Earl Nugent's Daughter; Or the Last Days of the Penal Laws: A True Story

I celebrated handing in my final grades by reading a Victorian religious novel, as, ah, one does.  Agnes M. Stewart's Earl Nugent's Daughter (1883) is a historical novel about Mary Elizabeth Grenville, Marchioness of Buckingham, who was, as the title advertises, the daughter of Robert Nugent, 1st Earl Nugent.  The novel is rooted in a memoir by Mary's daughter, Lady Mary Arundell of Wardour, and perhaps for that reason suffers from biofic-itis--that is, the tendency to confuse plot with chronological order.  Although the title advertises penal laws, the novel only sporadically remembers to address them; although it also advertises Nugent, he's a relatively minor character (Mary's husband, George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, is far more important); and the novel decides about midway through to spend lots of time on the French Revolution, which is not entirely lacking in sense (Mary helped settle French refugees), but, story-wise, is also not entirely sensible.  Nevertheless, as a Catholic novel it has some interesting features, not least of which is its progressivist vision of English national history when it comes to the Catholic population.

At one level, the novel is a narrative of apparently individual moral mistakes that, in actuality, emerge from political forces beyond anyone's control.  Nugent converts to Protestantism in order to secure his upward political trajectory, early on realizing that "those whose faith he professed were small in number amongst an overwhelming majority"; ranking earthly power above his heavenly salvation, he joins the ranks of "the oppressors" (13) and, indeed, becomes violently anti-Catholic.  His career addresses the paradox articulated by other nineteenth-century Catholic novelists, like Edmund Randolph: under Protestant rule, how is it possible to shape a gentlemanly public identity and retain one's faith? Nugent's fall into Protestantism, which manifests itself in a host of other private failings--not least of which is his authoritarian rule over his daughter--mistakes the sordid negotiations of political life for the true community afforded by the corporate body of the Roman Catholic Church.  Only on his deathbed is he at least partly reconciled with his daughter, as he admits that he has returned to Catholicism (as did the real Robert Nugent) and "beg[s] God to have mercy on you and me" (128).  But this deathbed reunion is subverted by the conditions of Mary's own interfaith marriage to the Protestant Grenville, which forbid her from admitting that, far from remaining Protestant as she had been raised, she too is a Catholic (128).  Yet all this, the novel admits, is not just a matter of Nugent's personal failings and Mary's excessive scrupulousness:

As to the Marquis of Buckingham, his conduct to his wife--in the highest degree a talented and accomplished woman; as a wife, circumspect, faithful, and affectionate--betrays too truly the odious and fearful spirit of the times; that he, an English nobleman of exalted rank, a statesman, highly educated, esteemed and beloved, could yet so fearfully coerce his own wife, shows up in all their horror the fearful penal laws, and the effect they produced.  They made to that unhappy lady, for many years, amidst all her wealth, tyrants of both husband and father, and caused the latter to die, not daring to proclaim himself as one returned to the old faith, because the barbarous laws would take from his own child her rightful inheritance.  (130-31)

The novel is not so much invested in the specifics of the penal laws, then, as it is in how they deform private life.  Mary's life with her husband is blighted not because he is naturally inclined to dominion, but because his own anti-Catholic education and the laws of the time make it essential that he repress her beliefs in order to maintain his position; her relationship with her father is equally blighted for the same reason.  Catholic domestic life under the penal laws is effectively Gothic, with overbearing patriarchs, an "odious and fearful spirit," and a general air of "horror."  At the same time, note how the novel's two primary male characters naturalize unequal relationships under the penal laws: Nugent simply opts for the role of "oppressor" in order to gain power, rather than the far more difficult option of resistance, while the cultured Grenville is unable (for most of the novel, at least) to question his own belief that Catholicism is not something for a "sensible or well-educated person" to "believe" (48).  As the thwarted moment of truth with her father suggests, Mary exists in an in-between space, trapped between the rock of her husband's Protestantism and the hard place of her own Catholicism; her inability to resist her father and, for most of the novel, her husband suggests the limits to her Catholic heroism.  Unlike other Catholic novels, which emphasize characters experiencing Catholicism in community (hearing Mass, for example), Earl Nugent's Daughter represents the tragedy of Catholic life under the penal laws in Mary's forced isolation: until her husband slowly relents in the wake of his experiences with French clergymen, she spends most of the novel communicating alone, at one point hearing Mass only by eavesdropping.  The penal laws forcibly dismember the Catholic body.

At the same time, the novel celebrates an emerging English tolerance for its Catholic community--symbolized in Grenville's slowly-increasing willingness to give his wife religious liberty, until eventually her beliefs are no secret at all--and here, I think, is where both the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution come in.  In a sense, the novel goes double Dickens, reworking (not very subtly or gracefully) both Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.  Like Dickens, Stewart stews about mobs.  But in counterpointing the Gordon mobs and the Revolutionary mobs, Stewart arrives at what seems like a paradoxical conclusion: Protestant England ultimately does a much better job of containing violence against its Catholic community than does Catholic France.  For that matter, Protestant England turns out to be a welcoming save haven for the French Catholic community, complete with monetary support that was "honourable to the charity of the English nation" (216).  Earl Nugent's Daughter shows surprisingly little interest in converting Protestants--notably, Grenville remains Protestant throughout (as per the historical record), something unusual in Catholic fiction.  Instead, it cheers for a more capacious understanding of Englishness, one in which, contra Dickens, it is possible to speak of one's Catholicism and fully participate in civic life.  In a key flash-forward, the novel conjures up the "attentive and well-conducted Protestants" (78) who calmly listen to Cardinal Wiseman speak in St. George's Cathedral, near one of the sites where Lord George Gordon urged the rioters on (78).  But despite the Papal Aggression controversy, we are informed that "John Bull has become more sensible" (79), and so there is no retread of the Gordon Riots.  The Protestants show no sign of converting en masse, but they have nevertheless learned to be "sensible"--a sensibility that enables them to enter a Catholic church as honorable guests, not rioters.  This "sensible" Englishness does not make Protestantism and Catholicism interchangeable, but it does enable a kind of mutual hospitality, in which Protestants are welcomed into Catholic churches in much the same way that French Catholics had been welcomed into England.  Everyone is at home, and everyone is a guest.