Constance Sherwood: An Autobiography of the Sixteenth Century

Charlotte Yonge summed up LadyGeorgiana Fullerton's career with a certain lack of enthusiasm: "As to literary fame, she may be described as having written one first-rate book and a number fairly above the average."  The "first-rate book" in question is not Constance Sherwood, but Ellen Middleton, a somewhat sensationalist High Church novel that advocates for the power of auricular confession.  (Lady Georgiana converted to Catholicism shortly after Ellen Middleton was published.)  Constance Sherwood (1865), despite a somewhat unnecessarily languorous plot, still qualifies as at least average.    Like Cecilia Mary Caddell's Wild Times and Fanny Taylor's Tyborne, Constance Sherwood traces the sufferings of Catholics under the Elizabethan penal laws.  Constance Sherwood's similiarities to Tyborne in particular  are not all that surprising, given that Taylor had commissioned Constance Sherwood in the first place [1]. Lady Georgiana connects the fictional title character to a number of historical people, ranging from Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel (whose wife is Constance's closest friend) to Elizabeth I to Edmund Campion.  In addition to the novel's historical and didactic purposes, its plot is a female bildungsroman, lightly sprinkled with moments which appear derived from The Heart of Midlothian, Jane Eyre, and even Bleak House. 

Historians of the historical novel often link the genre to the rise of the modern nation-state--both in its moment of origin and in its frequent subject matter.  But Catholic novels set during the age of the penal laws are frequently tragedies of national alienation: their characters try to assert patriotic English identities, only to be thwarted by their own government.   In this view, the Elizabethan settlement constitutes an act of national self-deconstruction, as the government devours the country from within in the name of Protestant conformity.  As Constance tells a man who turns out to be John Geninges, "their religion is made treason by unjust laws, and then punished with the penalties of treason; and they die for no other cause than their faith, by the same token that each of those which have perished on the scaffold had his life offered to him if so he would turn Protestant" (232).  Failing Christian unity, the Catholics call for the government to recognize civic allegiance as an essentially secular act--a distinction the government refuses to acknowledge.  Like other Catholic novelists, Lady Georgiana unravels the much touted link between Protestantism and liberty of conscience: the true "theorists" of liberty of conscience are not Protestants, but disempowered Catholics, for whom such liberty is at most a bandaid to hold together the bleeding wound of a fractured Church.  The very need to articulate such a concept, in other words, derives from the (supposedly temporary) triumph of Protestant heresy. 

While Constance Sherwood's Catholic characters renounce Protestantism, they become disaffected from their Queen and country only against their will.  Constance's future husband, Basil Rookwood, exiles himself from his home after a visit from the Queen turns madly destructive, most spectacularly in the destruction of a much-loved statue of the Virgin Mary; this astounding violation of the laws of hospitality, justified by Basil's recusancy, embodies the government's willingness to violate and profane Catholic subjective interiors as well.  (A Foucauldian critic would probably have a field day with the novel's interest in Protestant mental and physical surveillance, summed up in the apparently omniscient figure of Francis Walsingham.) Later, when Constance prepares to follow Basil into exile, she echoes (as it were) Sir Walter Scott:

...I looked at the soft blue sky and fleecy clouds, urged along by a westerly breeze impregnated with a salt savor; on the emerald green of the fields, the graceful forms of the leafless trees on the opposite hills, on the cattle peacefully resting by the river-side.  I listed to the rustling of the wind amongst the bare branches over mine head, and the bells of a church ringing far off in the valley.  "O England, mine own England, my fair native land--am I to leave thee, never to return?" I cried, speaking aloud, as if to ease my oppressed heart.  Then mine eyes rested on the ruined hospital of the town, the shut-up churches, the profaned sanctuaries, and thought flying beyond the seas to a Catholic land, I exclaimed, "The sparrow shall find herself a house, and the turtle-dove a nest for herself--the altars of the Lord of hosts, my king and my God."  (257)

Constance renders her attachment to "my fair native land" in sensual, aesthetic terms, a pastoral moment pointedly devoid not only of people, but also at first of any visible signs of human habitation.  Even the far-off church is invisible.  The church bells which appear to spark Constance's lamentation, however, are no longer Catholic, and the almost magical appearance of Catholic ruins in the landscape determines Constance's willingness to leave.  Her instinctive possessiveness ("mine own," "my") falls apart in the face of the traces of dispossession.  The link between Catholic tradition's physical manifestation and the English countryside has fatally disintegrated.  Detaching herself, Constance shifts registers: relinquishing "mine own England," she chooses instead the "Catholic land," defined by the  figurative (re)union of nature (Constance as the sparrow or turtle-dove, both familiar from Christian iconography) with the divinely-infused home of the "altars."  Shifting from geography (England) to creed (Catholic), Constance also shifts her allegiance from an earthly queen to a heavenly king. To be in exile, after all, is not to be without a home.

The novel's most notable deviation from narrative norms comes in its relatively muted and conciliatory attitude to Protestantism and its moral effects.  Both Catholic and High Church (or, at least, higher church) novelists agreed with such varied medievalist critics like A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, William Cobbett, and Thomas Carlyle that the Reformation inaugurated a dangerous new age of rampaging individualism, not to mention capitalism; there was no reason to be Protestant except to turn a profit, usually from the literal and figurative lives of one's fellow-citizens.  Social and mental stability dissolved under the all-corroding acid of Protestant "liberty" and its accompaniment, cash.  While Lady Georgiana limns the fallacies of evangelical anti-Catholic sentiment and attacks puirsuivants like the villainous Richard Topcliffe, she also insists that many Protestants aided recusants in times of need and represents some of them, like the spectacularly self-sacrificing Millicent, Lady L'Estrange, as virtual saints. As Kathleen Grant Jaeger notes, the novel evinces an unusual "breadth of sympathy" for its non-Catholic characters [2]. Lady Georgiana reserves her real condemnation for the fanatical and easily-tempted--defined by their uncharitable loathing of their opponents--whose unbalanced psyches swing naturally towards destruction.  Her primary examples are Anne Bellamy, the woman who betrayed Robert Southwell to Topcliffe (Lady Georgiana strongly implies that Topcliffe seduced her, not raped her, suggesting more agency on Anne's part) and Basil Rookwood's rival for Constance's hand, his sub-Bronte-esque and Byronesque brother Hubert.  Hubert conforms in order to receive the Queen's favor, then abruptly returns to Catholicism, but he develops a "virulent hatred of those in power" (274) and is eventually executed for his participation in the Gunpowder Plot.  In a familiar rhetorical strategy, Hubert's story carefully decouples Catholicism from political disloyalty by making violent rebellion emerge from a collapse of true faith--the novel's protagonists repeatedly insist on the need to love, forgive, and pray for one's persecutors--instead of a sign of faith.  Similarly, while Lady Georgiana repeatedly contests Victorian Protestant commonplaces about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, she nevertheless insists in a footnote that the cruelties on both sides resulted from "a blind, violent party spirit, which often acted irrespectively of all control" (279 n. 5) and argues that more thoughtful Huguenots and Catholics were genuinely appalled by the acts of their respective co-religionists.  Fanatical hatred, in other words, is a universal failing, one that can only be surmounted by truly Christian love.   Such love, the novel suggests, emerges in local and domestic action, not just (or not even) in the Court; when, at the end, Constance bids "farewell" to her "pen and ink," promising to pick them up again only for "such ordinary purposes as housewifery and friendship" (274), she quietly turns away from herself and towards a community of loved ones. 

[1] Kathleen Grant Jaeger, "Martyrs or Malignants? Some Nineteenth-Century Portrayals of Elizabethan Catholics," Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 7 (May 2001): 16.41.

[2] Jaeger, 16.49.