John Lingard: The historian as apologist

The account of Lingard's work which is ambitious to be more than a chronicle of his various publications must address large questions about the influence a historian's beliefs and prejudices may have upon his choice of subject for research, his general structuring of the narrative, and his peculiar emphases on events and persons. A review of Lingard's historical writing from the Anglo-Saxon Church of 1806 to the last volume of the last edition of his History of England in 1849, presents a deal of evidence for more than one motive influencing his enterprise, and for several shifts of balance among these motives. It would certainly be an inadequate reading of his work from which it could be concluded either that Lingard himself remained content with the quite crude propaganda for Roman catholic tenets exhibited in his early pamphlet publications, or that he ever surrendered his first intent to demonstrate that Roman Catholics could be trusted with a larger share in the national life than they enjoyed in late Georgian England. His apologetic mode changed during his career and there is a real interest in observing how it changed as he found greater opportunity to express himself. Through an examination of related narratives in Lingard's writing, particularly those in which he can be shown to have purposely engaged in some significant re writing, and exemplarily those in which he deals with the Christianity of the Anglo Saxons and the disputants of the Reformation in England, an attempt is here made to show what inner consistency there is in his work. A consistency, not of devotion to the common aspirations of any church or sect among Christians, but of a gradually expressed personal apologetic for a way of life that should offer Lingard the scope he desired for his talents.