FEATURE
Best and truest Charles A. Coulombe explores how the 19th century Celtic Revival brought many to the Faith
E
ver since the Anglo-Saxons made themselves at home in the ruins of Roman Britain, there have been greater or lesser amounts of antagonism between the English and the denizens of the so-called Celtic Fringe – Ireland, Man, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and to some degree portions of the north and west Counties of England itself. Expressed in the Middle Ages by the combat between the reigning English Monarch and such figures as Owen Glendower and Sir William Wallace, the Reformation added an ideological element to the struggle. Ireland and districts in the Scottish Highlands and Islands remained bastions of Catholicism – Wales and Cornwall, as their 16th and 17th century struggles for the Faith showed – doubtless would have done the same, had priests fluent in their languages continued to be trained. As it was, loyalty to the ill-starred House of Stuart against its successive Cromwellian, Williamite, and Whig opponents united them in a single cause for over a century. The defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746 and the recognition by Pope Clement XIII of his rival George III as King of Great Britain two decades later marked on the one hand the practical defeat of the Stuart cause, and on the other the separation between the official Church Hierarchy and Jacobitism (although on his father’s death, the rectors of the English, Irish, and Scots Colleges in Rome all honoured the Prince as “King Charles III,” and were summarily fired by Clement). In any case, outside Ireland the Catholics were a small minority of the Celtic peoples in the British Isles by 1800, although there were small preserves scattered from Lanherne in Cornwall to Barra in the Hebrides. Celtic culture as a whole was at a low ebb – its languages dying, many of its traditions either neglected or officially
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proscribed. But this was all about to change, as Romanticism, having cast its life-giving glow on Germany and France, arrived in the United Kingdom. Its foremost practitioner was Sir Walter Scott. Almost single-handedly, he rescued the Medieval from its reputation for barbarism – and gave the impression that perhaps even its Catholicism was worth investigating. Alongside this, he rehabilitated the Jacobites and Scots history in general. Even George IV became a fan, going so far as to pay for the Stuart tombs and monument at St Peter’s in Rome, and visiting Scotland and Ireland to great popular local acclaim – something that Monarch was not used to among his English subjects. As Prince of Wales he had already engaged the great Edward Jones – reviver of the Welsh musical tradition – as his personal harpist. To be sure, the seeds of all of this had been laid before Scott to some degree – with the work of James McPherson in his Ossian poems and Robert Burns. At first glance, the embattled Catholic minority in Great Britain would seem to have played very little role in these events – but in fact, Burns, despite his Masonic and Presbyterian memberships, was devoted to the memory of the Stuarts. Moreover, he numbered several Catholics among his close friends – something unexpected in one of his background and upbringing. John Geddes, vicar apostolic of western Scotland, prized both the man and his work: he prevailed upon the Scots monasteries of Regensburg and Wuerzburg and the Scots colleges of Paris, Douai, and Valladolid (now Salamanca, Spain) to subscribe to the 1787 Edinburgh edition of Burns’s poetry, which work put him on the literary map of Europe. After the rise to fame of the Laird of Abbotsford, a host of movements owing their inspiration at least partly to his work arose. Scott’s work ignited a great interest in all things Medieval – from
Gothic Architecture to knighthood (hence the adventure of the Eglinton Tournament), to an actual rekindling of interest in Catholicism – coinciding with the political agitation on its behalf in Ireland, led by Daniel O’Connell. But the Oxford Movement, the PreRaphaelites, and the Arts-and-Crafts also emerged therefrom. In addition to all of these, as the 19th century wore on, were the efforts at recovering – or, often enough, inventing – the traditions of the Celtic countries, from Irish legends to Scots tartans to the Welsh Eisteddfod. Most of those involved in this Celtic Revival were Protestants of various kinds – often entranced by the dreamy if inaccurate vision of a “Celtic Church” – Catholic, but independent from Rome. But there were in the first half of the 19th century several Catholic-friendly or even actually Catholic pioneers: among them were Welsh popular historian William Owen (1785 - 1864), called Y Pab – “The Pope” for his sympathies; deathbed convert and Cornish folklorist, Robert Hawker (1803–1875); and the decidedly dodgy brothers, John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart (real names John Carter Allen and Charles Manning Allen) whose Catholicism and influence in reviving Scottish customs were as real as their genealogy was fake. John Hobson Mathews (1858-1914) combined Catholic evangelisation with reclaiming the country’s language and heritage. In the meantime, starting in 1830, with the overthrow of Charles X, France, Portugal, and Spain became engaged in a series of dynastic conflicts pitting senior and more devout lines of the local Royal Families against junior and more liberal cousins. When the exiled French King came to Edinburgh in the year of his deposition to live in Holyrood, it was Sir Walter Scott himself who took the exile under his wing, transforming the locals’ hostility to a cordial reception by virtue of his own eminence. Although the British
WINTER 2019
