Nightshade
The Irish newspaperman and lawyer William Johnston (1829 - 1902) is primarily remembered today as an MP and influential member of the Orange Institution. For reasons that Nightshade (1857) makes abundantly clear, he does not generally rank among the more artistically-gifted of the nineteenth century's politician-authors. The Saturday Review lived up to its nickname of "The Saturday Revilers" in its assessment of the book, which concludes, rather tartly, that "[w]e can only express a sincere hope that no other M.A. in the country could be found to put his name to such a production as Nightshade--else we should be inclined to think that the Universities are much in need of reform." In any event, if the book does not glimmer, let alone twinkle or scintillate, it still illustrates some polemical tendencies of anti-Catholicism during the 1850s, the high-water mark of the Victorian "anti-Popery" agenda.
Like many other anti-Catholic agitators of his era, Johnston sees Jesuits not only under every tree, but also every politician, shop, and, in all likelihood, chamber pot. (At least he spares us that bizarre phenomenon, the "female Jesuit." Of course, it's about the only thing he does spare us.) The setting is in the late 1840s, around the time of the Risorgimento, and shortly after the first wave of Tractarian conversions to Roman Catholicism. The novel details the sad fortunes of orphaned English twins Anna and Emily, who find themselves under the mysterious guardianship of their uncle, Aubrey de Vere. Alas, de Vere is really--gasp--an Italian Jesuit named Ricci, who has absconded with the identity (but not the credit cards) of the twins' real uncle Aubrey, who died insane after falling in love with Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci. (This, at least, has the merit of some originality.) As is par for the course, de Vere plans to expropriate the twins' inheritance for the good of the Church while dooming them to lives in dark, dank convents. (It's never exactly clear how he figures out that de Vere would be a good target, but this presumably falls under "don't think too hard about the plot.") However, the twins are championed by the thoroughly muscular Christian Charles Annandale, a hardcore Protestant who falls in love with Anna after saving her from an ignominous death by drowning. At various points, he also rescues a man shot by Ribbonist assassins, fights against the French when they invade Italy, and breaks into a convent. (He's properly impressed by the Orange Order, to boot.) He is, in other words, the very model of a modern Protestant manly man. Annandale gets valuable backup from both the mildly comical pair of Mr. Anderson (elderly clergyman) and John Connell (elderly lawyer), and shares his star billing with the young, handsome Lord Oxenborough, who comes to embody Johnston's vision of the ideal Protestant aristocrat. (For some reason, we also get to meet Benjamin Disraeli, who walks on at a dinner hosted by Oxenborough.) In contrast to the fine and upstanding young Protestant gentlemen, we have Anglo-Catholic Oxford tutor Mr. Tractate (subtlety is not, perhaps, Johnston's strong suit) and his convert, Arthur Wilmington, both of whom seek to suborn the Church of England from within. By the end of the novel, Ricci has been thwarted and stabbed to death, but not before he manages to ensure Emily's doom ("'What a pity she won't die!'"..."'Those English girls are very hard to kill'" [272]) by imprisonment in an aforementioned dark, dank convent. Still, Charles marries Anna and they live Protestantly ever after, while Emily enjoys an evangelical good death and goes off to Heaven, accompanied by her favorite swallows.
As Albert Pionke has noted, Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric frequently casts the Jesuits as an "undetectable Catholic secret society" [1]. In Johnston's novel, Jesuits form a counter-cultural, subversive network of omnipresent spies: "'They penetrate every place, profess all varieties of politics, adopt every shade of religious opinion, in order to pervert all politics and all religion to the abominable end of bringing about the destruction of free thought, the annihilation of free action, and the complete subjugation of the world to Rome, as represented by their order'" (32-33). Chameleonic and theologically imperialist, Jesuits colonize all modes of thought, and thus cannot simply be detected by means of some political or religious acid test; the good evangelical next door might be a Jesuit as much as the more "obvious" Tractarian. The narrative thus prescribes a hermeneutic of Protestant suspicion. But, inasmuch as Jesuits--who, in practice, appear to be indistinguishable from any random Catholic pulled off the street--thrive by their discursive mastery, their ability to appropriate any and all forms of thought for their own ends, they cannot be admitted to dialogue. At the same time, given that the novel's Protestant dialogues with Catholics or Catholic sympathizers quickly result in shamefaced embarrassment or silence on the Catholic side, such terrifying mock-normalcy turns out, in practice, to be ridiculously vulnerable to Protestant attack. (Catholics are scary until real Protestants arrive on the scene.) The prime solution to the danger Catholics pose is a strong anti-tolerationism. Annandale very quickly arrives at an uncompromising position: insofar as "these Irish Roman Catholics worshipped murder, or, at least, the murder of a heretic" (53), only uprooting the religion altogether will suffice. He thus has no brief with the "Liberal Protestant" landowner, Mr. White, whom the novel derides as a self-satisfied exemplar of Victorian PC. "'This won't do now, Mr. Annandale,'" White informs him over dinner; "'bigotry is exploded; charity predominates; we must deal in a liberal spirit with our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen'" (322). Like many other anti-Catholic polemicists, Johnston attacks advocates of toleration for their impulse to historicize, to represent the modern age as an irenic moment of interdenominational cooperation that has superseded earlier eras of religious oppression and violence. For Johnston, such calls for "charity" simply wink at Catholic crimes (killing people, immuring nuns, the usual...); Catholicism/Jesuitism is entirely incompatible with any nation built on (or, in the case of Italy, building itself on) a strong tradition of civil liberties. Johnston's modern England, far from being a securely Protestant haven, is in fact teetering over a Roman Catholic abyss, but may be rescued by a return to staunch Biblical principles.
Although Johnston was Irish, the novel tends to be insistently English (although chunks are set in Ireland). The novel offers up a standard geography of UK religious differences: Scotland is the most resolutely anti-Catholic, Ireland has been destroyed by Catholicism, and England currently exists in some sort of weird via media. (Wales doesn't appear to exist.) England thus emerges as both battleground and potential standard-bearer. On the Continent, the Risorgimento demonstrates the possibilities of large-scale anti-Catholic organization, in a rather persistent Protestant misreading of what was at stake in Italian nationalism [2]. The organized warfare in Italy repeats itself in Ireland and England in the Ribbonist assassinations and Annandale's assault on a convent (probably intended to echo the destruction of the Charlestown Convent in 1834). In effect, the novel offers "Protestant" and "Catholic" models of violence: Catholics kill people secretly (and manipulate the legal system to get themselves declared innocent), whereas Protestants, who have apparently all played rugby at public school, bravely jump into battle on the side of beleaguered nationalists and, well, invade convents. "[F]ifty stalwart men" (309) crash the London convent where poor Emily is being held, doing no damage but definitely being cast as upright English liberators. Johnston contrasts the Abbess, "mingling maledictions and Ave Marias, and talking of the Law of England," with the "brave, honest Englishmen," who cheer in "triumphant" and "joyous" tones (310-11). By the end of the novel, Catholicism is feminine, incapable of forthright self-defense, and, as the Abbess' improperly jumbled language suggests, profanely confused; Protestantism is masculine, active, and openly expressive. (Such gendering is itself conventional, and the fantasy of convent invasion occasionally crops up elsewhere in anti-Catholic literature.)
The Abbess' lie that Emily is not in the convent is yet one more example of the novel's insistence that a Catholic talking is a Catholic lying. To make this argument, Johnston conflates two separate concepts: reserve and equivocation. The Tractarians were exceptionally interested in the practice of reserve, an imitation of God's care not to "overwhelm" seekers with truths they could not handle; ideally, "[b]earing testimony to God's truth is a Christian duty, but it should be done only in so far as it would leave all persons who hear that testimony the better for it" [3]. Equivocation, which by the nineteenth century formed part of any Jesuit stereotype, is a casuistical way of thinking about those few circumstances when lying might be necessary (preventing someone's death, for example), and how it might be done--usually through a process known as mental reservation [4]. However, many Protestants understood equivocation (frequently folded into reserve, as here) to justify lying under any and all circumstances, failed to register the debates within Catholicism about the subject, and denounced it and Catholics accordingly. (Like many other polemicists, Johnston seizes on the canonization of Alphonsus Liguori as proof that Catholics advocate lying [5].) Thus, when Annandale comments on Arthur Wilmington's growing "reserve" (66), he inadvertently puns on Wilmington's theological practice. Similarly, in a parody of reserve, Wilmington's Catholic friend Prynne tells him that he already is Catholic (but an Anglican priest) only after Wilmington converts: "'Yes, Wilmington; I can impart this information to you, now; you and I will be fellow-workers in the Church's cause, though we seem to be in the enemy's camp'" (255). As a result, the novel preempts all Catholic speech whatsoever by insisting that by definition, no Catholic arguments in their own favor can be true--and, indeed, that any arguments that sound like they might be pro-Catholic must already be tainted.
[1] Albert D. Pionke, Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 61. More generally, see Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
[2] For a discussion of how Italian exiles encouraged such a reading, see Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 132-34, 203-7; and for Anglo-American Protestant arguments in support of the Risorgimento, C. T. McIntire, England against the Papacy, 1858-1861 (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 224.
[3] James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 118, 120. See also Pionke, esp. 64-68.
[4] For an overview, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[5] On anti-Liguorianism among Protestants, see J. L. Altholz, "Truth and Equivocation: Liguori's Moral Theology and Newman's Apologia," Church History 44.1 (1975): 73-84.