Cadoc Leighton John Milner, history and Ultramontanism Frederick Husenbeth began his 1862 biography of John Milner (1752- 1826) by setting out the bishop's claims to historical attention. He fixed chiefly on his role in the politics of Catholic Emancipation, casting him in the role of a Moses, who, having led the English Catholics through their long journey towards their inheritance, expired within sight of it.1 This adulatory assessment of Milner still stands to the extent that a claim that the age of Milner succeeded that of Challoner in English Catholic history would probably still go uncontested,2 and that is due, in large measure, to his involvement in the Catholic politics of the age. It is an error to accord primacy to matters of politics in discussing Milner, one that he himself would have been anxious to correct. Still, his political role was important; for he was outstanding among English Catholics in his favourable disposition towards the character the Emancipation campaign acquired in Ireland, before and under O'Connell. It was thus that he was able to contribute to that Irish campaign - the one which mattered. His achievement, in other words, was to bring English Catholics, with much difficulty, to the Irish banner. Husenbetlťs typology, one might remark, needs revision. The alter- native offered elsewhere in his work, recording Milner' s appellation as an 'English Athanasius',3 is better: At home, among English Catholics, he was liable to take on the appearance of a solus contra mundum in the attitude he manifested to Emancipation. Such a measure, he thought, was indeed to be welcomed, chiefly as a declaration that the Anglican state embraced an alliance with Catholic Europe against the menace of the Revolution. This was the view he manifested in his discussion of the dif- ficulty his sovereign encountered in attempting to reconcile approbation of the measure with his coronation oath: changed circumstances, that the threat now came not 'from the side of Popery, ... [but] from the opposite quarter of Jacobinism', changed the obligation of the oath.4 Then again, 1 F. C. Husenbeth, The life of ... John Milner, D.D., bishop of Castabala... (Dublin, 1862), ppi- 4. 2 Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), p. 36. 3 This frequently used approbation was perhaps first suggested by Milner himself, who declared that in opposing Enlightenment christological heterodoxy he aspired to trace 'the steps, at an humble distance, of the great Athanasius'. John Milner, Letters to a prebendary ... with remarks on the opposition of Hoadlyism to the doctrines of the Church of England (2nd ed., Winchester, 1801), p. 505. 4 [John Milner], The case of conscience solved: or, Catholic Emancipation proved to be compatible with the coronation oath... (London, 1801), pp 5-35. See especially p. 29. 346 John Milner, history and Ultramontanism would not an increase in the legal and social status of Catholics assist in securing the interests of their Church and advancing their religion? Yet Milner more often saw the passage of Emancipation as a testing at Meribah than as a triumphant crossing of the Jordan. He saw very great dangers and most of his activity was concerned with averting them, activity which often appeared to parts of the English Catholic body as an undermining and an obstruction of their efforts.5 Milner, however, was simply acting on the Catholic principle, most clearly enunciated by the Counter- Reformation papacy, that, in politics as in all conduct, matters relating to faith must be accorded precedence over all others. The achievement of Emancipation would be vitiated if this principle were not adhered to and Catholics succumbed to the temptation of using their victory to pursue their temporal advantage. ... by the Catholic cause, many of its advocates, now-a-days, under- stand not the safety and prosperity of the Catholic religion itself, as our forefathers understood it, but the exemption of its professors from certain civil disadvantages under which they labour: and to obtain this, too many of them seem to consider that the end justi- fies the means...6 The final phrase condemned those in England, notably adherents of the Cisalpine party, whom he perceived to be sacrificing principle to advan- tage, by surrendering to the British state such influence over the Catholic Church in its territories, that its 'jurisdiction, in this period of boasted Catholic Emancipation, is in great danger of being overwhelmed../7 Since adherence to the Catholic faith pre-eminently consisted in admitting 'that living speaking tribunal in the pastors of the universal church',8 a matter of jurisdiction clearly pertained to faith. The dispute about government involvement in ecclesiastical appoint- ments - it came to be designated somewhat inaccurately as the 'Veto Controversy'9 - had flared. Irish Catholics, in Ireland and England, and the traditional lay representatives of the English Catholic body diverged 5 Narratives of Milner's political activity can be read in the works of Bernard Ward. See The dawn of the Catholic revival in England 1781-1803 (2 vols, reprint, Farnborough, Hants., 1969, of orig. ed., London, 1909) and The eve of Catholic Emancipation... (3 vols, reprint, Farnborough, Hants., 1970, of orig. ed., London, 1911). 6 J[ohn] M[ilner], Supplementary memoirs of English Catholics, addressed to Charles Butler... (London, 1820), p. 1. 7 John [Milner], 'A pastoral charge addressed to the Catholic clergy of the Midland District', being pt. 2 of a privately printed ad clerum of 1813 (Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives [hereafter B.A.A.], Milner Papers, R 212, p. 1). 8 Milner, Letters to a prebendary, p. 411. 9 Fergus O'Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O'Connell and the birth of Irish democracy 1820-1830 (Dublin, 1985), pp 3-4. 347 Archivium Hibernicum in their responses to the proposals being made in the years after 180 with Milner stoutly representing the Irish view. He thought it desirab in 1811 to explain to the faithful of his own charge, more fully than had hitherto done, the extent of the threat he perceived. Adapting to purposes the arguments that had been developed in Ireland,10 he asser that the measure then proposed, ostensibly a very limited one, mere to allay Protestant anxieties, would lead to 'an efficient control over t appointment of our bishops and officiating priests, nominally in the crown, but effectively in the established clergy'. This was a means o advancing 'a settled plan ... formed by statesmen, the most eminent for their zeal to effect Catholic Emancipation'. This plan was 'to introd a sort of reformation into the Catholic Church'. In this design they h found accomplices in the Cisalpine movement.11 The precise content Milner's fears is revealed in his reference to the use to be made of 'the established clergy', a group which aroused less anxiety among Irish pur- veyors of this argument. He certainly did not view the whole body of the Anglican clergy with hostility. His stance was revealed in the course of his Letters to a Prebendary , where he had entered gleefully, fiercely and effectively into the heart of Anglican domestic quarrelling. He depicted that part of the establishment's clergy which had received an infusion of Enlightenment thought, its Low Churchmen,12 as apostates, intellec- tually and morally corrupted. He traced their views to the figure at the centre of the Bangorian Controversy of the early eighteenth century, Bishop Benjamin Hoadly - appropriately, in view of the regard in which this prelate was held by his immediate antagonists in controversy - and denounced his opinions as a denial of divine authority that could rightly be stigmatized as democratic. Such noxious thought contrasted with that of faithful Catholics, whose loyalty to the monarchy it was the purpose of 10 C. D. A. Leighton, 'Gallicanism and the veto controversy: church, state and Catholic community in early nineteenth-century Ireland' in R. V. Comerford et al. (eds), Religion, conflict and coexistence in Ireland: essays presented to Monsignor Patrick J. Corish (Dublin, 1990), pp 135-58, at pp 147-50. 11 [John] Milner, Instructions addressed to the Catholics of the Midland counties of England, on the state and dangers of their religion (Wolverhampton, 1811) pp 11-15. The work was reprinted by Richard Coyne in Dublin. Coyne's title declared it to be addressed to 'the Catholics of the British Empire'. 12 The term 'Low Church' is used here in conformity Peter Nockles observation that, before the rise of the Tractarians, it 'was confined to the Latitudinarian school associated with Benjamin Hoadly and Francis Blackburne'. Those Anglicans whom Milner was apt to identify as commendable (and spoken of in this study as High Churchmen) were pre-eminently those whose views might have led them to oppose Low Churchmanship thus described, though with an exclusion of Evangelicals, whom some might, obviously often inaccurately, label as 'Calvinisť or even 'Puritan'. Milner's classification of Anglican parties might thus be said to anticipate Tractarianism's. Nockles offers a general discussion of Anglican party nomenclature in Milner's period and after in his The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge, 1994), pp 25-43. 348 John Milner, history and Ultramontanism the work as a whole, ostensibly, to vindicate.13 The probable involvement in Catholic affairs of these clerics, and that of at least equally corrupted politi- cians, threatened not merely to damage the external order of the Catholic Church, but to produce a schism, like that which followed the partial acceptance of France's Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Among those who accommodated themselves to the wishes of the state, there would be a direct subversion of Catholic belief, while others would face persecution.