And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

i.

We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole.  Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, was in exile as a result of his refusal to accept Henry’s divorce and remarriage, and the attendant break with Rome.

After becoming one of the first prebendaries of Westminster (an odd Cathedral, even by Anglican standards, having no bishop), Simon Haynes ended his career assisting in the persecution of suspected anabaptists and helping to draft the first English liturgy.

(And I shall now leave off ransacking Wikipedia quite so brazenly.  I feel no compunction about this since the Wikipedia entry on Haynes is basically paraphrasing his entry in the 1885-1900 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography.)

Haynes was not just a fellow traveller.  He was a passionately committed Evangelical reformer.  A letter he wrote to a member of Parliament survives (in John Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials) in which he criticises the decisions made concerning the so-called ‘Act of Six Articles’ of 1539.

In an attempt to foster uniformity in the nascent new English church – i.e. to impose as much conservatism as possible – Henry piloted decisions through Parliament, Lords, and convocations, which represented ideological defeats for the evangelical reforming party, essentially preserving core tenets of Roman Catholicism.  (Henry, despite his politically necessary break with Rome, remained a religious conservative, i.e. an orthodox Catholic in his theology and ritual.)  In a decidedly counter-revolutionary step, the Six Articles preserved the principles of the real presence of Christ in the mass (transubstantiation), chastity and celibacy for priests, private votive masses, etc.  Haynes declares these tenets without foundation in scripture; the declaration that they are true jure divino (by divine right or authority) is thus untenable.  Haynes observes tartly that if declaring things correct jure divino without scriptural authority is acceptable then there are no theological grounds to dispute, say, the claims of “the bishop of Rome” to primacy over kings.

Haynes may not have liked the Six Articles (he was not alone; bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton resigned their sees in protest) but for Haynes the principle of royal authority was paramount.  When the evangelical preacher, parson, and courtier Edward Crome (to whom we shall have cause to return in later essays) responded to the Six Articles with fiery public sermons attacking the mass and transubstantiation, and was (like Latimer and Shaxton) arrested for heresy as a result, Haynes intervened and persuaded him to recant – “chiefly on the grounds that the king had ordered Crome to do so”, as Professor Ryrie puts it.

Even so, Ryrie writes that Haynes was part of a wing of early English Protestant clergy who partially resurrected a version of the old Lollard demands for using church money to found new educational establishments.  He

proposed an ambitious set of reforms to his cathedral in the late 1530s. Had they been implemented, they would have seen schools for a hundred children established, twenty-four students supported at the universities and a salaried lectureship in theology endowed.

Haynes was one of those who, in Professor Ryrie’s words, envisaged the English Reformation as the transformation of the country into one big university.   The role of the church would be to foster the growth of the new and rising – and piously moral – educated middle class.

So what is M.R. James getting at by using the name Haynes?

Firstly, there is simply the invocation.  The more I look at James’ work, the more I see that he uses names as almost magical signifiers, the purpose of which is to invoke the spirits and spectres of history.  Names are often magical things in James’ stories, and words in general – particularly when in schoolboy Latin – even oftener.  This concentration upon Latin, and the translation of Latin into English is a recurrent tick in James’ stories.  It bespeaks not only his own lifelong immersion in the public schoolboy mindset but also a feeling of the continued haunting of the post-Reformation world by the Catholic past.  The presence of Latin would be enough to imply this by itself, but it usually pops up in explicit connection with the religious institutions of the medieval epoch.  But this is a subject for a later essay.

The name ‘Haynes’ does not only evoke the Reformation, but also some specific modes of it, as we have seen.  Namely: the Cambridge connection, evangelicalism, radical reformism within the limits of submission to royal authority.

Cambridge would be the model for that ‘society as big university’ model the eyes of many of the early evangelical reformers.

As Ryrie says,

the leadership of the evangelical movement was dominated so heavily by Cambridge men. … Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton, Edward Foxe, Thomas Goodricke, John Bird, Robert Holgate and Henry Holbeach were all Cambridge men.

Much more so than Oxford, despite Oxford’s undoubted contributions.

The domination of English evangelicalism by Cambridge men in the last years of Henry’s reign was matched by the enormous disparity in the levels of support for reform within the two universities. That Cambridge had a reputation as the more evangelically inclined institution has never been in doubt.

James goes to great lengths to put his fictional Haynes into the context of Cambridge.  He thereby associates his Haynes not only with historical Simon Haynes and his milieu, but also with himself.  James was a Cambridge man, obviously, as was his father.

ii.

It is a little surprising to me that Victor Sage, in his overall very fine book Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, says of M.R. James that “[t]here is no taint of evangelicalism about his beliefs”.  At the very least, this seems to require the caveat that James’ father, the Reverent Herbert James, Rector of Great Livermere, was an evangelical episcopalian.  Herbert James was the friend and one-time ‘examining chaplain’ to J.C. Ryle, the evangelical clergyman, critic of ritualism, influential writer on faith, and later Bishop of Liverpool.  Sage compounds his puzzling statement by saying that James’ “High-church background accounts for a strain of anti-Puritanism”.

In his Introduction to the Oxford World Classics volume Casting the Runes, and other Ghost Stories, Michael Cox writes that James and his siblings

were brought up in what Sydney James [MRJ’s eldest brother, later Archdeacon of Dudley] called a ‘devotional’ atmosphere, which meant morning and evening prayers, a daily psalm and hymns, Bible study, and above all a respect for the ideals of Christian living.  Yet it was not an oppressive regime: though he was strong for pastoral labour and scriptural authority, the rector was no Theobald Pontifex…

(Theobald Pontifex is the mean and tyrannical clergyman father of Ernest Pontifex in Samuel Butler’s savage satire of the Victorian bourgeois family The Way of all Flesh.)

Herbert James may have been no extremist, but the above certainly sounds like an evangelical Anglican attitude.

In his biography, Montague Rhodes James, Richard William Pfaff recounts parental letters sent to James the Cambridge undergraduate in which Rev. Herbert tells his son how deeply he longs to see him “coming out more and more for Christ, and taking your place as a rallying point for others” and exhorts him to be more punctilious in observing the sabbath.

Pfaff writes:

Herbert urges his son to go to Holy Trinity Church – Simeon’s church, and thereby the shrine of Cambridge Evangelicalism – to hear Handley Moule preach…

Handley Moule was an evangelical churchman, theologian, and poet, who became Bishop of Durham.  He was one of the members of the Higher Life Movement or Keswick Movement or Deeper Christian Life Movement.  This was a conservative evangelical Anglican movement which originated in the mid 1800s – possibly as a reaction to the very crises of Anglicanism we discussed last time – and which espoused the need for a second experience of God after the initial conversion experience, something referred to as ‘entire sanctification’.  (This is similar in some ways but also distinct from ideas within Methodism.)

The ideas of this movement have been enormously influential within Protestantism.  Billy Graham wrote that he was influenced by the inaugural Keswick Convention, at which Handley Moule was a speaker.

Rev. Herbert James writes approvingly of Handley Moule’s theology to his son when urging him to go and hear him speak, though – as Pfaff writes – there is no evidence that James took up his father’s suggestion.  Nor is there any evidence that James worried too much about reducing his attendance at Sunday dining out with friends.  Pfaff demonstrates James’ “development away from the Evangelical tradition of his family” by adducing his apparent approval of a passage in the first letter of Peter in which the resurrected Christ is said to have “preached to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:18-19).  According to Pfaff, James remarks contemporaneously that

Dante had been too hard on worthy pagans such as Plato and Tacitus in denying them even the eventual hope of paradise, and speaks harshly of what he takes to be the views of Calvin and Augustine on the souls of unbaptised infants.

Charles Simeon, also mentioned above, was “[t]he most influential leader of Anglican Evangelicalism” of his time, according to Mark Chapman in Anglicanism – A Very Short Introduction.

Pfaff writes of Rev. Herbert that, as a student

[a]t King’s [Cambridge] he would have found the Evangelical influence, under which he had grown up, still strong.  Charles Simeon, himself of Eton and King’s, has [sic] died in 1835, but his impact on Cambridge remained large.

“Simeon’s preaching”, says Chapman,

shaped a couple of generations of Cambridge undergraduates, and his ability to channel funds to the Evangelical cause affected even the remotest part of the country. The Simeon Trust, formed with money left by his brother, was the first of the ecclesiastical party trusts: by the time of his death, there were 42 livings under its control, including important churches like Bath Abbey, Cheltenham, and Derby. Together with several members of the Clapham Sect, Simeon was also instrumental in establishing the Church Missionary Society in 1799…

A little digression into the Clapham Sect may be instructive.

The Clapham Sect was founded in the 18th century by evangelical ministers Henry Venn and his son John Venn.  It was so-named owing to the fact that John was Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Clapham, when the circle of likeminded churchmen and other prominent men formed.  One of the most important members of the sect was William Wilberforce MP.  This gives an instant flavour of evangelicalism at this time.  It was activist, reformist, moralistic, and philanthropic.  Its adherents championed causes such as the abolition of the slave trade, reform of factory conditions, education for the children of the poor, etc.  It was not, however, in any sense, a radical popular movement.  The bluestocking writer Hannah More was associated with the Sect, and while she opposed slavery and called for reforms of the penal and factory systems, she also distributed morally improving pamphlets she had written specifically to counter the effect of Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.

As Professor Alan W. Smith writes in The Established Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850:

There is no question of the Evangelical revival which took place within the ranks of the Established Church at the time of the Methodist Secession being in any sense a movement of popular religion. Even more than Methodism it should be characterised as religion not of the poor, but for the poor.  Indeed if we look at Wilberforce, for example, through the eyes of William Cobbett, one may see in his work a major factor in the increasing trend towards the alienation of the masses from the State Church. To this extent the historian may note the Evangelicals as a moulding force in the development of popular religious attitudes. To the student of religion, the interest of the problem is rather different. He would prefer to consider the extent to which the movement was a genuinely disinterested response to the religious challenge of the age (taken at its face value) and how far a rationalisation of a purely socio-political policy.  To which challenge was Wilberforce really sensitive? The call to save souls in peril or the fear of the consequences of the masses succumbing to Jacobinism? It is true that Wilberforce’s conversion and the King’s Proclamation against vice, etc., preceded the revolution but only after the revolution did the implementation of ‘Proclamation’ policies become socially significant. He was certainly willing enough to stress the purely pragmatic aspects of his theological convictions.  Cobbett put the matter succinctly. The mission of the Saints, he said, was, ‘to teach the people to starve without making a noise’, and ‘keeping the poor from cutting the throats of the rich’.

Smith goes on to say:

Time and time again the question of class intrudes into any discussion of the aims and methods of the Evangelicals. The point seemed obvious to Cobbett and in 1802 Sydney Smith had also seized upon it, suggesting that Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice should properly have as an addition to its name the words ‘among persons with less than £500 a year’.

There was no necessary political alignment among these evangelicals.  They included independents (like Wilberforce) and parliamentary ‘radicals’ like William Smith MP.

A later reforming Evangelical, an MP in the Tory interest, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, is quoted on factory conditions by Marx in Capital, Vol.1.  Remember the quote last time from Marx on the Tory (but Free Trade leaning) PM Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws?  Well elsewhere in Vol.1 Marx writes…

On the one hand, it was to the interest of the middle-class agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie foamed with sullen rage at the denunciations of the factory system by the landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy with the woes of the factory operatives, of those utterly corrupt, heartless, and genteel loafers, and at their “diplomatic zeal” for factory legislation. It is an old English proverb that “when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own,” and, in fact, the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two fractions of the ruling class about the question, which of the two exploited the labourers the more shamefully, was on each hand the midwife of the truth. Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was commander-in-chief in the aristocratic, philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was, therefore, in 1845, a favourite subject in the revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the condition of the agricultural labourers. This journal, then the most important Liberal organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, who did not content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published the names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The following list gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blanford, Wimbourne, and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes and of the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that, just like Bankes, this “low church pope,” this head of English pietists, pockets a great part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of house-rent…

This gets right to the heart of it.

We looked, last time, at the perennial High Church / Tory alliance.  The 18^th-19^th century Evangelicals, as reformists and nonconformists, descendants (via the 18^th century religious revival) of the reforming evangelicals of the earliest days of the English Reformation, like Simon Haynes, were definitely low church, being spawn of the ideological innovations and fragmentations of the Protestant Reformation.  Even so, a Tory peer could be one of them.  From the standpoint of landed property and rentier capitalism, he could afford to take a stern moralistic view of the depredations of the factory system.  Meanwhile the proto-liberal Whigs were actually representatives of the new industrial bourgeoisie.  Their agenda was so-called Free Trade ideology.  The question was couched in terms of high, even religious morality, but was actually one of class interest.  The ‘low church popes’ are furiously denouncing the exploitation of child labour in the factories while creaming off the profits of rent on land they own – in other words, we are simply watching the process of surplus value being distributed across different sections of the ruling class, and listening to them squabble over their respective shares.

Back to Professor Smith:

What then was the Evangelical policy towards the common man and his religious needs? Firstly, more churches with cheap or free accommodation and by a Church Building Act of 1818 a million pounds was voted by Parliament for this purpose. In addition the Evangelicals wanted more clergy, more prosecutions, more gratitude and above all, more working men, remodelled as Hannah More’s wayward Robert Reeves was, on the pattern of Philip’s eunuch [i.e. subject to religious conversion].  What did Wilberforce achieve? Whatever he failed to do for the common man he certainly did something to the middle and upper classes. ‘An earnestness, hitherto the monopoly of the dissenting groups outside the mainstream of English life, invaded governing circles and the Church of England’. The Annual Register of 1798 had noted an outward and visible sign of this new spirit. ‘It was a wonder to the lower orders … to see the avenues of the churches filled with carriages.’ There is little doubt that the immediate motivation of this new religiosity was fear of the tumbril…

So while the context for the rise of Evangelical Anglicanism is the general religious revival of the 18^th century, this is itself a product of class conflict and revolution.  This era produced more radical versions of English religion.  Evangelical Anglicanism was one version of it that formed among the middle echelons of the ruling classes and its parasites.  This variant subsequently managed – via the appeal of limited and moralistic reforming zeal – to spread through the middle layers, imbuing Victorian petty bourgeois English life with a spirit of pious and high-minded moralistic virtue which never showed any danger of metastasising into radicalism.

This is the very milieu in which M.R. James was raised.

iii.

In ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, the Reverend Dr John Benwell Haynes’ obituary writer informs us that Haynes’ sermons were “ever conformable to the principles of the religion and Church which he adorned” and, in a phrase that must seem odd or even ridiculous to most readers now, praises them as “without the least trace of enthusiasm”.

It is necessary to understand what is meant here by “enthusiasm”.  In the historical context, it refers to inspired forms of faith featuring visions, revelations, socially eccentric convictions, or rowdy public events like revivals.  In this sense, it is a pejorative, meaning something like “fanaticism” or “zealotry” in religion or politics.  For a while, especially after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 (i.e. the deposition of the Catholic James II and the subsequent ‘Protestant Settlement’ under William of Orange), calling someone an “enthusiast” was a serious insult with a tinge of possible political repression implied.  It was an imputation of irrational and socially destabilising radicalism.  By this point, ‘enthusiasm’ of this type was blamed for the Civil War.  (By an irony of history, in recognising that the Civil War was also a revolution, this view is closer to the truth than most present-day historiography of what are now called the ‘British Civil Wars’ or the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’.)  The term ‘enthusiasts’ was often applied to Nonconformist Protestants such as the Methodists, and inherently implied that such people were dangerous.

Even at the very start of the English Reformation, the establishment that was initiating it was at pains to try to control the radicalism that lurked as a destabilising possibility within the Protestant movement, which had after all been revolutionary in many parts of Europe, such as in ‘Anabaptist Munster’.  Remember how even a zealous evangelical reformer like Simon Haynes was later involved in the repression of (probably imaginary) anabaptist incursions into England.

Professor Alec Ryrie again, this time from his book The English Reformation:

In 1540 Archbishop Cranmer had written a preface to the regime’s official Bible which described two parallel dangers for England’s incipient Reformation: that foot-­dragging papists would hold it back; and that overeager zealots would race too far ahead and lose their way. Keeping the country together, preferably in lockstep, was his priority. The same principle informed the Book of Common Prayer, a text suffused with talk of national unity, spurring laggards and bridling enthusiasts.

(My italics.)

Though Cranmer was an ideologically daring reformer (which came out in his revised version of the Book of Common Prayer during the high days of Protestant reform under Edward VI) he was primarily concerned with social stability under royal authority.  The preface that Professor Ryrie describes above came only a year after the Six Articles, with their backsliding conservatism, and the repression of those reformers who criticised them.

Lumping the Quakers, the Anabaptists, and the Levellers under the same term, the Scottish Tory philosopher David Hume (1711-76) wrote (around 1750) that “enthusiasm produces the most cruel disorders in human society”, at least to start with, though he did add that “superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it” because “superstition groans under the dominion of priests, and enthusiasm is destructive of all ecclesiastical power”.

[E]nthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty; as superstition, on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery. We learn from ENGLISH history, that, during the civil wars, the independents and deists, though the most opposite in their religious principles; yet were united in their political ones, and were alike passionate for a commonwealth. And since the origin of whig and tory, the leaders of the whigs have either been deists or profest latitudinarians in their principles; that is, friends to toleration, and indifferent to any particular sect of Christians: While the sectaries, who have all a strong tincture of enthusiasm, have always, without exception, concurred with that party, in defence of civil liberty. The resemblance in their superstitions long united the high-church tories, and the Roman catholics, in support of prerogative and kingly power; though experience of the tolerating spirit of the whigs seems of late to have reconciled the catholics to that party.

Where Hume is capable of taking something of a wider view, the obituary writer in the story is a more limited soul.  James tells us that, after relating the horrible death of Haynes, his obituarist

goes on to reflect upon the probability that the writings of Mr Shelley, Lord Byron, and M. Voltaire may have been instrumental in bringing about the disaster, and concludes by hoping, somewhat vaguely, that this event may ‘operate as an example to the rising generation’

(This, by the way, is a lovely example of James’ capacity for wry humour.  A conservative he may have been, but he had an eagle eye for lazy-minded reactionary folderol.)

Even as he engages in the reactionary political sectarianism above, the obituary writer praises Haynes’ sermons as “[f]ree from sectarian violence”.

Haynes is thus – at least in the view that James is depicting – apolitical.  For the obituary writer, anything other than conformity with a kind of dignified and formalistic efficiency would constitute a political presence or content or intrusion – and a bad one.  Haynes’ politics is pure establishment, at least as far as the establishment can see – and clearly this view is not entirely wrong.

And yet, as we have seen, James is invoking the shade of Simon Haynes, the evangelical reformer.  If Haynes is an echo of the Cambridge evangelicals of the earliest English Reformation then he comes with a built-in set of ambiguities.  He represents a low church which is inspired with a reforming and educative zeal, a patronising beneficent attitude to the poor and the common people.  He contains a strict but sentimental moralism which is itself contained within material interests and resultant political allegiances of a mixed kind.  He implies revolutionary change subject and obedient to the authority which benefits from it.  This all fits extremely well.

The entire issue of the poor, the working common people, and education, is suggested by the semi-literate blackmail letter to Haynes from Jane Lee, the dismissed serving maid.  The letter shows her lack of education, but also her attainment of a degree of education.  For all her errors of grammar and spelling, she does write, and she makes her meaning perfectly clear without ever being explicit.  (Though, as we shall see, the letter contains and suggests many fascinating ambiguities.)  Partly this is because the letter is actually written by the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and he needs the letter to make narrative sense.  (It is a little reminiscent of the famous letters ‘from’ Jack the Ripper to the tabloid newspapers in 1888.  Almost certainly written by journalists, the most famous of these pose as the work of an ill-educated member of the working class by incorporating many a contrived error of grammar and spelling, yet display their true origins by being very clear and full of ‘amusing’ turns of phrase.)  Even so, if we take the text at face value, we learn from the letter that Jane is a beneficiary of just the kind of paternalistic reform championed by the evangelicals from the start of the Reformation.  Haynes goes on to pay Jane the blackmail money she demands.  If this is enforced charity, that only goes to invoke the idea of charity towards the poor in order to show the hypocrisy of those who advocate it, the decay of such ideals within evangelicalism as it has become more and more enshrined, and the basis of evangelical reformism in a fear of the potential vengeful power of the lower orders.

Paradoxically, the murder of Pulteney itself surely qualifies as revolutionary change.  It is a coup d’etat.  A change of government based upon the execution of an individual near the apex of the power structure, but leaving the power structure itself materially intact.  This act invokes the entire Reformation and all the subsequent centuries of struggle over religious and state hegemony in England.  The entire struggle has been one over retention and inheritance of power, of legal and divine right, played out at the level of religious morality.

First there was the ‘Great Matter’ of Henry VIII.  The question of whether the English Church would split from Rome and begin its lone journey was based on the arguments, legal and religious, over Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and thus the legitimacy of their daughter Mary.  The whole matter arose from Henry’s desire for a son who would inherit his throne, and his anxiety over this arose from the fact that his own claim rested upon his father’s dubious lineal claims backed up by force of conquest.  Surrounded by people who had at least as good a claim as he did, Henry feared the relapse of the country upon his death into the ‘Wars of the Roses’, themselves arising from the usurpation of the crown by Henry IV from Richard II (or Richard’s abdication in favour of Henry IV, depending upon how one looked at it), and based ideologically upon squabbles over the legalities of inheritance by differing lines of descent.  The same pattern repeats itself through the entire history of the Church of England.  The Protestant government of Edward VI falls after his youthful death and English Protestantism relies upon the wobbly claim of Jane Grey, promptly ejected from power by Mary I, who tries to restore a version of the old Catholic religion.  Mary dies and Elizabeth ascends, and restores Protestantism.  She has no heir and so the crown goes to James Stewart of Scotland, who passes his views on royal autocracy and the divine right of kings to his own successor, Charles I.  Charles, along with his Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, embraces a very high church form of religion, which prompts rebellion in presbyterian Scotland.  Cromwell and the Protectorate arise partly on the back of Puritan hatred of Catholicism, and partly on the back of radical experiments with egalitarian and revolutionary new forms of Protestantism.  The Commonwealth falls and the Restoration brings Charles II to power, who leaves his throne to his Catholic convert brother James II, who is deposed in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brings to power his own Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, the Protestant William of Orange…  At every stage of this story, the question is one of rightful legal inheritance, the danger is of political change, the practice is of power politics, and the ideological discussion takes place at the level of religion – for the very good reason that the religious factions represent the opposed wings of property which are fighting over rulership of the rising modern state.

In Haynes’ murder of Pulteney, we see a capsule of the entire process.  Just as Grantly in Barchester Towers expects to inherit the position of Bishop upon the death of his father, so Haynes expects to inherit the position of archdeacon upon the death of Pulteney.  And remember that the Cathedral is the site of the throne of a Bishop.  That is where the name comes from.  The Latin cathedra means ‘seat’.  The paradox of the Reformation – that it is a revolution made by radicals who wanted to win by wedding themselves to existing power and authority – is contained in the paradoxical nature of Haynes’ revolutionary act of killing.

Pulteney is the system decadent and malfunctioning, ripe for reform.  The reform must be brought about by violent deposition.  The rightful inheritance is asserted and finalised as a fact through the exercise of material power.  The moral justification is found in the very reform which the violent deposition of the rightful ruler permits.  But the reform ultimately takes the form of the restoration of rent payments from tenants to the diocese.  It is difficult to look at Haynes and not see a mordant comment on evangelical reformism, and even on the entire Protestant Reformation project in England.  Thus also there seems to be a kind of cancer, a material rot, at the heart of Anglicanism.

James was a faithful Anglican.  But we have seen how he drifted from his father’s evangelicalism owing to his intellectual engagement with Christianity as a kind of story engaged with art and the history of ideas.  It is too much, reading Dante, to imagine that Plato and Tacitus deserve to suffer for eternity.  For all his religion, James was also a scholar, and scholarship demands a certain baseline level of materialism.  Scholarship of religious texts demands an ability to judge them with a degree of dispassionate detachment, and James brough both these traits – his material judgement and his artistic/narrative engagement – to his studies of the Biblical apocrypha.  He was also reluctantly involved in the internal politics of college administration.

The obituarist is at pains to reassure us that Haynes was an orthodox Anglican with no fancy spiritual or ecstatic ideas that might lead to flirtations with Nonconformity or radicalism.  The classic decent, proper English churchman: decidedly secular in outlook.  We see this confirmed in Haynes’ own refusal to admit that his supernatural experiences are anything but “symptoms of incipient decay of the brain” or a “physical affection in myself” which can be banished by strict adherence to the so-called Protestant work ethic.  A good and proper English divine, he is a stubborn and dogmatic materialist.  Outside his (in the text completely tacit) belief in Christian theology, Haynes is a rational Victorian.  (Ironically, this type of character is better depicted in the BBC television adaptation of another James story ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ than in the adaptation of ‘The Stalls of Barchester’… but that will have to wait.)  But this puts him outside the high church, especially the high church of the later Victorian era.  Indeed, in his ruthless ambition, Haynes is like a homicidal version of Trollope’s Obediah Slope, the petty bourgeois opportunistic careerist.

However, there are hints that Haynes is not quite the low church figure that this all might seem to imply.  There is something suspicious in the very insistence of the obituary writer about Haynes’ lack of ‘enthusiasm’.  It almost implies that someone felt the need to scotch an impression.

The interesting thing is that the word “enthusiasm” keeps cropping up in the story, outside the context of the obituary.  James assures us that “[t]here can be no doubt of the new archdeacon’s zeal and enthusiasm” and goes on to describe his “sudden growth of enthusiasm for the Cathedral itself and its furniture”.  So, contra the obituary, there is enthusiasm here.  James’ description of Haynes’ professional competence as a kind of zealotry tends to contradict the complacence of the obituarist, and to imply that being an administrator – a sturdy and functioning part of the machinery of the edifice of hierarchy and power – is to have a kind of politics.

Moreover, Haynes also has politics – or at least an awareness of aesthetics – when it comes to the material structure of the cathedral.  He is alive to the beauty of its curiosities.  His appreciation of the carvings on the choir stalls pre-dates his uncanny experiences of them.  It is possible to see his uncanny experiences of them as stemming from his aesthetic appreciation.  Aside from being a hilarious pastiche by James of an amateur try-hard style which veers into prolixity and pomposity, Haynes’ unsent letter to Sylvanus Urban communicates a genuine… well, enthusiasm for the carvings.  Haynes is entranced by them.  By their ominous life.

the prayer-desk is terminated at the eastern extremity by three small but remarkable statuettes in the grotesque manner. One is an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat, whose crouching posture suggests with admirable spirit the suppleness, vigilance, and craft of the redoubted adversary of the genus Mus. Opposite to this is a figure seated upon a throne and invested with the attributes of royalty; but it is no earthly monarch whom the carver has sought to portray. His feet are studiously concealed by the long robe in which he is draped: but neither the crown nor the cap which he wears suffice to hide the prick-ears and curving horns which betray his Tartarean origin; and the hand which rests upon his knee is armed with talons of horrifying length and sharpness. Between these two figures stands a shape muffled in a long mantle. This might at first sight be mistaken for a monk or “friar of orders gray”, for the head is cowled and a knotted cord depends from somewhere about the waist. A slight inspection, however, will lead to a very different conclusion. The knotted cord is quickly seen to be a halter, held by a hand all but concealed within the draperies; while the sunken features and, horrid to relate, the rent flesh upon the cheek-bones, proclaim the King of Terrors. These figures are evidently the production of no unskilled chisel…

By the way, Haynes’ puts “friar of orders gray” in quotation marks because… well, I’m not sure actually.

And this is worth a fun digression…

Haynes might be referring to the popular folk ballad ‘I am a Friar of Orders Grey’ by the Irish actor and dramatist John O’Keeffe (1747-1833).  O’Keeffe was, in his day, an enormously successful and popular writer of theatrical comedies, farces, and operettas.  Now largely forgotten, at the end of the 1700s he was the most frequently produced playwright on the London stage.  A Catholic, his Protestant actress wife cheated on him and then married her boyfriend without getting a divorce, because she did not consider a marriage to a Catholic legally binding.  In retaliation, John denied her access to their children.  As a poet, he was no Milton, but he shared Milton’s fate: he went blind, and afterwards had to dictate his works.

O’Keeffe’s ballad, written in the voice of a self-satisfied and gluttonous mendicant friar, contains the lines

What baron or squire,
Or knight of the shire,
Lives half so well as a holy friar?

Alternatively, and a little more enticingly from a critical perspective, Haynes might be referring to a ballad called ‘The Friar of Orders Gray’ included by Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, County Down, Ireland (1729-1811) in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.  Percy purports to have reconstructed an ancient ballad from fragments found in Shakespeare, and in his contemporaries Beaumont & Fletcher.

In any case, Haynes picks up on the ‘life’ contained in both the carvings first as an appreciative viewer of them, and then later as a toucher of them.  His openness to their sensual power allows them to communicate more of that power to him.

The story’s emphasis on the artistic decoration inside the cathedral comes freighted with the entire history of the Reformation.  The schism between Rome and the nascent Church of England opened by Henry VIII resulted in country-wide, state-mandated iconoclasm, especially after the accession of Henry’s son Edward VI, who was controlled by a clique of extreme Protestant nobles.  The government instructed people to strip their churches of ornamentation.

Ryrie:

A new set of royal injunctions ordered every parish to ‘take away, utterly extinct, and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all . . . pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition: so that there remain no memory of the same’. Even before the injunctions were issued, it had begun. Protestant provocateurs were attacking images, rightly confident that no one would stop them. In November 1547, even the great ‘rood’ (crucifix) in St Paul’s Cathedral in London was desecrated.

For ordinary people, the most immediately visible sign of the epochal rupture between the centuries-old English Catholic order and the new Protestant present was the stripping and whitewashing of the churches.

Now, it is not that this iconoclasm necessarily stripped churches of all ornamentation.  It concentrated on imagery and decoration associated with the religious ideology and practices of Catholicism.  Even so, the very idea of decoration and representation inside a church is freighted with this history, and thus also with the history of the appropriation of church property by the state, and its transfer into private hands.  The Reformation was the largest land and property grab in British history, and was maybe the earliest part of the centuries-long process of ‘primitive accumulation’ whereby feudal property was converted into private and state capital.

The carvings in the stalls are a strange mixture of the spiritual and the secular.  First, there is a cat.  A cat is not obviously a Christian symbol, except in the negative sense that it might connote witchcraft.  We cannot know the colour of the cat in the story, so we cannot know if it is black… but one tends to assume so.  They cast a black cat in the BBC television adaptation, but it has to be admitted that the text gives no particular warrant for this.  Haynes glimpses the manifestation of the cat, but never clearly enough to describe it, aside from saying it is large.  It’s amusing to think of Haynes being haunted by, say, a British shorthair.  The carving of the cat has no colour other than, presumably, the natural colour of the wood.  Pre-Reformation English churches would have been riots of colour, with all the decorations, carvings, and statues painted in bright colours.  Had it existed in that era, the cat would probably originally have been painted a particular colour.  But we know that the cat, along with the other carvings, is a relatively recent addition to the cathedral.

The carved stalls – very decidedly not the work of Dutch artists, as we are told, with all the semiotic implications of that negation – suggest a lingering taint of iconography within the English church.  The English Cathedral itself is a kind of artificially preserved survival in a religion which has no real role for it.  It cannot be a site of pilgrimage or relic worship; such things have no place within a Protestant church.  The cathedrals were retained partly because, as we have seen, the Reformation monarchs, starting with Henry, wanted to retain the bishop system, with the bishops suitably brought to heel, as a functioning power structure that supports the power of the crown.  Even so, this retention, and other such retentions stemming from the conservative impulses within the English Reformation (remember the Six Articles), may have been the seedbed for the later rise of the high church tendency, and such phenomena as the rise of the Victorian Anglo-Catholic movements within Anglicanism, such as Tractarianism or the Oxford Movement.  History lurks within the traces of iconography within the stripped-down post Reformation Church.  It lurks literally within, as the story shows.

In James’ Haynes there is something of the complexity about the politics of low, high, and centre that we saw in Trollope.  Remember how, in Barchester Towers, while the less sympathetic group within the clergy is low church, the more sympathetic group is not high but rather centre, albeit eventually aligned with the high.  Like Haynes, Mr Harding in Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Towers is Precentor of Barchester Cathedral.  The Precentor leads worship, with particular responsibility for music.  Mr Harding is particularly musical, and is appalled by Obediah Slope’s (politically calculated) attack in a sermon upon what he sees as an over-emphasis on music in services.  Haynes’ was devoted to the Cathedral, says his obituarist, “particularly in the musical portion of its rites.”

We’ve already mentioned Haynes’ awareness of the aesthetic qualities of the Cathedral.  In his physical contact with the carvings, his physical communion with them, which seems to awaken them to a reciprocal awareness of him, he displays an innate and unconscious tendency to commune with the physical, material, iconographical history of the Cathedral.  He may not be high church, but the same traces of history which give rise to the high church ideology can awaken within Haynes a kind of communion with the hidden, sleeping past of the church, with the deep spiritual time imprinted in its fabric… though this is complicated by the fact that the stall carvings are of relatively recent date… but that is a subject for later.  It’s a very clear echo, however, of James’ own drift away from evangelicalism via his engagement with the artistic and imaginative and narrative side of faith.  Even within the both evangelical and “conformable” Haynes, there is a seed of pre-Anglican aesthetic, ritual, and sacramental ecstasy.

Haynes, then, in his very lack of clear alignment, seems to inhabit that fuzzy, non-ideological – and yet ideologically torn – Trollopian centre.  His religious politics is aspiritual.  It is administrative.  It is about running things, and collecting rents, efficiently.  It is about merging seamlessly within the power structure, as most evangelicals tried to do even at the start (viz Haynes’ namesake.)  It is about defending episcopacy – i.e. rule over worship by bishops, i.e. the established structure of the Anglican church.  As such, for the obituary writer, it is value neutral.  It is a null hypothesis.  It is a given.  To question it would be to engage in politics; to defend it is to refrain from politics.

So James is showing us a particular type of establishment cleric, and what he looks like to his own establishment.  The invisible elephant in the room is. Of course, the fact that Haynes is a murderer, and that he attained his position within the establishment via murder.  Clearly, we are being shown an inner hypocrisy to the apparently neutral establishment functionary, and thus to the religious and political establishment itself.  Apparently “[f]ree” of “violence”, it harbours immanent violence.  Apparently non-sectarian, it generates internal bloodletting over title and position.  Apparently concerned with “graces”, it actually seethes with ambition.  Apparently “informed by the spirit of the truest charity”, it is actually homicidally mean, and preoccupied with property, and collecting rents.  As Jane Lee demonstrates, charity must be forced out of it at (figurative) gunpoint.  If it is politically neutral, it is not because Haynes is not low church and evangelical – he is – but because such ideological alignments are ultimately not about ideology or principle – no question of ideology or principle plays any real role in Haynes’ actions – but rather political alignments.  He tells himself that he “acted for the best”, but only as self-justification when he is being persecuted.  But of course this is not actually political neutrality.  Rather, it showcases the disjunct between two senses of politics: politics as belief, ideology, and principle; politics as power, property, and position.  Putting this in the context of the establishment religion of the United Kingdom cannot possibly be considered an apolitical statement.

*

My Patreon supporters got this ages ago.  If you enjoyed it, think about bunging me a dollar every month.  It would be greatly appreciated.

More to follow.