Lady Mary Pierrepoint
It's a holiday weekend!
Therefore, let me write something about this tract.
Lady Mary Pierrepoint (not to be confused with the real-life Mary Wortley Montagu, nee Pierrepoint...) was one of the "Common Sense Tracts" ("trash," snapped Cardinal Wiseman) that Sinclair wrote for publisher Richard Bentley. Sinclair enjoys ongoing fame (or infamy) among two very different sets of readers: specialists in children's fiction, for whom her nonsense novel Holiday House (1839) is a landmark work; and people like yours truly, who know her novel Beatrice (1852)--also published by Bentley--as one of the most popular anti-Catholic novels of the Victorian period. Sinclair experimented with different narrative forms for the Common Sense Tracts, including fictional diaries and, as is the case here, dialogue (a conventional form for tract writing). Sinclair tends to obsessively preface, footnote, or appendi-cize (is that a word? well, it is now...) her polemical works, and that last is the case here.
Sinclair's work repeatedly singles out Ireland for condemnation, and her antagonism is on display in Lady Mary Pierrepoint, which aims to represent "the blighting influence of superstition" at every level of Irish culture (iii). The first plot revolves around a bit of blackmail: Lady Pierrepoint, an aspiring abbess dressed in "the costume of a corpse" (1), insists that her son, Sir Cosmo, must schelp his daughter Ida off to the convent. Alas, there's one small problem: Sir Cosmo's much put-upon wife, Lady Mary, is a Protestant, and she'll not be having this. Ergo, Lady Pierrepoint decides to hit Sir Cosmo where it hurts--namely, the pocketbook. If Sir Cosmo fails to pack off Ida as directed, mom will "transfer all these broad lands to the Papal Church" (7). What to do, what to do...why, do as mom asks. Meanwhile, in the second plot, a vaguely rakish Catholic, Captain Compton, has finally fallen in love with an angelic young Protestant, Nora Donnington. A second alas: she won't marry a Catholic. And Compton's uncle will likely disinherit him if he marries outside the faith. What to do, what to do...why, convert. As the respective decisions by the similarly-named Cosmo and Compton suggest, Sinclair associates Roman Catholicism with "unmanly" behavior (knuckling under to overbearing mother and aggravating priest, effectively abandoning wife and child) and Protestantism--or, at least, impending Protestantism--with authentic masculinity. By the same token, the dowager Lady Pierrepoint flunks both femininity (she seems to relish abusing the nuns) and maternity (her abusiveness to her son), whereas Lady Mary resolves to sacrifice everything in order to save her daughter. These two plots dovetail at Dr. Donnington's home, where Lady Mary runs to escape Sir Cosmo, and Sir Ronald Jerningham, Compton's uncle, arrives to announce that he plans to test Compton's determination to marry Nora.
Sinclair's most interesting decision is to leave the stereotypically evil Catholic priest, Father O'Murphy, entirely offstage. "[F]iendishly clever" (2), he manifests himself only by the dreaded reach of his influence--a small-scale devil incarnate. Father O'Murphy embodies multiple traditional anti-Catholic bugbears: he's a political agitator, a manipulative confessor, a suborner of governesses, etc., etc., ad nauseam. (Sinclair neglects to mention that Protestants were not the only ones who disliked political Irish priests: Paul Cullen, eventually Cardinal Cullen, was already trying to rein them in.) As is par for the course in such texts, Father O'Murphy repeatedly intervenes in domestic life, usurping the authority of father, uncle, and husband; thus, he helps Lady Pierrepoint to "secretly circumvent" her Protestant husband's last wish that his son be raised a Protestant (6), and "poisons" Sir Ronald's feelings toward Compton--or so Compton thinks (20). And he even steals all the Bibles in order to sway Lady Mary's religious sentiments (31). In effect, Father O'Murphy miniaturizes a grand conspiracy theory about the workings of the RCC in Ireland, in which every parent, every political decision, and every exchange of cash ultimately traces its way back to an invisible yet omnipresent clerical interference. By absconding with the Bibles and substituting Catholic texts instead, O'Murphy seeks to decenter the core of Christian faith; as Sinclair understands it, all Catholic literature amounts to a permanent deferral of "right" reading, displacing the would-be Christian's devotional reading from God's Word to perverted human rhetoric. His anti-Biblicism maps neatly onto Lady Pierrepoint's shenanigans, the governess' deceptions, and his own attempts to conceal that the estate is not Lady Pierrepoint's to alienate. Nevertheless, the plot's wrap-up also celebrates the ultimate inefficacy of both Catholic fictitiousness and conspiracy-mongering, given that Father O'Murphy's rabble-rousing, intended to destroy Dr. Donnington, inadvertently gets O'Murphy killed instead. (The killers evince a remarkably cheerful attitude to their probable punishment.)
In fact, O'Murphy's death spins the tract into comic mode. Cosmo repents, the governess reveals the paperwork demonstrating that Cosmo controls the estate, and Sir Ralph endorses the two young lovers. Better yet, Compton winds up winning the local election for the Protestant interest. Sinclair thus projects the "inevitable" nature of Protestant victory over Catholic lawlessness, consolidated by both conversions and politics. We're told that Compton's constituents celebrate his win and his marriage with Handel's "See the Conquering Hero Comes," which links Compton to the Duke of Cumberland and his victory over the Catholic Charles Edward Stuart, as well as to Judah Maccabeus. Compton's moral and political triumph both evokes and supplants the physical violence of earlier warriors. Moreover, Sinclair also rejects any allegorical possibility of interfaith marriage. Far from producing national unity, interfaith marriage consistently disrupts private life and enables further Catholic depradations. The Irish future, Sinclair argues, rests on integrating Catholics thoroughly into the Protestant fold.