John Mason Neale (1816–66) is arguably one of the dozen or so major figures encountered by the student of nineteenth-century Anglicanism, but it it not easy to understand quite why this is so. What he accomplished during a rather short life is so multi-faceted – his roles as ecclesiologist, hymnodist, monastic founder, historian of the Eastern Church, logorrheic author of bad novels and potted histories for children, proto-Ritualist, thorn in an episcopal side – that the sum never quite seems commensurate with the constituent parts. The difficulty thus posed to a biographer may be, at least in part, why there has never been a fully adequate account of his life and achievements.Footnote 1
The present study may intensify the problem in that it addresses yet another aspect of Neale's activities, that of a surprisingly acute antiquarian-turned-social-critic. This role is displayed in a work which was published both anonymously and jointly, with a collaborator: a radically expanded edition of Sir Henry Spelman's History and fate of Sacrilege, originally completed in 1643 but not printed until 1698. Spelman (1563/4–1641) is an important figure in the history of scholarship, and the story of why his Sacrilege was written and, equally, of why its publication was so delayed is known somewhat widely.Footnote 2 By ‘Sacrilege’ Spelman meant the possession by lay owners of property formerly belonging to the Church (above all, lands that had been in monastic hands before the dissolution of religious houses in England between 1535 and 1540).Footnote 3 During the middle months of 1846, the London publisher Joseph Masters issued a new edition of this work, edited and, as the title page states, ‘revised and corrected, with a continuation, large additions, and an introductory essay by two priests of the Church of England’.
One of these priests was Neale, the other his friend Joseph Haskoll (1819–71). Neale and Haskoll had almost certainly known each other as undergraduates at Cambridge, Neale at Trinity and Haskoll at Clare. Their preface to the new edition, dated Lent 1846, states that ‘It is more than four years since the present editors conceived the idea of reprinting the History of Sacrilege’ (p. ix). Whatever may have been done then, it seems not to have been until the summer of 1845 that serious work began. Neale, whose always precarious health had already made it inadvisable to continue with regular parochial duties was, according to his memoirist, Eleanor Towle, spending four or five hours a day on the project and had by then secured Haskoll's help.Footnote 4
Haskoll was at that point a curate in the Walworth district of south London, not too far from Reigate in Surrey, where Neale and his wife settled in the autumn of 1845. Haskoll remained in Walworth until 1847, and eventually moved to Scotland as part of the ambitious scheme of the Tractarian bishop of Brechin, Alexander Penrose Forbes, to establish a (Scottish Episcopal) cathedral at Perth.Footnote 5 By 1850 these plans were sufficiently advanced that Haskoll was encouraging Neale, unsuccessfully, to accept an offer to become dean at the new foundation. He was still based in Scotland in 1853, when Joseph Masters put out a second edition, ‘with further additions’, of the 1846 printing, the editorial labour still ascribed only to ‘two priests of the Church of England’.Footnote 6 It appears impossible to allocate any specific part of the editorial work to Haskoll. Given the nature of his other literary activity,Footnote 7 it is probably correct to assign the great bulk of the introductory essay to Neale, and consequently often to speak of him alone, without the cumbersomeness of adding Haskoll's name.
By 1846 Neale was well launched on his literary career, and the movement with which his name was until then chiefly associated was at the height of it influence.Footnote 8 The Cambridge Camden Society, founded by Neale and his friend Benjamin Webb in 1839, had quickly evolved from a group of young Cambridge enthusiasts for ‘proper’ (i.e., Gothic) church architecture to a body of as many as 700 members with wider ecclesiological concerns. By 1846, when opposition to it within Cambridge had forced a move to London and a renaming of the body as the Ecclesiological Society, the tenets of the movement – still ostensibly architectural, but with strong attention to liturgical furnishings and then, inevitably, to questions of ritual – were beginning to be put into practice throughout England.Footnote 9
Neale's incessant literary efforts had until that point been heavily directed towards the rapid production of novels: Herbert Tresham: a story of the Great Rebellion in 1842, the next year Agnes de Tracy: a tale of the times of S. Thomas of Canterbury and Ayton Priory: or the restored monastery and, two years later, Shepperton Manor: a tale of the times of Bishop Andrewes. There were also some children's histories and miscellaneous works. The only substantial literary effort was a translation, made jointly with Webb, of the first book of the thirteenth-century French bishop William Durand's Rationale divinorum officiorum, under the somewhat misleading title Symbolism of churches (1843).Footnote 10 More to the point is another of Neale's publications of 1843, Hierologus; or, the church tourists. This is a dialogue, stretching wearisomely over three hundred pages, between two self-professed ecclesiologists, ‘Catholicus’ and ‘Palaeophilus’, as they cover a rather odd itinerary from Crowland in Lincolnshire to Barmouth (Abermaw) in Gwynedd.Footnote 11
Towards the beginning of Hierologus Catholicus fantasises in ‘an abbey church, newly decorated’ a neo-medieval service of Hollywood-epic grandeur, concluding with a bishop pronouncing solemn cursings ‘on those who shall sacrilegiously violate the newly erected temple’. Palaeophilus responds at once: ‘And fearfully have those curses been fulfilled: how fearfully let Sir Henry Spelman tell in his “History of Sacrilege”.’ He goes on to instance a very minor Augustinian house at Breadsall in Derbyshire, valued at a mere £10 at the Dissolution in 1536: the next 250 years saw thirteen families in possession, with extinction of line or failure of male heirs common.Footnote 12
So something like the Spelman project must have been at least at the back of Neale's mind. Corroborative evidence is provided by the framework of Ayton Priory, published the same year as Hierologus. The novel hinges on possession of formerly monastic lands by a gentry figure who becomes persuaded to restore them to (proto-) monastic use. The romantic hero is impelled to the same conclusion by a study of Spelman, and thereby wins the hand of the heroine.Footnote 13 Even more pointed is a lengthy anonymous piece in the August 1843 number of the Christian Remembrancer, a High Church organ: ‘A summer day's pilgrimage, no. 1 – St Alban's Abbey’. Taking off from a visit to the church there, not yet restored and not (until 1877) a cathedral, the author moves discursively from ruminations on (mostly) Norman architecture to the spoliation of English monasteries after the Dissolution. After concluding a roll-call of the names of several dozen houses with a rhetorical outburst – ‘what sad thoughts do these simple names recall! what miserable histories! what distress, poverty, extinction, and it may be crime!’ – he poses a challenge:
We know not a service to the Church more needed than a re-publication of Spelman's ‘History of Sacrilege’ continued to the present time; the ears of England's nobility and gentry must be made to tingle, and this for their own sakes; … the wrath of God is worse than the anger of man, and woe be to us, unless we make atonement and restitution for past sacrilege.Footnote 14
Although the fullest published list of Neale's writings, that in Towle's memoir, ascribes his earliest article in the Remembrancer to 1844 (a piece on the Portugese Church), it seems likely that she overlooked his authorship of what is almost a dry run for the Spelman project. Many of the sentences sound very much like those in the long introductory essay to the Spelman edition.
Neale's attention may also have been newly focused by the publication two years earlier of a new edition of an earlier work of Spelman's, a short book with a long title: De non temerandis ecclesiis: a Tract of the rights and respect due unto Churches, written to a gentleman, who having an appropriate parsonage, imploid [sic] the church to prophane uses, and left the parishioners uncertainly provided of divine service, in a parish neere them adjoyning. This book was probably put together while Spelman was gathering material for his big work on Sacrilege, and certainly during protracted litigation about his purchase of the leases of a couple of long-dissolved minor monastic houses. Its first printing was in 1612, a second, ‘enlarged with an Appendix’, in 1616. Unlike the later History and fate of Sacrilege, this work had a lively career in the seventeenth century. By 1668 it was in its fourth edition; by 1676 in its seventh, a handsome printing by H. Hall for Amos Curteyn at Oxford.
The 1841 edition is a reprint of the 1676 version, issued by the Tractarian publisher John Henry Parker in 1841 with a modest introduction of six pages, signed ‘R. J. S., Exeter College, Oxford, King Charles Martyr [i.e. 30 January] 1841’. The initials are those of Robert Jeffries Spranger, from 1832 to 1841 a Fellow of Exeter. A topical note sounds once in his brief introduction:
The case of the present Impropriators differs somewhat from that of the first spoliators [sc., at the sixteenth-century dissolution of religious houses]; restitution, it may be said, is to be required of the nation, not of individuals; yet no man is compelled to accept things sacred, by purchase, marriage, or inheritance
There is a clear echo of Keble's ‘National Apostasy’ sermon of 1833, precipitated by a government proposal to suppress ten Church of Ireland bishoprics and reallocate their lands and revenues.
Between that sermon and the publication of the Neale-Haskoll version of Spelman's Sacrilege lie the celebrated dozen years which culminated in Newman's defection to Rome in 1845. Neale's name does not appear in the classic account of those years, R. W. Church's The Oxford Movement: twelve years, 1833–1845 (1891). Nor does he receive more than passing mention, as a co-founder of the Cambridge Camden Society, in Owen Chadwick's equally classic The Victorian Church.Footnote 15 To a large extent the two ‘movements,’ summarily termed ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’, have been kept apart historiographically. What makes the Neale–Haskoll Sacrilege so striking is the extent to which its argument, buttressed by the massive documentation presented there, hinges on the same presupposition as underlay Keble's argument about the lands of the Irish Church: the intrinsic sacredness of the Church, and therefore of its possessions. Spelman's rather emotive term ‘Sacrilege’ becomes the enabling figure for a wide-ranging survey of lands formerly possessed by the Church in relation to secular society: above all to the holdings of large landowners, but also to conditions resulting from the growing industrialisation of Britain.Footnote 16
The preface to the new edition of Sacrilege
It seems odd that Neale and Haskoll make no mention of Spranger's edition of the De non temerandis in the editors' preface – all the more so because they there quote verbatim four pages from the ‘prefatory epistle’ supplied by Clement Spelman, Sir Henry's son, to what they call ‘the Oxford edition’ of that work.Footnote 17 Their interest is in the first instance in the textual history of Sacrilege, and the only time that they mention the De non temerandis is to note that Clement Spelman had in his preface ‘made a kind of abstract of the History of Sacrilege, inserting some further particulars, which we shall notice in their place’ (p. viii). The textual history of Sacrilege is indeed complicated: it seems to involve two abortive printed versions, and three or four manuscripts, one of which is lost.Footnote 18 A partial manuscript, apparently in Henry Spelman's hand, was sent to the editors just as they were finishing their work, and they were able to take account of its numerous verbal variations from the 1698 edition.Footnote 19
After laying out their quite extensive re-arrangement of the 1698 text of Sacrilege, the editors remark ingenuously that ‘we have omitted no opportunity that lay open to us of acquiring correct information’, and offer a list of ‘the works to which we are principally indebted’, a list that consists of twenty-nine county histories (two of them Welsh), twenty-three English local histories, and thirteen French local histories, plus the obvious large compendia like Dugdale's Monasticon.Footnote 20 How they obtained access to all of these books is a considerable puzzle. It is doubtful that any library in England would have contained every one of these titles, especially the French histories. Conceivably one or both of the collaborators had taken elaborate notes from libraries in Cambridge while they were still resident there; certainly around 1845 neither man was in a position to spend long hours in major libraries.
The ‘introductory essay’
The main interest of this edition, and the primary rationale for the present study, lies in what is modestly titled an introductory essay but is in fact virtually a monograph (120 pages in length); it is offered as both a gloss on Spelman's work and a kind of continuation of it. It may be assumed that Neale was the primary, perhaps sole, author. The approach, summarised in outline form, is markedly scholastic, the proofs of their ‘thesis’ being laid out under five headings: ‘(I) A priori; (II) De facto, inductively; (III) Statistically; (IV) De facto, deductively; and (V) From the testimony of enemies and friends.’ And that thesis is that
Property, consecrated to God in the service of his Church, has generally, when alienated to secular purposes, brought misfortunes on its possessors; whether by strange accidents, by violent deaths, by loss of wealth, or, and that chiefly, by failure of heirs male; and such property hardly ever continues long in one family.
The detailed argument begins with a review of Sacrilege (in Spelman's sense) in the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 21 It then proceeds, rather ploddingly, into the secular world, supplementing Spelman's passing references with a selection of instances that show how impressive was Neale's fund of learning (and/or just possibly Haskoll's, let it be said once for all). These range from a disquisition on the use of hierosulia in LucianFootnote 22 to a morbid recounting of the fate of the sixteenth-century Japanese ruler Nobunanga, taken from a late seventeenth-century work on Christianity in that country by a French Jesuit.Footnote 23
Then, positing that Sacrilege leaves effects behind it which will injure unborn generations, they launch into an excoriating piece of criticism of contemporary England:
The heathenish, and worse than heathenish state, of our manufacturing towns, of Birmingham and Manchester, and Ashton-under-line [sic] lies in great measure at the door of Henry viii. The cries of the famishing poor of our own day invoke vengeance against the Russells, the Seymours, the Audleys, the Clintons, the Dacres, of that. It is to them that we are indebted, in no small degree, for the moral and physical state of our labouring and manufacturing classes.Footnote 24
The conclusion of this line of argument is, not quite logically, that ‘the punishment of sacrilege may be expected to affect the descendants of the guilty person, as well as the offender himself. As the injury continues centuries after the deed of spoliation is at an end, so, it may be supposed, will the retribution’.
Under the heading of ‘detestable and enormous crimes’ committed in England comes a long series of instances ranging from the sixteenth century to almost the date Neale was writing. The cases of two notable contemporary authors are offered as evidence. After Sir Walter Scott moved to Abbotsford (‘the very name of which testifies to its having been Church property’),
in spite of all his genius, and all his honesty, he is inextricably involved in embarrassment after embarrassment, ending in total ruin … In his generous self-devotion to his creditors, his mind breaks down. His son succeeds in the prime of youth and strength; – and is at once cut off. His second son succeeds and dies also. His daughters fall victim to the same fate. In the next generation, his name is clean put out.
And the family of Lord Byron, possessors of Newstead Abbey, has suffered numerous disasters connected with succession to the title, marked especially by a preponderance of only children. After quoting Byron's own words, that ‘Such a complication of only children all tending to one family is singular enough, and looks like fatality almost’, the editors add sternly, ‘We need not remind the reader of the separation of Mr and Mrs Byron, and of Lord and Lady Byron, nor of the miserable tenor of the poet's afterlife.’Footnote 25
In the same vein, the brief section headed ‘The argument de facto, deductively’ adduces five sensational events of the very recent past. Three are characterised as ‘the most remarkable accidents that have, within the last ten years, occurred in the British Peerage’: the deaths of Lord William Russell, murdered by his valet in 1840; of the earl of Darnley, by unintentional suicide in 1835; and of the earl of Norbury, assassinated, perhaps by one of his Irish tenants, at his house, Durrow Abbey, in 1839. The other two appear in the second edition only: a somewhat obscure reference to ‘the curse of Tinterne’ in connection with ‘the most melancholy death among the conquerors’ at the battle of Mudki (first Anglo-Sikh war) in December 1845; and an allusion to ‘the murder, which, since the publication of our first edition has made by far the deepest impression on England’, that of Isaac Jermy (here called Jeremie) and his son by an aggrieved party in a property dispute; the execution of the murderer, Rush, at Norwich in early 1849 was the last public hanging in England outside London.Footnote 26
The ‘testimony of enemies’ – those who might have been thought to have favoured Sacrilege – is duly noted, the voices of Luther, Calvin and John Knox being reviewed summarily. Far more extensive is the next section, on the ‘testimony of friends.’ Offered as little more than a stringing together of ‘a few passages from English writers, who take the same view of the subject as ourselves’, this is in fact an astonishing trawl of polemical writers from the reign of Henry viii to 1782: Henry Brinklow (‘Roderick Mors’), Thomas Leaver, Archbishop Whitgift, John Hacket, an anonymous tract of 1641, Jeremy Taylor, Peter Heylyn, Ephraim Udall, William Waller, Isaac Basire, Robert South – all writing in the sixteenth or seventeenth century – and a near-contemporary, the much venerated William Jones ‘of Nayland’ (d. 1800), described as ‘a bright and shining light in a dark place … a worthy link in the chain of English Divines who have touched on our subject’. These witnesses all run in the same direction and provide grist for the editors' mill. Commenting on a blunt statement of Udall's (in a sermon of 1642 titled Noli me tangere), ‘Neither let any man think that this will take away the nature of sin from the alienation of Church-lands, that it is done by a national assembly of the states in Parliament’, the editorial gloss is that ‘he remarks very sensibly, – and when we remember the Irish Spoliation Act, we may add very seasonably for ourselves’.Footnote 27
The final section of the introductory essay attempts to confute each of six objections that had been, or might be, raised to the arguments just advanced. The first, that ‘the suppression of the abbeys was not sacrilege’, is dismissed and then, as though worth contesting none the less, disproved by an extremely odd flourishing of statistics. The dismissal is emotionally and rhetorically based, with a long list of things ‘we do not mean to consider’: for example, ‘to contrast the monastery with the union, the lot of the nun with that of the governess or apprentice, the holiness of S. Alban's as it was, with the godlessness of Manchester as it is’. A pseudo-statistical reckoning produces a figure of over £18 m.‘that would have been devoted to God’ in the century after the Dissolution; and, by further extrapolation, the figure is brought up to date: ‘during the last centuries, the church has been defrauded of three hundred millions of pounds’.
Another objection to be met is somewhat more substantial: that of exceptions to the rule that Sacrilege is punished. The first, 1846, edition had specified, with no more than mere listing, four families in which ‘church property’ had continued without notable disaster. This must on reflection have seemed feeble or inadequate, for the 1853 edition has over four pages of additional corroboration.Footnote 28 Particular attention is given to the Russells, about whom it is noted in summary that ‘In ten generations, the eldest son has succeeded his father thrice only’, and that ‘There have been four violent deaths (not on the field of battle), including those of Lord William Russell in 1840, noticed above, and of Lord Henry Russell, killed on ship-board by a block falling on his head, 1842.’ No political allusion is made, but contemporary readers would have been aware that the prime minister from 1846 to 1852, Lord John Russell, was the nephew of those two unfortunates.Footnote 29 His earlier actions, in favouring the appropriation of tithes in Ireland in 1834 and, two years later, in championing the Tithe Act, are likely to have aroused Neale's opposition. We may wonder whether this account of the Russell misfortunes, told with what almost reads like vindictive glee, was added in the second edition in consequence of Lord John's actions in office. In any event, the objection is dismissed, the generalised conclusion being that ‘the crime of sacrilege has been punished on six hundred families out of six hundred and thirty’.
The conclusion to this essay (a separate section) in the 1846 edition included a note stating that ‘We are indebted for some of the thoughts that follow to the Christian Remembrancer [sic] for Aug. 1843 and to Mr. Neale's Ayton Priory.’Footnote 30 Perhaps the reference looked pointlessly out of date by 1853, or maybe Neale's anonymity seemed threatened by the inclusion of his name. In any case, the note was dropped in the later edition; the sunny moral of that highly moralistic novel, that of the family harmony accruing to the virtuous landholder who realises, and then implements, some degree of restoration to ecclesiastical use of ‘Church property’, is at odds with the mode of denunciation, worthy of Dickens, which predominates here:
It is to you that the festering mass of corruption and guilt in our manufacturing districts is owing; to you that draw your thousands from the revenues of the Church, and subscribe your annual guinea to some benevolent society; that have defrauded the Church of hundreds of acres, and are chronicled as prodigies of benevolence if you resign one: – it is to you that, in great measure, the miserable destitution of the manufacturing districts is to be ascribed; that we have ceased to feed Christ's poor, and have begun to cage them; that we have pulled down alms-houses, and erected gaols; that so many souls are perishing, which, unless you kept back the money of the Church, would have entered into Paradise.Footnote 31
The final sentence is as bleak as it is brisk: ‘They that being often reproved, – reproved from Scripture, by history, by natural reason, by the heathens themselves, by examples of all ages, by proof at the present time, [–]still harden their neck, shall doubtless suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.’ Spelman's work, to which this is all meant to be introductory, seems almost unnecessary. But there is more, much more.
Editorial amplification of Spelman's text
The organisational principle of Spelman's work is, the editors note, ‘but one species of argument, that de facto’. His ‘historical argument’, as they also term it, of necessity stopped at the end of the sixteenth century. Three major outbreaks of Sacrilege since his time cried out for treatment: ‘The sale of cathedral lands, and profanation, or destruction of churches during the Great Rebellion’; the suppression of French monasteries during the revolution there; and a similar suppression of monasteries throughout Spain, Portugal and their dominions ‘at the time that the Constitution was forced on their respective governments’.Footnote 32 Given that much of the introductory essay is devoted to what is summed up as the moral argument, ‘our continuation and Appendices, on the contrary, aim at supplying historical details to the grand argument of our author's work’. The range of research required is laid out in (faintly light-hearted) detail: for example, ‘the inquirer … must, at one moment, be deep in the worm-eaten folios of the Germanicae Historiae Scriptores, at the next, skim the flippant pages of the watering-place Guide; … he must copy the epitaph in the country church, and listen to the anecdotes of the country sexton’.Footnote 33
The supplementary information thus gathered is either intercalated into the text or supplied in one of four appendices. While the historical and antiquarian scholarship that had been deployed by Spelman is quite staggering, the learning displayed in the additional notes in the new edition is no less impressive. This is particularly evident in the long chronological survey of ‘Sacrilege among Christians’ which takes up some forty pages. A notable case is when Spelman's anecdote of a sacrilegious noble who, after outrages against monks of Cluny c. 888, ‘was carried away, fearfully crying through the air, with a black horse’, is supplemented immediately by the comparable story of a sacrilegious German who ‘being in his wars in Italy, and his horse falling with him into a pit, perished miserably’, with a reference to the Life of St Wiborata (d. 926) as in the first May volume of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum.Footnote 34
The most obvious area for continuation of Spelman's line of documentation was also a tricky one: what happened to English royalty and peerage since 1603. Spelman's discussion of the descendants and relatives of Henry viii had stopped, tactfully, with Queen Elizabeth, but the nineteenth-century editors continue the recital of ‘the calamities that happened to the crown’ down to the issue of the seven sons of George iii – including the duke of Kent, who ‘died without male issue’ (the more notable fact, that he was the father of Queen Victoria, going unremarked). Relying heavily on T. C. Banks's Dormant and extinct baronage of England (1807–9), they provide details of the failure of issue in families descended from the temporal peers in the Henrician parliament at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. A typical, if rather puzzling, case is that of Hambledon, a manor said to have belonged to the see of Canterbury, for which the summary reckoning is ‘In two hundred and forty-three years, we have seventeen possessors and fourteen families; the estate only twice descending from the father to son.’Footnote 35 Among the possessors listed are Thomas Cromwell, Queen Catharine Parr, Cardinal Pole, Lord Chancellor Christopher Hatton, a South Sea Bubble director, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, and finally the Earl Spencer who died in 1834.
As might be expected, information about former church estates in Sussex (the location of Neale's Sackville College) is very full, both for well-known places and for obscure ones. Into the former category comes Boxgrove Priory, in the possession of the dukes of Richmond, the misfortunes of whose family in the first half of the nineteenth century are detailed with a directness that seems, like the denunciation of the Russells, almost gleeful.Footnote 36
Reception: Nicholas Wiseman's review
Within a few months of the appearance of the 1846 edition a lengthy piece appeared in the Dublin Review.Footnote 37 Though unsigned, it is clearly by one of the Review's co-founders, Nicholas Wiseman, at that time President of Oscott College in Birmingham, a bishop coadjutor and soon (1850) to become archbishop of Westminster. It begins with the opaque statement that ‘We have long been looking out for this republication of Sir H. Spelman's posthumous work, and it appears at a moment which seems to us most propitious.’Footnote 38 For Wiseman the work has confessional value: it ‘will necessarily prove useful’ because it ‘will disgust people more and more with that terrible event in English history, the horrors of which have been gilded by the name of Reformation’.
Wiseman singles out for particular praise the editors' extensive preliminary essay, as aiming ‘to prove in a more systematic form, what Spelman's work aims at doing at once by evidence. It is as the counsel's speech premised to the calling of witnesses’. He then adds a few instances that a Yorkshire correspondent had brought to his attention, and extends Spelman's basic contention to the family of Bonaparte, pointing out the irony that Napoleon himself had been ‘the scourge of God, upon those princes, who had just before set the example of plundering the Church, and dissolving its religious establishments’.
As a concluding touch Wiseman brings up another species of Sacrilege, ‘that committed by violence against persons consecrated to God, because the examples given by the editors all refer to Protestant clergymen, whose priestly character we of course deny’. He offers two examples from recent Irish history – 'during the Irish Rebellion, as it is called’ – both being of (Roman Catholic) priests whose oppressors suffered especially telling deaths. Throughout his piece, there is no indication that Wiseman knew the identities of the two editors; indeed, at one point he refers to ‘the antiquarian, like Mr. Paley or Mr. Neale’ as loathing the ‘profane and sacrilegious destruction of sacred edifices and holy things’. This seems to allude in particular to the activities of the Cambridge Camden Society, of which Neale had been a co-founder (1839) and Frederick Apthorp Paley, a Cambridge classical scholar, an officer.
Beyond Wiseman's lengthy treatment, surprisingly little notice seems to have been taken of this enterprise. Possible reasons include the nature of the work, which on the surface could be regarded as primarily a reprint of a very old book with an uninviting title; and the editors' insistence on anonymity, which precluded identification with Neale's other (signed) publications. In general the year 1846 was not especially auspicious for reviews of a book of this sort: the Guardian was in its infancy, the Church Times had not yet begun, and the British Critic, which had been an important Tractarian organ, had ceased publication three years earlier. The notice in the Christian Remembrancer, the journal in which the fullest review might have been mentioned, is little more than perfunctory.Footnote 39 And the more generally secular journals like the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review and Eclectic Review ignored the work.
The second (1853) edition and beyond
The brief preface to the second edition, dated 17 June 1853, begins by alluding to ‘The length of time, during which the History of Sacrilege has again been out of print’, and speaks of ‘the four years that have elapsed since a new Edition was called for’.Footnote 40 The ‘new facts and fresh illustrations’ that are offered as justifying it – of which there are in fact not many – have been collected by the editors despite their disappointment that ‘so much should remain locked up in the traditions of private families’ because of ‘the fear of shame, or notoriety, or scandal’. Some correspondents have demanded confidentiality or anonymity; in many cases, ‘the result has been, that their communications have been nearly useless’.Footnote 41
This deprecation of anonymity makes it all the more puzzling that the editors' own anonymity was maintained into the second edition. Hesitation about, even fear of, offending powerful families – factors thought to have held up the publication of Spelman's work in the seventeenth century – seem hard to credit as justification for anonymity in the mid-nineteenth. It might have been argued that in 1846 both editors were sufficiently unknown that their work would be likelier to sell if stated to be merely by ‘two priests of the Church of England’.Footnote 42 Even then, the anonymity seems not to have been absolute: the old ‘slip’ catalogue in the Bodleian Library included the editors' names, in square brackets, in the original entry which seems to have been made in 1846.Footnote 43 In any case, obscurity could scarcely have been argued in 1853, by which time's Neale was widely known as an author as well as controversialist. A satisfactory explanation is still to seek.
It is even difficult, perhaps impossible, to ascertain the point at which the names of Neale and Haskoll become widely known. The 1853 edition continued to be reprinted until at least 1864, and the firm of Masters went on publishing books of a generally High Church sort until at least the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 44 On the title page of a curious translation into German by an aristocratic Redemptorist priest, Ludwig Graf Coudenhove, in 1878, the editors are still zwei Geistliche der englischen Staatskirche.Footnote 45 It seems not to have been until 1888 that Neale's role becomes truly public information, in the context of a reprint of the 1846 edition in which Samuel J. Eales, the new ‘editor’, states that ‘It need be no secret now that the “two Priests” to whom this able Introductory Essay is due were the Rev. Prebendary Webb, Vicar of S. Andrew's, Wells Street and the Rev. Dr. Neale, both dear and honoured names.’ Eales's substitution of Webb's name for Haskoll's must have been a guess – Webb was widely known, not least as co-founder with Neale of the Cambridge Camden Society, whereas Haskoll was, as we have seen, not – but is none the less surprising.Footnote 46
Eales's presentation seems not to have been regarded as satisfactory, and a mere seven years later, in 1895, a Cambridge man a full generation younger than Neale, Chares Frere Stopford Warren, produced (again with Eales's publisher Hodges) a so-called fourth edition – the exiguous notes to which begin by straightening out the name of Neale's collaborator.Footnote 47
The chapter on Neale in Geoffrey Rowell's often-cited The vision glorious begins by listing what is described as his four-fold contribution to the Catholic revival of the Church of England: in brief, his work with the Camden Society, his liturgical interests and hymn translations, his study of the history of Eastern Christianity, and his founding of the Society of St Margaret.Footnote 48 There is no mention of the edition of Spelman's Sacrilege. This is typical of the almost complete lack of scholarly attention paid to this work. Despite its anonymity it was in its time not relegated to the bin of total obscurity. That Wiseman should have found the first (1846) edition (or, more accurately, its subject matter) worth such lengthy treatment in his periodical organ; that a second edition was published a mere seven years after the first, this second (1853) edition itself being reprinted for at least a decade; and that the subsequent editions – besides the German translation (1878) – of Eales (1888) and Warren (1895) bring awareness of the enterprise nearly up to the twentieth century: all attest to the work's appeal. This appeal must have been two-fold, antiquarian and topical, both amply provided for by the Neale-Haskoll edition. Spelman's original work had a similar two-fold appeal: at least, it would have had had it been published in the year of its completion, in 1643. Its topicality was much muted by the time that it was finally printed, in 1698, but the antiquarian value remained, if anything enhanced by the passage of time.
Precisely what caused Neale (or the always shadowy Haskoll) to pick the work up and decide to undertake the considerable labour of so expanded a new edition cannot, it seems, be known. In the climate of the late 1830s and early 1840s sensitivity to matters of church property and church restoration was at a high pitch. Given the celebrated ‘beginning’ of the Oxford Movement with a protest against the suppression of bishoprics (and therefore related land) in the Church of Ireland in 1833, and the beginning, almost as conventionally understood, of the movement for the ‘restoration’ of the physical fabric of thousands of Anglican churches with the founding of the Cambridge Camden Society six years later, it is scarcely surprising that Neale should have been attracted to a work which dealt at once with loss of church property and with ‘bare ruin'd choirs’ – the latter viewed through a lens polished with Laudian zeal.
What resulted – the introductory and supplementary material supplied by the ‘two priests of the Church of England’ that amounts to a work as large again as Spelman's – deserves to be better known. To that end, the present article has attempted to introduce this notable piece of nineteenth-century historical writing and to bring to light a previously unexplored aspect of the achievement of one of the most fascinating and many-faceted churchmen of the Victorian era.
