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Mary and Roman Catholicism in Mid Nineteenth-Century England: The Poetry of Edward Caswall
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In her article on the nineteenth-century Marian revival, Barbara Corrado Pope examines the significance of Mary in the Roman Catholic confrontation with modernity. ‘As nineteenth-century Catholics increasingly saw themselves in a state of siege against the modern world, they turned to those symbols that promised comfort’, she writes. Inevitably the chief symbol was Mary, whom the ‘patriarchal Catholic theology’ of the time held up as embodying the ‘good’ feminine qualities of chastity, humility, and maternal forgiveness. But there is another side to Mary that emerged as even more important and effective in the struggle against what many Catholics perceived as contemporary errors, and this was the militant figure embodied by the Immaculate Conception. The miraculous medal, an icon of Catherine Laboure’s vision of the Virgin treading on a snake, popularized this concept. The crushing of the snake not only had a connection to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; it also symbolized victory over sin, particularly the sins of the modern world. ‘Thus while the outstretched arms of the Immaculate Conception promised mercy to the faithful, the iconography of this most widely distributed of Marian images also projected a militant and defiant message that through Mary the Church would defeat its enemies’.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004
References
1 Pope, Barbara Corrado, ‘Immaculate and Powerful: the Marian revival in the nineteenth century’, in Atkinson, Clarissa W., Buchanan, Constance H., and Miles, Margaret R., eds, Immaculate and Powerful: the Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, Harvard Women’s Studies in Religion Series (Boston, MA, 1985), 173–200 Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 175.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 177.
5 Ibid., 181.
6 Ibid.
7 Caswall had pointed out in his notes for his poem ‘The Easter Ship’, see below.
8 See, e.g., Newman’s ‘Remarks on the Oratorian vocation (1856): rough draft’, in Placid Murray, O. S.J., Newman the Oratorian (Dublin, 1969), 299-313.
9 The original material used here survives unlisted and without call numbers among the Caswall papers in the Birmingham Oratory archives. Some of the notes are therefore unavoidably unspecific in their referencing.
10 Caswall, Edward, A May Pageant and Other Poems (1865)Google Scholar. An earlier version, L’Incoronata, had been published in Birmingham in 1860. A revised version, A Tale of Tintern, was issued separately in London in 1873.
11 Duns Scotus was the leading Franciscan proponent of this belief. Caswall copied from The Rambler of August 1850 (p. 119) a quote titled ‘notices of English Franciscan writers’. It refers to the English Franciscans’ ‘constant defence of [Mary’s] immaculate conception’ and cites an order given in 1632 that after Compline the brethren were always to ‘recite Tota pulchra etc. in honorem Immaculatae Conceptionis’, along with the fact that in 1643 the convent at York was named after the Immaculate Conception.
12 Coincidentally(?), the area of Birmingham immediately to the north of Edgbaston, where the Oratory is located, is called Ladywood.
13 Tintern was founded in 1131 and dedicated to Mary. Cf. Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon anglicanum, 5 (1846), 265, from which Caswall has copied this information.
14 The invisible world and its relation to the visible world was an important theological and poetic theme for Caswall throughout his life. His Sermons on the Seen and Unseen (1846) was the last book he published as an Anglican.
15 Caswall gives ‘p. 870’ but does not identify the book further.
16 The family of Caswall… is said to have come from the county of Glamorgan and settled in the town of Leominster, county Hereford, as early as the 16th century’: Memoirs of the Caswall Family (Privately printed, n.d.), 7.
17 Caswall’s subtitle for the poem, ‘A Tale of Tintern’, reflects the poem’s Wordsworthian roots.
18 In asserting the English Church’s descent from Augustine Caswall rejects the claim that the true English Church - the Protestant Church - descends not from Peter but from a ‘Pauline Church’ that existed in Britain almost since the apostolic era. This view was espoused by Caswall’s great-uncle Bishop Thomas Burgess. S.J. Barnett has shown that claims for the antiquity of the Protestant Church thrived into the eighteenth century: ‘Where was your Church before Luther? Claims for the antiquity of Protestantism examined’, ChH, 68, (1999), 14-41. Burgess not only continued the tradition into the nineteenth century, he also fashioned new bases for this claim which he set forth in a series of tracts. In ‘An address to the Roman Catholics of the United Kingdom on their subjection to a foreign jurisdiction’ he rejected papal supremacy as ‘unfounded and unscriptural’ by arguing that St Peter never enjoyed supremacy over the other apostles: Thomas Burgess, Tracts on the Origin and Independence of the Ancient British Church; or the Supremacy of the Pope; and the Inconsistency of All Foreign Jurisdiction with the British Constitution; and on the Differences between the Churches of England and Rome, 2nd edn, with additions (1815). Without mentioning Burgess by name, Caswall rejected this view in the journal he kept during the period leading up to his conversion to Rome in 1846-7, calling it ‘childish and absurd’: Journal, 204.
19 According to the founder’s charter of endowment, dated 714, St Egwin, third bishop of Worcester and founder of Evesham Abbey, and one of his herdsmen, Eoves, each had a vision of the Virgin Mary on the future site of Evesham Abbey. The Virgin commanded Egwin to build a monastery there in her honour. ‘Evesham Abbey’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al. (New York, 1909), 5:648, col. 1.
20 St Philip Neri and St Augustine of Canterbury both died on 26 May, and St Philip’s feast is celebrated on that date. However, St Augustine is commemorated on 27 May.
21 This had occurred in 1850.
22 In the notes he compiled for ‘A May Pageant’ and ‘An Easter Ship’ Caswall comments that Protestants would ‘be surprized [51c] to find … from how very early a period [the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception] has been, as at present understood, the constant belief of the Church anterior to any dogmatic definition’: Birmingham, Oratory archives, Caswall Files, loose notes in a box of miscellaneous poetry MSS [hereafter ‘Box P’].
23 The Young Churchman’s Book of All Creation (Birmingham Oratory archives).
24 In his notes compiled for ‘An Easter Ship’ Caswall refers to and quotes from the encyclical of proclamation ‘which appeared last year’: Birmingham, Oratory archives, Caswall Files, Box P.
25 The visions of Marina de Escobar (1554-1633) fill many volumes and were written down by her spiritual guide, Ven. Luis de Ponte (1554-1624). They were translated into German in 1861. Caswall mentions a translation by ‘Wordsworth’ of the vision in question.
26 Caswall’s extant material includes his own sketches along with several signed ‘MRG’ - Newman’s friend Maria Gibernc: Birmingham, Oratory archives, Caswall Files, Box P.
27 In The Masque of Mary (1858) it appears between ‘A Masque of Angels’ and ‘St Kenelm’s Well’.
28 Caswall’s notes include source material on the ship as symbol of the Church (see n. 30); he indicates that in this context it is to be interpreted as the Catholic Church in England (Birmingham, Oratory archives, Caswall Files, Box P). Margaret Johnson refers to Tractarian use of the ship ‘as an image of spiritual journeying’: Gerard Mauley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1997), 209.
29 A Hermit plays a key role in Part VII of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. ‘The Minster of Eld’ is another Caswall poem with a hermit as a key person. The mysterious Stranger from the Middle Ages who appears in Faber’s Sights and Tiioughts in Foreign Churches (1842) is probably a version of this personage.
30 Perrone, Giovanni, Praelectiones iheologicae, 2nd edn, 9 vols (Rome, 1840-4), 9: 316 Google Scholar.
31 Among Caswall’s material for ‘An Easter Ship’ is the original masthead, cut from the actual newspaper. ‘A singular homage this, paid by a maritime port of Protestant but once Catholic Scotland to her who is emphatically named the Star of the Sea!’ is his comment in his prose explanatory notes originally intended to accompany the poem: Birmingham, Oratory archives, Caswall Files, Box P.