Abstract
SPT’s anti-Catholicism must be seen in the triple context of an historic British phobia, the Quaker non-sacramental tradition and the Reformed emphasis on scripture. Protestant convictions made SPT very critical of RC Bible translation. He treated Italian Catholicism as not only idolatrous and superstitious, but authentically Roman. He was unaware of the more liberal variety of Tuscan Catholicism emerging in the earlier nineteenth century but which in 1849 would be silenced. SPT’s plea for the persecuted Madiai was a response to unenlightened Catholicism. His negative verdict on the moral consequences of Roman Catholicism may be usefully compared with similar ones expressed by John Henry Newman. SPT’s parallel encounter with repressive Catholicism in Spain in 1860 indicates a modest change in his attitude but the same British patriotic prejudice is prevalent. In the context of his studies however, SPT developed a growing respect for the integrity of RC scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
Well exemplified in the numerous prints of ‘God’s Double Deliverance’ (Amsterdam 1621) an etching by Samuel Ward, a ‘preacher of Ipswich’.
- 2.
Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church Part 1, 1829–1859, 3rd ed. (London: A & C Black, 1971 [1966]), 294–95. However, it is evident from the chapter ‘Bonfires, Revels and Riots,’ in D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford University Press, 1992), 225–66, that the religious issue was often merely a pretext for lawlessness and hostility to the police.
- 3.
John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–88 (Cambridge, 1973), 63; cf. J.P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972), 6.
- 4.
C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, C. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester University Press, 1993), 11–12. He cites a good example in the respectful treatment of Edward Weld, a Catholic gentleman of Lulworth Castle in Dorset during the Jacobite scare of 1745.
- 5.
‘I went through this whole question with Spaniards [whether the Greek λόγος should be translated in Spanish as verbo or palabra] twelve years ago’. In 1844, SPT’s home was in London but these conversations could well have taken place in Plymouth where ‘the intercourse [with Spaniards] every summer is pretty habitual’. S.P. Tregelles (Plymouth) to B.W. Newton, 11 and 20 April 1856 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [4, 5]).
- 6.
Phelipe Scio de San Miguel, La Biblia Vulgata Latina traducida en Español, y anotada conforme al sentido de los santos Padres y expositores Cathólicos (Valencia, 1791–1793).
- 7.
[S.P. Tregelles], Valera’s Spanish Bible of 1602. Appeal to Protestant Christians Respecting the Reprinting of This Version, prefatory note signed B.W. N[ewton] (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1856).
- 8.
S.P. Tregelles, The Versions of Scripture for Roman Catholic Countries: An Appeal to the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Wertheim and Macintosh; Plymouth: W. Brendon, 1856). In his letter, Tregelles wrote ‘It is now [October 1855] about eighteen years [sc. c. 1837] since I first endeavoured to draw the attention of those concerned to the condition and character of the Romish versions’ (p. 6). Antonio Martini [1720–1809] had been the Archbishop of Florence whereas Giovanni Diodati [1576–1649] was Beza’s successor in Geneva as Professor of theology, two centuries earlier.
- 9.
In Italian fare penitenza, rather than ravvedersi.
- 10.
Offerivano al Signore i sacri misteri (Martini) rather than facevano il publico servigio del Signore (Diodati).
- 11.
Tregelles, Historic Evidence, 87.
- 12.
Quotations taken from SPT’s letter to Eben Fardd (Rome, March 1846); see below Appendix of Letters . Tregelles refers to the arcibasilica as ‘the cathedral of Rome’.
- 13.
S.P. Tregelles (Plymouth, 29 November 1848) to the BFBS (Cambridge /CUL, BSA/D1/2 Tregelles 29/11/1848) but, see above (Chapter 7, Footnote 9) for his easier experiences in Florence.
- 14.
For an early discussion of Emmanuel Miller’s discovery which was published in Oxford in 1851, see C.C.J. Bunsen, Hippolytus and His Age; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome Under Commodus and Alexander Severus…. 4 vols., i. The Critical Inquiry: In five letters to Archdeacon Hare (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852) where the author acknowledges that it was SPT, in early June 1851, who introduced him to Miller’s work and had assured him [Bunsen] of the enthusiastic interest of the elderly President of Magdalen College, Dr. Martin Routh (1755–1854), Bunsen, op. cit., 1: 9.
- 15.
S.P. Tregelles [ed.], Canon Muratorianus. The Earliest Catalogue of the Books of the New Testament … (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867), 63n.
- 16.
For the contrasting opinions of Raffaello Lambruschini, (1828–1873) of San Cerbone, and his very conservative uncle, Luigi Lambruschini, whom we encountered in an earlier chapter, see V. Gabbrielli [ed.], Gino Capponi — Raffaello Lambruschini, Carteggio (1828–1873) (Florence: Spadolini-Le Monnier, 1996), 91–92, n.2.
- 17.
Lapo de’ Ricci (1782–1843) was one of the editors of the progressive Giornale Agrario Toscano. He was a nephew of the reforming Jansenist Bishop of Pistoia, Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810). It was he who encouraged his protégé, Salvatore Ferretti, who was preparing for the Catholic Priesthood, to attend the Swiss Church, in the belief that such an encounter with Protestants would prepare him for an active part in the spiritual renewal envisaged by liberal Roman Catholics. In the event, Ferretti became a Protestant and found his way to England where he edited L’Eco di Savonarola; see S. Ferretti, ‘La mia conversione,’ in L’Eco di Savonarola (1847), 215.
- 18.
Bettino Ricasoli (1809–1880) Count of Brolio, the ‘Iron Baron’. An austere and highly moral aristocrat, famed for pioneering the advanced viticulture in Tuscany with the production of Chianti. As a politician, he favoured unification with Piedmont and succeeded Cavour as Italy’s second Prime Minister.
- 19.
For the role of the Swiss réveil in these developments, see T.C.F. Stunt, ‘L’influenza del réveil svizzero prima dell’Unità d’Italia,’ in Maghenzani, Riforma, 105–13.
- 20.
For Matilde Calandrini (1794–1866), see DBI 16 (1973); V. Gabbrielli [ed.], Carteggio: Lambruschini – Vieusseux I, (1826–1834) (Florence: Spadolini-Le Monnier, 1998), 212, n.17; D.D. Ronco, La fede e l’opera di Matilde Calandrini (dalle lettere a Gian Pietro Vieusseux) (Bangor: University of Wales, c.1995).
- 21.
For Jean-Pierre Vieusseux (1779–1863), see R. Ciampini, Gian Pietro Vieusseux: i suoi viaggi, i suoi giornali, i suoi amici (Turin: Einaudi, 1953). Anthony Trollope’s brother, Tom, wrote an excellent appreciation of Vieusseux’s unique place in Florentine life, which appeared in his brother’s magazine. ‘Giampietro Vieusseux, The Florentine Bookseller,’ The Saint Pauls Magazine 2 (1868): 727–35.
- 22.
For Charles Eynard (1810–1876) historian and biographer, see T.C.F. Stunt, From Awakening to Secession, 373; Alville, Anna Eynard-Lullin et l’époque des congrès et des révolutions (Lausanne: Feissly, 1955), 295–96.
- 23.
For the Walker family, see above Chapter 7, Footnote 4.
- 24.
Sarah Senhouse [ed.], Letters of the Madiai and Visits to Their Prisons by the Misses Senhouse (London: Nisbet, 1853), 4–6, cf. 111. For a recent account of the Madiai, see Laura Demofonti in DBI 67 (Rome: Treccani 2006), s.n.
- 25.
The Italian friends were Francesco Manelli and Alessandro Fantoni; L’Eco di Savonarola 9:5 (1 October 1856): 149
- 26.
In most accounts, the couple are described as being arrested on the same day, but according to Pietrocola-Rossetti, Rosa Madiai was arrested eight days later, and the account based on Eliza Browne’s letters gives her arrest as ten days later; see T. Pietrocola-Rossetti, Biografia di Rosa Madiai (Florence: G Pellas, 1871), 10; Soltau, Story of Madiai, 447.
- 27.
See above Chapter 6, pp. 64–65, Footnotes 5–7.
- 28.
Tregelles, Prisoners, 15–16.
- 29.
The literature on John Henry Newman (1801–1890) is immense and I shall refer below to his published Letters and Diaries, but there is probably no better overview of his extraordinary career than Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1988]).
- 30.
C.S. Dessain [ed.], Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (London: Nelson, 1961), 11: 267.
- 31.
Letter to his sister Jemima Mozley, 26 January 1847; C.S. Dessain, Letters and Diaries, 12: 24.
- 32.
Pier Gio[vanni]. Vincenzo Giannini, Notizie istoriche sopra la miracolosa imagine di Gesú bambino che si venera nella ven. Chiesa presbiterale di S. Maria in Aracœli di Roma: con alcuni divoti esercizi per conseguire le grazie che si domandono: coll’aggiunta di varie notizie, e savie riflessioni sopra la nascita del medesimo divin redentore (Rome: Puccinelli, 1797).
- 33.
S.P. Tregelles, Remarks on the Prophetic Visions in the Book of Daniel…new ed. (London: Bagster, 1852), 209n. For an amusing and not uncritical account of Francis Joseph Nicholson (1803–1855), a curiously Protean character, and his diplomatic activities in Rome, see J.P. Flint, Great Britain and the Holy See: The Diplomatic Relations Question, 1846–1852 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 14–15 and passim.
- 34.
K. Eaton, Protestant Missionaries in Spain, 1869–1936: ‘Shall the Papists Prevail?’ (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2015) [Eaton, Protestant Missionaries], 69. Chapman made two further visits in 1838 and 1839 before his more systematic Brethren work in Spain with George Lawrence beginning in 1863.
- 35.
Extracts from the annual reports were later incorporated into Mrs. Robert Peddie, The Dawn of the Second Reformation in Spain: Being the Story of Its Rise and Progress from the Year 1852 (London: S. W. Partridge, 1871) [Peddie, Second Reformation]. For the reports from ‘a lady correspondent in Plymouth’, see pp. 41 [1855], 58–59 [1856], 89–90 [1857]. Mrs. Peddie [Maria Denoon née Young] had edited the Spanish Evangelical Record and seems to have been one of its chief financial supporters. SPT described some of the work in which he and his wife were engaged among Spanish speakers in Plymouth in a letter to Eben Fardd written in July 1856 later published in Y Traethodydd 29 (July 1884): 289–90 where the date is misprinted as 1836.
- 36.
The Wesleyan Missionary Notices Relating Principally to the Foreign Missions Under the Direction of the Methodist Conference, 3rd series, 2 (October 1855): 173–75.
- 37.
John Eadie, Life of John Kitto, DD., FSA., (Edinburgh: Oliphant, 1857), 35n.
- 38.
SPT, Plymouth to B.W. Newton, 20 April 1856 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [5]).
- 39.
After the Republican Revolution in 1848, the Duke, who was the youngest son of the overthrown, Orleanist French, king Louis Philippe, and the Duchess, a daughter of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII, had gone to live in Spain. In 1857, they were visiting the Duke’s widowed mother at Claremont House in Surrey which Queen Victoria had made available to the French King and Queen in exile (London Gazette, 23 June 1857).
- 40.
Peddie, Second Reformation, 89.
- 41.
William Thomas Brown (1821–1899), formerly a clerk at the Methodist Mission House, ‘had learned Spanish and used it among Spanish sailors in the Port of London’. In 1872, he went to Barcelona where for a decade he distributed scriptures and gathered a little Methodist society; John Pritchard, Methodists and Their Missionary Societies (London: Routledge, 2013), 220. A Spanish observer described him as ‘intellectually poor and lacking linguistically’; quoted in Eaton, Protestant Missionaries, 134, n.51.
- 42.
SPT, Plymouth, to B.W. Newton, 11 April 1856, (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [4]).
- 43.
SPT, Plymouth, to B.W. Newton, 5 May 1860, (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [20]).
- 44.
One is not surprised to learn from his sister-in-law that SPT travelled the extra twenty miles to visit Alcala where the Complutensian polyglot of the Greek New Testament was produced by Cardinal Ximenes and published in 1514, Cambridge, MA/AHTL, Prideaux, MS Life [p. 26].
- 45.
Unless otherwise indicated my account of SPT in Spain is based on this letter, the text of which (together with some of his other letters to Eben Fardd) was published much later in the Welsh magazine, Y Traethodydd [The Essayist] 29 (July 1884): 292–93. Because of its intrinsic interest, I have reproduced the entire letter in my appendix of original letters. [[The double square bracketed paragraphs]] were originally in Welsh but I have given them in the English translation with which Mrs. Olwen Wonnacott most kindly provided me some fifty years ago.
- 46.
The need for secrecy may be reflected in the fact that no letters from SPT in Spain , to Newton have survived. Perhaps he reckoned it was safer not to write to him.
- 47.
Manuel Matamoros–Garcia (1834–1868). ‘One of these meetings [in Málaga] was witnessed by Dr. and Mrs. Tregelles, at which there were about ninety-seven present…’ William Greene, Manuel Matamoros: His Life and Death. A Narrative of the Late Persecution of Christians in Spain, Compiled from Original Letters and Other Documents, 3rd ed. (London: Alfred Holness, 1889), 11.
- 48.
Peddie, Second Reformation, 66.
- 49.
SPT, Plymouth to B.W. Newton, 29 January 1864 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181[62]), vide infra, Appendix of Unpublished Letters, No. 7, note 5.
- 50.
See Greene, Matamoros, 11–12. Following the advice of Mrs. Tregelles, Matamoros did write to Green from Barcelona in September 1860 but Greene may have wrongly assumed that it was then and there that SPT and his wife had met Matamoros (p. 11).
- 51.
As it was reported, ‘Both [Matamoros and Alhama] are personally known to Dr. Tregelles, the well-known Biblical critic, who, with several other gentlemen, has presented a memorial upon the subject to her Majesty’s foreign secretary… To the facts thus stated in the memorial, Dr. Tregelles added that the law of Spain inflicts, as the punishment of apostasy, or worshipping contrary to the principles of the church of Rome, eight years’ imprisonment with hard labour’; Sunday at Home 8 (1861): 80. Cf. a similar report of the Deputation to Lord John Russell: ‘Dr. Tregelles, of Plymouth, said he had spent a great portion of the last summer [1860] in Spain , and had had much personal intercourse with Matamoros and Alhama, and could bear warm testimony to their Christian character…’ The Bulwark or Reformation Journal (1 January 1861): 190.
- 52.
For Alonzo’s later work in Spain, see Christian World: Magazine of the American & Foreign Christian Union (June 1869): 166; Evangelical Christendom (July 1869): 249.
- 53.
SPT, Plymouth to B.W. Newton, 7 May 1863 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [49]).
- 54.
SPT, Plymouth to B.W. Newton, 5 October and 19 December 1864 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [77, 80]).
- 55.
Carlo Vercellone (1814–1869).
- 56.
‘What shall we say of the text of the New Testament? Which countless scholars from Laurentius Valla and John Mill to Constantine Tischendorf, Tregelles and Lachmann have almost demolished with their variant readings. Will not all men of learning acknowledge the very rich fruits that have come into existence from these sources?’ [My own translation]. SPT, Plymouth to B.W. Newton, 12 December 1863 (formerly in the Fry Collection, but missing from Manchester/JRUL/CBA; Xerox copy in the author’s possession). The passage in Latin, cited by Tregelles is from Variae lectiones Vulgatae Latinae editionis Bibliorum editionis quas Carolus Vercellone sodalis Barnabites digessit. Vol. I, Complectens pentateuchum (Roma: Iosephum Spithöver, 1860), 1 [Prolegomena] XVI [accessed October 2017 at https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_Omx9sz2I0sEC]
- 57.
SPT, Plymouth, 27 October and 10 November 1858, letters to the Editor of The Record; reprinted in the Journal of Sacred Literature 8 (January 1859): 458–61.
- 58.
SPT (30 November 1852) to F. del Furia, (Florence/BNC Carte del Furia 82 cccxliii, 4).
- 59.
As indicated above in Chapter 6, the only surviving account of this episode is in Cambridge MA/AHTL, Prideaux, MS Life [pp. 11–13]. SPT acknowledged Battelli’s help in Tregelles, Account 157. The fact that the abbé framed his concern in the way he did suggests that in their earlier conversation SPT had raised the theme of his early tract, The Blood of the Lamb and the Union of Saints; (see above Chapter 4, p. 37, Footnote 7).
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Stunt, T.C.F. (2020). Tregelles and Roman Catholicism. In: The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_8
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