Re-Evaluating John Lingard's History of England

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.