The Reformation tales I'm studying have one thing in common: they present themselves as countercultural. Given that Protestants of various stripes were the dominant majority in Victorian Britain, readers may well wonder how novels asserting the righteousness of the Reformation could possibly be "countercultural." But their authors consistently represent nineteenth-century Britain as forgetting its evangelical past and succumbing to the siren song of tolerationist attitudes; by endorsing toleration for Catholics, the Protestant establishment rejects God's condemnation of "Popery" (as laid out in the Bible, especially Revelation) and thus renders the entire country apostate. Tolerating Catholics, in other words, risks everyone's soul.
Protestants, however, didn't have a lock on Reformation tales. Frances Taylor's Tyborne: and 'Who Went Thither in the Days of Queen Elizabeth' (1859) is a Catholic riposte to Protestant fiction and historiography alike, published in the wake of the so-called "Papal Aggression" controversy of the early 1850s. (Later Mother Mary Magdalen Taylor, the novelist founded the Poor Servants of the Mother of God.) As Taylor semi-explains--or rather, excuses--Tyborne fictionalizes Bishop Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests. The novel's main plot stitches together the experiences of multiple priests, including Edmund Campion (who also makes a walk-on appearance) and Robert Southwell, thereby generating a synthetic martyrology; this strategy deliberately echoes the Protestant "Foxeite" historical novels that were becoming increasingly popular during this period.
Conspicuously unlike contemporary Protestant novelists, Taylor believes that, far from penetrating into English culture, modern Catholics face continued persecution: the "name of Catholic is yet hated and despised, and they who wear it wear also a mark of their Master's scorn" (xii). By recuperating Catholic experience through fiction, Taylor hopes to ameliorate such prejudice by reminding the English of their full religious heritage. For Taylor, "forgetting" results not from complacency, but from Protestant historical biases. Pointedly observing that "religious persecution" has led readers to empathize with the Albigensians, Huguenots, and Covenanters--all of whom Taylor finds theologically and politically dangerous--she wryly asks, "[i]s it not, then, wonderful that when the persecutions under Mary Tudor have been written indelibly on the page of history, the long, the terrible, the patient sufferings of Catholics in the succeeding reign should remain unnoticed?" (ix-x). Protestants sustain themselves on the back of emotional responses to suffering, Taylor slyly suggests, so why not explode such narratives of mass victimhood by appropriating victim status for Catholics themselves? Taylor situates her novel within a larger trend of Catholic historical revisionism, spearheaded by John Lingard (x), which seeks to legitimate Catholic experience as part of English national history. Such recovery work has both theological and political implications; when one character tells the soon-to-be-martyred protagonist, Walter de Lisle, that his sufferings are "not witnessing for Christ" because Walsingham will rewrite this event as treason, Walter serenely replies that "[i]n his own good time the truth shall be told, and England know for what cause we suffer" (194-95). Taylor thus turns her popularization of Bishop Challoner into a virtually providential act, both rewriting the historical record and establishing that Catholic martyrs are martyrs who can testify to religious truth.
Although Taylor announces that her primary concern lies with the Penal Laws, and devotes several chapters to the effects of a particular law (each explicated by a lengthy endnote), she is ultimately more interested in the threat posed by conformity. Her hero, Walter de Lisle, is initially repulsed at the very thought of martyrdom, but after he loves and loses a beautiful Protestant, Constance (who suggests outward conformity as one solution to his problem), he goes abroad, becomes a Jesuit, and returns to England as a missionary priest and eventual martyr. Walter's embrace of divine over earthly love--"Let me be well apparelled for my bridal day," he says as he prepares for execution (224)--offers a rejoinder to Protestant critiques of priestly celibacy. Repeatedly described as "joyous" or "joyful" in his reactions to impending death, Walter models an ideal Catholic masculinity, in which celibacy merely forms part of a greater self-abnegation before Christ and the good of His church. Walter's ability to endure vividly-described tortures of various sorts, as well as his gory execution (which culminates with his "quivering heart" being "torn from its place and held before the fast glazing eyes" [240]), quite literally embodies the triumph of Catholic devotion and heroism in the face of Protestant monstrosity.
By contrast, Walter's sister, Isabel, chooses the path that Walter rejects, and conforms to Protestantism out of pride and misguided love. The results, predictably enough, are catastrophic: she is visited by a series of clearly divine punishments, beginning with childlessness and ending with years of dementia. It is her own husband, in fact, who engineers Walter's capture and execution. Only at her death, when she regains awareness, fully repents and reconciles herself with the Church, is Isabel rewarded with a glorious vision of her sainted mother and brother, awaiting her in Heaven (259). Isabel's fall into Protestantism and eventual redemption, an example of sinful frailty, stands in bleak opposition not only to her brother's exalted call to martyrdom, but also to the heroism of other Catholic women in the text, including her mother (who resists all pressure to conform after her husband is executed), her cousin Blanche (horribly crippled after she saves all the "vessels and vestments" of a Mass from being taken by Protestant officers [113]), and Constance (who converts and lives the rest of her life in suffering and penance).
Taylor's critique of Protestantism forms part of what she clearly believes is a revisionist attack on Elizabeth I. At the center of English life lies the court, which Taylor represents as a mass of moral depravity, full of "dangers without end or limit" (160) and presided over by the ambiguously gendered queen. Men and women who enter the court engage in flagrant displays of sexuality, not to mention political corruptions of every description. Taylor's Elizabeth has little enthusiasm for women who haven't "the least taint of scandal" (250), as one character notes; the queen's unregenerate nature is, for all intents and purposes, the essence of Protestantism in miniature. All of the novel's Protestants are timeservers, moral relativists, and libertines, implicitly taking their cue from Elizabeth. (On his way to his own execution, Walter converts another condemned man, the son of a convert to Protestantism, who tartly sums up the content of his father's religion as "nothing" [228].) In fact, Elizabeth did not enjoy especially good press from many Victorian Protestants (High Church Anglicans included), who were frequently anxious about her "masculine" nature and the implications of her lifelong celibacy. When, near the end of the novel, Taylor contrasts Elizabeth to Victoria, she actually repeats a standard Protestant trope:
Three hundred years are past and gone! The last of the Tudors and the last of the Stuarts alike crumble into dust. A new dynasty holds the sceptre of England, and a queen, with all a woman's virtues, sits upon the throne. The rack and the torture-chamber are things of the past, and the savage laws of Elizabeth can be found only in some obsolete statute-book. Men walk abroad in safety, for England is free! (265)
If there is some irony at work here--after all, as Taylor argued in the preface, Catholics are still disadvantaged--nevertheless the new queen's "virtues" model an equally new Protestantism, one which rejects violent compulsion and dispatches "savage laws" to the junk heap of discarded law texts. Taylor's praise for Victoria carefully links Catholicism to English patriotism, even as it implicitly calls on Victoria to extend English "freedom" to her still-persecuted subjects. Unlike her Protestant counterparts, who deny that Catholicism can change, Taylor has no trouble arguing that modern Protestantism has liberalized itself. Nevertheless, the novel concludes not with a celebration of Victoria's England, but by reminding its readers of Tyborne's Victorian existence "in the midst of bustling, rich, gay London" (267)--an emblem of Catholicism's near-forgotten presence in England's past and present alike.
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