 8th Duke of Hamilton, which lasted four years. Neitherbook is without expressions of stereotypical anti-Catholicism. For example,there are the monks of Naples, who ‘do not offend Providence by a peevishneglect of the good things’, and the Carthusians, on whose convent outsideNaples ‘much expense has been lavished’.29 However, Moore explicitly rejectsthe idea that monks are ‘the greatest profligates and debauchees in the world’;rather, he argues that the climate of southern Italy is not favourable to thecontinence of religious or laymen: it is a fertile land in which the ‘seeds ofsuperstition [...] produce the most extraordinary crops of sensuality anddevotion that were seen in any country’.30 Moore repeats his rejection of the



stereotypical view of dissolute monks in a more substantial way in adiscussion of Italy’s rural poor, asserting that tenants of ecclesiasticallandlords are in his experience ‘less oppressed than those of the lay lords andprinces’. He goes on: ‘though my acquaintance with the Roman CatholicClergy is very limited, yet the few I do know could not be mentioned asexceptions to what I have just said of the Protestant [men of learning andingenuity, of quiet, speculative and benevolent dispositions].’ Furthermore:

It is a common error, prevailing in Protestant countries, to imagine that theRoman Catholic clergy laugh at the religion they inculcate, and regard theirflocks as the dupes of an artful plan of imposition. By far the greater part ofRoman Catholic priests and monks are themselves most sincere believers, andteach the doctrines of Christianity, and all the miracles of the legend, with aperfect conviction of their divinity and truth. The few who were behind thecurtain when falsehood was first embroidered upon truth, and those who haveat different periods been the authors of all the masks and interludes which haveenriched the grand drama of superstition, have always chosen to employ suchmen, being sensible that the inferior actors would perform their parts moreperfectly, by acting from nature and real conviction.31

This long passage deals with a fundamental tenet of anti-Catholicism – thatCatholicism was a twofold system of religion, with a set of false doctrinespromoted to control, if not to exploit, the poor.32 Moore rejects the charge ofhypocrisy, but only partially. He argues that the schismatic and hereticalChurch of Rome is the work not of all priests and monks, but rather the workof a few who have preyed on the sincerity of the many. Moore is certainly notascribing any truth to the Church of Rome, and thus his anti-Catholicism isstill largely intact. What is different about Moore’s comments is that he isunwilling to promote the idea that hypocrisy was widespread in the Churchand to dishonour those men whom he had found to be worthy, honest anduseful.33

IV. Towards a Superstitious Topography of Italy

While Moore is rather unusual in acknowledging so explicitly the virtuousqualities of many Catholic religious in general, their faith remains to himcorrupted by superstition, and his book also contains plenty of discussionof manifestations of that superstition. In fact, it is hard to avoid the ideawhen reading Moore’s View and other books, as well as letters and journals,that travellers derived pleasure from describing Popish superstition, fromperceiving and articulating its excesses. In other words, British tourists werecertainly by no means indifferent to the doctrines and practices ofCatholicism, nor did they ignore them, as they might have done. For example,a frequently described ceremony, in the second half of the century, was theliquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, which

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took place three times a year. Tourists were drawn to Naples more frequentlylater in the century, after the rediscovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the1730s and 1740s, and many chose to witness the ceremony in which theblood of Saint Januarius liquefied. It was, as James Edward Smith wrote in1793, ‘a standing joke for all our heretical travellers, and on which so muchhas already been written, that nothing new can be said’.34 However, touriststhroughout the century and beyond did describe their experiences of theceremony, for it was clearly one of the high points of what we might call thesuperstitious topography of Italy. Some simply described the ceremony, whileothers speculated on how the liquefaction was effected, for no supernaturalintervention was conceivable for these Protestant spectators. As John Mooreobserved, although some ‘travellers of great eminence’ have described it a‘clumsy trick’, he was unable to discern how the transformation took place.35

This was not insignificant to Moore or to other travellers, for all the light thatthey made of it. Its real importance was that it was an event claimed asmiraculous that Protestants could witness. As Moore explains:

the divinity of no other religion whatever is any longer attempted to be provedby fresh miracles, but all are now trusted to their own internal evidence, and tothose wrought at a former period, this miracle of Saint Januarius is probably themore admired on account of its being the only one, except transubstantiation,which remains still in use, out of the vast abundance said to have beenperformed at various periods in support of the Roman Catholic faith.36

The very visible, material transformation, the cause of which they could notdiscern, was what gave the ceremony its charge (and Moore was not alone incomparing it to the invisibility of transubstantiation). It is clear that touristsregarded this ceremony not as mere local custom but as representative ofCatholicism as a whole. They responded to it by rehearsing the superiority oftheir own religion, built on reason and the foundations of the Bible, and thejustness of the Reformation. This rehearsal may sometimes have taken theform of a commonplace, but the frequency and level of detail with whichthe ceremony was described suggest that it was a significant episode in thereinforcement of individual Protestant identities.

At the other end of Italy from Naples was Loreto, a place of great curiosityto British tourists, who were drawn there only because of its fame as a placeof pilgrimage. Samuel Sharp described the Santa Casa of Loreto, its migrationand state of preservation, with a thinly veiled irony, encouraging his readersto laugh along with him, as did John Moore who, in a lengthy description ofthe house, its contents and the treasury, apparently revelled in the visual andmaterial excess of what he found there.37 It represented to him all that waswrong with the Catholic religion: its doctrines, which ‘shocked commonsense’, and the practice of monasticism, which served no practical good in theworld (by contrast to Christ, who went about ‘continually, doing good’) – insum, the ‘mysterious webs, of various textures’ that had been woven around



the essential and simple truths of Christ’s message. Loreto was to thesevisitors an ‘eminent monument of delusion’.38

While travellers frequently did ‘take the liberty of laughing at the SantaCasa’s expense’, they also recognised at Loreto another challenge to theirProtestantism, different from that made by the miracle of Saint Januarius’blood: the good behaviour and devotion to their religion of the Italian poor.James Edward Smith, for example, acknowledged in his broad discussion ofLoreto and its implications that while ‘these Madonnas, and their mummery,in one point of view are below contempt [...] considered in another light, theyare powerful instruments, not merely of spiritual tyranny, for that is theirabuse, but of piety and virtue’.39 While travellers do occasionally admit tohaving been moved to religious thought in a Catholic church, many wouldhave nodded with approval at Lady Anna Miller’s suggestion to her friendwhen reading descriptions of churches in her letters, that she might

consider them rather in the light of collections of paintings, sculpture &c. Putpriests and monks, with their croaking of masses out of your head, and theseparating of ideas which you have connected closely together, may enable youto read with less weariness, what you will frequently have accounts of fromthese regions of priestcraft and superstition.40

At first glance Miller’s advice to her friend suggests a bid to secularise churchvisiting, but that would not be correct. Rather, it is an attempt to reduce orcounter the effects of the experience of religious excess. As they visitedchurches, Protestant spectators were always managing two main kinds ofvisual experience: one of looking at art (a significant part of the tour wasspent in this way), and the other of observing what they considered to be theidolatrous practices of Catholicism. Each seems to have been as important asthe other.41

Two kinds of idolatry were most frequently observed: representations ofGod the Father and image-worship, where the image was venerated andprayed to. While the first was straightforwardly anathema, the second was soin a more complex manner. Tourists frequently observed that the poor anduneducated were very likely to commit the sin of idolatry if they were notgiven proper instruction and supervision (a belief that was frequentlyexpressed in relation to the decoration of Protestant churches in England).42

Two different reasons were advanced by tourists for why the hierarchy of theChurch tolerated these sins against the Second Commandment. The first andsimplest explanation was also the oldest: that the idolatry of the people wasthe clearest demonstration of the corruption of the Church of Rome. Theother explanation was one that we have already encountered: that theChurch employed a kind of twofold system of religion, fitting its teachings anddoctrines to the different capacities of its people. Such a system was certainlynot justifiable – in fact, it was tyrannical – but it was understandable,in political terms (and historical comparisons drawn particularly fromancient Rome aided that understanding).43 While Smith observed the link

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between plebeian good behaviour and idolatry, he was careful to emphasisethat he did not want to be misunderstood ‘as the defender of priestcraftand superstition’.44 He, like others, sought evidence of the positiveencouragement of idolatry by the Church, as evidence of its ultimatecorruption.45 In strong contrast were the views of Giuseppe Baretti, theItalian Catholic émigré, who argued in his riposte to Samuel Sharp that thetoleration of popular superstition was a politically expedient system and that,after all, the idolatry of the poor was less likely to make ‘heaven so very angry,as they have made that gentleman’.46 No Protestant is likely to have agreedwith him.

V. Tolerance and Anti-Catholicism, Travelling Companions

When James Edward Smith arrived back at Dover at the end of his long tour,he had trinkets from Loreto in his pockets, which caused him momentaryconcern in case such things might be prohibited. However, as he goes on to tellus, they ‘certainly were in no danger from the heretical custom-house officersof England’.47 This incident plays a similar role in Smith’s narrative to that ofSterne’s monk in Calais, marking the boundary between Protestant Englandand Catholic Europe in reverse. The word ‘heretical’ alerts the reader toSmith’s comic intent, and it also signals the theme of Smith’s conclusion (andours): English tolerance.

On his way home from Dover, Smith describes one last church that he visitsas a tourist – Canterbury Cathedral – and it is the opportunity for one lastobservation about the differences between the practice of religion at homeand abroad. ‘But’, he goes on:

let us have done with Catholic churches and ceremonies, curious andentertaining as they are, and novel (thank heaven and our forefathers) to anEnglishman of the present day. Who can approach London without beingstruck with the nobler object of a great industrious and flourishing nation,made up of people of all persuasions, none of whom would authority dare tomolest (could it ever be foolish enough to wish it), unless bigotry andintolerance begin with themselves. May they long continue so! And may eachorder of the community know their own best interest, and live at peace; and ifany attempts should ever be made at home or abroad, hostile to the generalhappiness and greatest good of the whole, may Englishmen always havecourage and wisdom to repel them!48

Smith’s book appeared in 1793, the year that war broke out between Britainand Revolutionary France, which probably accounts for the chargedpatriotism of the final sentences of his book. For all its directness, there is,nevertheless, a strange ambivalence in this paragraph: were English Catholicsincluded in Smith’s ‘people of all persuasions’? Whether they were or not,Smith identifies the Europe through which he had been travelling with asuperstitious and tyrannical religion, and England with tolerance. In fact,



Smith could be interpreted as quite legitimately expressing anti-Catholicismand tolerance simultaneously. Tolerance can exist only where there is realcontinuing opposition, and thus tolerance depends on the maintenance ofopposition. Indifference is not tolerance.49

This essay argues that, while attitudes to Roman Catholics at home didchange substantially during the second half of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholicism remained, nevertheless, an important organising principle ofelite British cultural politics. Therefore, rather than being seen as astraightforward lessening, the shift in attitudes towards Catholicism thathistorians have identified and described (which resulted in measures oftoleration and eventually emancipation in 1829) should perhaps becharacterised as a largely domestic political realignment. Catholicism wassurely tolerated, even appreciated, in certain circumstances (as, for example,the ‘religion of a gentleman’) as it had not been before, but, significantly, theview of Catholicism as an idolatrous and corrupt religion was alsoconspicuously rehearsed and maintained in print. The reasons for this areobvious but have been underplayed in the literature. Anti-Catholicism playeda highly significant role in the construction of Protestant identity, for it was,after all, fundamental to self-understanding that a turning away from theheresies of the Catholic Church towards a truer Christianity had taken placeand had to be maintained. This was especially true in a nation where theestablished Church was defined most strongly by what it was not, rather thanwhat it was.50 There was still intense public debate about the right practiceof Protestantism, in which the view of the Roman Catholic Church asschismatical and corrupt played an important role.

In 1846, in a very similar way to Samuel Sharp, Charles Dickens addressedhis Catholic readers at the beginning of his Pictures from Italy:

I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of the Roman Catholicfaith, on account of anything contained in these pages [...] When I mention anyexhibition that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not seek to connectit, or recognise it as necessarily connected with, any essentials of theircreed ... When I hint a dislike of nunneries for young girls who abjure the worldbefore they have ever proved or known it; or doubt the ex officio sanctity of allPriests and Friars; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics both homeand abroad.51

Here Dickens makes use of the twofold faith argument, and by it he exemptshis Catholic readers from belief in the aspects of their faith that he criticises.So they were, just like him, enlightened enemies to superstition and, thus, fullBritish citizens. Nonetheless, did Dickens really expect his British Catholicreaders to nod in agreement when he scorned the exhibition of relics at StPeter’s or the idea of Purgatory and described Jesuits in Genoa as ‘slinkingnoiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats’?52 Well, perhaps not. Dickens mayhave inhabited a different age, but his approach to Catholicism was one witha long tradition. Throughout the eighteenth century, in the elite sphere of the

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Grand Tour, anti-Catholicism continued to be expressed. The image ofCatholicism that we have pieced together is not a monolithic one, andcertainly there was room for positive comment, particularly about individualsand British Catholics (although not in terms that they might always haveappreciated), but the belief that Catholicism was a superstitious andtyrannical religion remained. It was reinforced by elite encounters with Italyand circulated in the literature of the Grand Tour.

NOTES1. S. Sharp, Letters from Italy (London, 1766), p.194.2. Sharp, Letters from Italy, p.277.3. C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England: A Political and Social Study

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). See esp. p.164-203. However, Haydon’sanalysis of Grand Tour encounters with Catholicism, and its implications (p.167-8), arechallenged by the argument presented here.

4. J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers to Italy, 1701-1800 (New Haven, CT,and London: Yale University Press, 1997).

5. J. Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: History Press,1997); J. Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,2003); Grand Tour. The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. ed. A. Wilton and I.Bignamini (London: Tate Gallery, 1996); A. Moore, Norfolk and the Grand Tour: Eighteenth-Century Travellers Abroad and their Souvenirs, (Fakenham: Norfolk Museums Service, 1985).

6. Among the most frequently referred to are those by J. Addison, G. Burnet, J. Keyssler, F.Misson and J. Richardson.

7. C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1999); M. Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour. Language, National Identity and Masculinity’, ChangingEnglish 8:2 (2001), p.129-41; B. Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: Harper Collins, 2001).

8. For the role of anti-Catholicism in the formation of British national identity see L. Colley,Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), and T. Claydon andI. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity c.1650-c.1850 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998).

9. Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Anti-Catholicism in England, 1660-1760(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

10. L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey [1767] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p.51-3.11. Sharp, Letters, p.iv.12. Sharp, Letters, p.50-51.13. Sharp, Letters, p.69-70.14. J. Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), p.179-85.15. R. Gray, Letters during the Course of a tour through Germany, Switzerland and Italy (London,

1794), p.379. See also p.372-4.16. B. H. Blacker, ‘Gray, Robert (1762-1834)’, rev. M. E. Clayton, Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11350, accessed 10 July 2007].

17. For other comments on castrati, see, for example: Sharp, Letters, p.279, and Gray, Letters,p.378.

18. See J. Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy (London, 1787; 4th edn, 1781), vol.I.378-9; A. Walker, Ideas, Suggested on the Spot in a Late Excursion (London, 1790), p.325-6; Black,Italy, p.153, 162.

19. Hopes are expressed frequently for a new Reformation in the 1790s: see, for example, J. E.Smith, A Sketch of a Tour on the Continent (London, 1793), vol. II.196; Gray, Letters, p.375-6; andAnon., A Comparative Sketch of England and Italy (London, 1793), vol. II.73-5.

20. Smith, A Sketch, vol. I.8.21. Female monasticism exercised the imaginations of tourists in a variety of ways, which I

regret I have not the space to consider here. The ‘taking of the veil’ was probably the mostfrequently described of all the Catholic Church’s ceremonies. Observations tend to have two



focuses: the youth and beauty of the young woman who abjures the world, and speculations onwhat led her to the convent. The idea that monasticism is an unnatural way of life is expressedmost frequently in relation to female religious.

22. B. Hobhouse, Remarks on Several Parts of France, Italy, &c. in the Years 1783, 1784 1785(London, 1796), p.16.

23. This should not be mistaken for a criticism of monasticism tout court. Expressions ofappreciation for the learning and seriousness associated with monasticism and for a golden pastof religious practice are not uncommon, and are rehearsed throughout the century. M. Aston,‘English Ruins and English History. The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), p.231-55, and B. Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: The Ideaof a Protestant Nunnery’, Past and Present 117 (1987), p.107-30.

24. Sharp, Letters, p.98-9, and N. Brooke, Observations on the Manners and Customs of Italy(Bath, 1798), p.21, 61-3, 108-13.

25. P. White, ‘The Purchase of Knowledge: James Edward Smith and the Linnean Collections’,Endeavour 23:3 (1999), p.126-9. Smith was a Unitarian. While it has been recognised thatanti-Catholicism was particularly strongly expressed by Dissenters, Smith’s opinions arecharacteristic of the body of literature under consideration.

26. See, for example, vol. II.126.27. Smith, A Sketch, vol. II.141.28. Smith, A Sketch, vol. I.47-8.29. Moore, A View, vol. II.161, 135.30. Moore, A View, vol. II.163-4.31. Moore, A View, vol. II.388-9.32. This is the position of Sharp too, as demonstrated in the two quotations from his Letters

above. See also the discussion of Baretti’s comments on idolatry below.33. See Gray, Letters, for a very similar approach, which may be indebted to Moore.34. Smith, A Sketch, vol. II.79-80.35. Moore may well have had Joseph Addison in mind when writing this passage: he

described the miracle as a ‘bungling trick’ in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), p.196.See Sharp, Letters, p.121, who also discusses Addison’s comments.

36. Moore, A View, vol. II.276.37. Sharp, Letters, p.39-43.38. Anon., A Comparative Sketch, p.ii, p.60.39. Smith, A Sketch, vol. II.312-3.40. Miller, Letters from Italy (London, 1777), vol. I.220.41. See Haynes, Pictures and Popery, esp. Chapter 2, for Grand Tour practices of looking at

religious art.42. Haynes, Pictures and Popery, esp. Chapter 5.43. P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990), and F. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

44. Smith, A Sketch, vol. II.314.45. Smith, A Sketch, vol. II.325-6.46. G. Baretti, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (London, 1768), p.92-6, 254-6.47. Smith, A Sketch, vol. III.233-4.48. Smith, A Sketch, vol. III.236-7.49. It is worth remembering that Locke did not advocate tolerance for Catholics in his famous

Letter upon Toleration. See J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

50. J. Walsh, C. Haydon and S. Taylor (eds), The Church of England c.1689-1833: From Tolerationto Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. p.1-66. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, p.254.

51. Dickens, Pictures from Italy [1846] (London: Penguin, 1998), p.6.52. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, p.43-4.

clare haynes is honorary Research Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Herbook Pictures and Popery was short-listed for the Berger Prize for British Art History 2007.

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‘a trial for the patience of reason’? grand tourists and anti-catholicism after 1745

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