The Druids and the Origins of Ancient Virtue

Celtic virtue 9 . ‘A complete history of priestcraft’: The Druids and the origins of ancient virtue he foundations of the cultural purchase of Toland’s intellectual Targuments were laid in a series of personal relationships with powerful men and women. Whether writing for German princes or queens, or for government ministers, or wealthy earls, or provincial gentlemen, Toland was capable of designing writing suitable for his audiences. Sophia and Leibniz enjoyed abstract metaphysical discussion – they got works like Letters to Serena (1704); Eugene and Hohendorf liked a variety of impiety – Toland drafted work on the Gospel of Barnabas, dissertations on Giordano Bruno and the history of the apocrypha. For men like Harley, Collins and Shaftesbury (as well as a list of more minor figures) Toland was able to produce a mixture of learning and prudential political commentary. For Harley he composed a series of printed pamphlets advancing various political schemes as well as more private memorials analysing the options prompted by political circum- stances. It is clear in some cases that Toland was writing what he thought these powerful people would like to hear: the tone of the more personal works for Eugene and Harley, in particular, underscores the individual relationship of respect and service. It is also clear that he used the opportunities of intellectual intimacy to advocate a powerful defence of his central principles. Toland’s working relationships with powerful people took a variety of forms. In the cases of noble and imperial persons like Sophia and Eugene, the politics of international diplomacy and courtly access limited the intimacy of the relationship. His collaboration with the aristocratic Shaftesbury was routine: it was manifest in the concrete form of a series of pamphlets and political commentaries in the late 1690s and early 1700s. While direct written collaboration is not evident in the case of Toland’s connections with Harley, and anxieties about the elusiveness of the minister’s political identity are apparent in the cautious language of his correspondence, it is obvious that Toland saw some point, and advantage, to this relationship. When it became 213 213 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 08:12:25AM via free access MUP/Champion_10_Ch9 213 27/2/03, 10:26 am Subversive learning unmistakable that Harley was undertaking a very different set of policies than those which had cemented their relationship, Toland abandoned all associ- ation with him, and in fact turned to explicit and virulent public criticism. It may be debatable whether Harley saw any further use in his connection with Toland, but it is unequivocal that Toland saw little point in continuing to try to further his own agenda with Harley. Toland’s aspirations were implicitly based, then, on the assumption that his liaison with the premier minister would have some sort of effect on the shape of national policy (in this case specifically in defending and securing the Hanoverian succession). Aspirations, ambitions, influences and convictions are notoriously difficult to define with precision. Throughout his life, Toland was confident that he had something important to say, and that people would listen: he thought he was making a difference. Intellectual conversations in libraries, at after-dinner tables lubricated by fine claret in country retreats, or the more robust sociability of coffee-houses and refined politeness of metropolitan salons, were the venue for his projects. Toland described himself as always with ‘a book in my hand or in my head’, motivated by the desire to be entertaining in ‘private conversation’ and ‘serviceable to publick society’.1 Exploring in detail the intellectual transactions between Toland and Lord Robert Molesworth, one of the commonwealth politicians in his circle, will allow a more reflective appreciation of the function of his learning and ideas. As has already been established, Molesworth was at the heart of the intellectual and political community that Toland exploited in the circulation of his scribal works. A politician of impeccable Whig credentials, Molesworth had made his republican reputation with the publication of his Account of Denmark (1694) that indicted civil tyranny and priestcraft in equal measure. On the margins of ministerial influence in the 1700s although a continuing member of the Irish Privy Council, Molesworth devoted considerable energies to preserving the declining fortunes of his estates in England and Ireland. After the accession of George I, his political kudos as torchbearer of the ‘true Whig’ tradition, projected him back into the turbulence of national and parliamen- tary politics. He was both an Irish Privy Councillor and a commissioner for Trade and Plantations. In 1720, Toland had been employed by Molesworth to produce a polemical pamphlet for the controversy surrounding the Declara- tory Act defending the jurisdictional competence of the Irish legislature.2 Toland was committed to Molesworth’s political reputation. Indeed it was one of Toland’s last political acts to reinforce his support for Molesworth’s parlia- mentary candidature at Westminster by preparing electoral broadsides, representing him as a modern Cato. Closely associated with republican under- takings to reform the Church, the universities and even the constitutional role of the House of Lords, although not part of the inner circle of political 214 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 08:12:25AM via free access MUP/Champion_10_Ch9 214 27/2/03, 10:26 am Celtic virtue managers like Stanhope, Sunderland, Townshend and Walpole, Molesworth attracted considerable political authority. His relationship with the series of successful journals, produced by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, which popularised a commonwealth critique of corruption in Church and State, similarly meant he was identified as a leading opposition figure. The deep concern that Molesworth held for Toland is immediately apparent from the tone of his letters to his dying friend in early 1722, signed off with the phrase ‘your affectionate friend and servant’.3 Toland’s intimacy with Molesworth has often been cited as evidence of the manifestation of an ‘Irish’ identity and affinity.4 Recent historiography has suggested that there was an intimate relationship between Toland’s ethnic origins and the literary and philosophical quality of his polemic. The ambi- guity and equivocation found in Toland’s writings are a ‘symptom of Irish intellectual culture’. Responding to the contradictions and tensions of the rival claims of national identity and political authority, Toland’s subversive writing was a consequence of conflicts within the ‘Irish mind’.5 As we will see Toland’s interest in things ‘Celtic’ was part of an elaborate and learned joke. There is considerable evidence to establish Toland’s connections with Ireland. The evidence of correspondence in the Bodleian (from 1694) between the non-juring scholar, Henry Dodwell (who later suffered some damage to his reputation at the hands of Toland’s scholarly games) and Bishop George Ashe, indicates the obscurity of his origins. Dodwell, perhaps wary of the young Toland’s character, had made inquiry of the Irish bishop about ‘our Countryman’. Ashe had received testimony (which could, he suggested, be authenticated by ‘sufficient vouchers’) indicating that Toland was ‘bastard son to Cornelius Tolan a popish priest of Enishowen near Derry’. Esteemed ‘a very very talkative man’ he noted that he had been ‘bred in Glasgow, [and] has been in Rome and Leyden’. Ashe had passed on a letter from Richard Anderson on the same subject to Dodwell. In this earlier report, culled from conversations with a number of people in Dublin, further details emerged: Toland’s father had been a priest in the parish of Donagh, Toland himself was born in France and ‘speaks French very well now’. Described in the same terms as ‘a black sclender man’ both very angry and very talkative, Toland at this point was depicted as ‘a great searcher after religion and that he said he had tried all sorts and found the Presbyterian Religion to be the best’.6 Later he reflected with some nostalgia about his childhood in the parish of Clonmany in Inishowen, County Donegal in the 1670s.7 Toland was educated as a Gaelic speaker. Although some contemporaries in Oxford in the early 1690s suspected that Toland had been born in France, Toland later sought out confirmation of his Irish lineage and ancestry from Catholic sources.8 Baited by Abbot Tilladet and Bishop Huet ‘upon the account of his pretended illegitimacy’, Toland produced testimonial certification from ‘the Irish Franciscans of Prague’ to 215 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 08:12:25AM via free access MUP/Champion_10_Ch9 215 27/2/03, 10:26 am Subversive learning establish his Irish origins.9 There is little doubt that Toland was of Irish extraction, and that he knew the Celtic languages.10 Toland was proud of his linguistic competence. It was the basis for a profound learning and erudition which he exploited, especially in his relationship with Molesworth, to fashion his intellectual credibility. Accomplished in a variety of Gaelic skills, he displayed not only the ‘native’ capacity to speak Irish, but also the more ‘learned’ and complex idiom of historical orthography that suggests he had received tuition at some point in his education.11 We have already seen that his early reputation in Scotland, Leiden and Oxford was built on these linguistic and philological abilities, even if he was regarded as a man of little religious commitment. One of the important results of this Celtic learning was the composition of a scribal work, which displayed to full effect these skills, specifically for Robert Molesworth – A specimen of a critical history of the Druids. By exploring the themes of this writing, it will be possible to see how the relationship between erudition and polemic functioned in the text, as an instrument both for bonding Toland to his patron by defining a common political understanding, but also providing intellectual entertainment.

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