Exposing the False Narrative of Fake History

[Editor’s Note: This is the eighteenth in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]

We live in an age when fake news is rampant. Yet fake news is nothing new. It’s been around for centuries. False narratives about what is happening now and what has happened in the past are always with us. They are a curse which prevents us from understanding where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going.

It is, therefore, very important that we learn to discriminate in the true understanding of that word. To discriminate is to make the necessary distinction between things. In the case of that which is fake or that which is real, of that which is false from that which is true, this discrimination, this ability to distinguish, is vital and necessary.

One of the most egregious examples of the dissemination of the false narrative of fake history is the bias and inaccuracy of the “official” history of England since the time of the Reformation. This false narrative is what Hilaire Belloc called the “enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness” that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history.” Belloc sought to expose this bias in many of his own works. He wrote two panoramic overviews of the period of the English Reformation and its aftermath, How the Reformation Happened and Characters of the Reformation, as well as writing biographies of the key figures of those traumatic times, including Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and James II. 

Although Hilaire Belloc continues to be overshadowed, somewhat unjustly, by his great friend G.K. Chesterton, he is sufficiently well-known to preclude his inclusion as one of the unsung heroes of Christendom. His praises are still being sung by many, which includes the present author who wrote a biography of him, if not by as many as his genius and importance deserve. It is, therefore, to two earlier historians who blazed a truth-seeking trail a century earlier to whom we will now turn our attention.  

Fr. John Lingard would write a multi-volume work exposing the prejudiced perspective of the officially accepted narrative of English history. Ironically, however, he would be almost killed long before he wrote anything, when, as a young man, he was caught up in the vortex of French history. He had been a seminarian at Douai in northern France at the time of the French Revolution and had witnessed a French acquaintance being dragged by the mob, presumably to his death. When he sought to intervene, a cry went up from the mob of “le calotin à la lanterne!” (the priest to the lamppost), which was the revolutionary cry calling for priests to be lynched. Faced with the anger of the mob, the young seminarian took to his heels and ran for his very life.

Returning to England, Lingard was ordained to the priesthood in 1795. In 1819, the first three volumes of his multi-volume History of England were published, a monumental work which built upon the foundations that had been laid by the groundbreaking scholarship of Bishop Challoner, another unsung hero of Christendom, around 75 years earlier. A fourth volume was published in 1823 with further volumes published subsequently. 

Having read the first four volumes, the English radical agrarian William Cobbett began his own very popular History of the Protestant Reformation in 1824, using Lingard’s work as his principal source. Although Cobbett was deeply indebted to Lingard, a debt he readily acknowledged, the two men had very little in common. Lingard was a Catholic priest who lived an outwardly uneventful life of quiet and diligent scholarship; Cobbett was a firebrand political radical and globetrotting adventurer, including a controversial time in the post-Revolutionary United States, who rejoiced in polemic. 

Although Cobbett was not a Catholic, his eyes were opened by Lingard’s work to the injustice of Henry VIII’s annexation of the Church in England and the subsequent persecution of England’s Catholics which followed in its aftermath. His own history of the period was full of the vigorous and vituperative invective which made his writing so popular. Whereas Lingard’s work was read by a handful of scholars, Cobbett’s became a national bestseller. It was, therefore, Cobbett’s passionate political “spin” on Lingard’s painstaking scholarship which exposed to a wider public the fake history which had been sold to the British people by the bias of the previous century’s Whig historians.

One example of Cobbett’s strident rhetoric will suffice to illustrate the impact his fiery polemic would have had on his contemporaries:

If, however, we still insist that the Pope’s supremacy and its accompanying circumstances produced ignorance, superstition and slavery, let us act the part of sincere, consistent and honest men. Let us knock down, or blow up, the cathedrals and colleges and old churches: let us sweep away the three courts, the twelve judges, the circuits and the jury boxes; let us demolish all that we inherit from those whose religion we denounce, and whose memory we affect to heartily despise; let us demolish all this, and we shall have left—all our own—the capacious jails and penitentiaries, the stock-exchange, the hot, ankle and knee-swelling and lung-destroying cotton-factories; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks…; the poor-rates and the pauper-houses; and, by no means forgetting that blessing which is peculiarly and doubly and “gloriously” Protestant,—the National Debt. Ah! people of England, how you have been deceived! 

William Cobbett’s populism and popularity gave Lingard’s scholarship the reach and readership it would otherwise have lacked, making it much more widely known and the Catholic view of English history much more widely accepted. It helped indeed that Cobbett was not a Catholic himself and could therefore claim impartiality with respect to the religious question, denouncing the Reformers as avaricious plutocrats irrespective of the creed they theoretically espoused. 

The huge success of Cobbett’s History helped to pave the way for Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and would also prove to have a significant influence on some of the major political and cultural movements of the following century, including the Gothic Revival, led by Augustus Pugin, a convert to Catholicism; the Young England movement, led by Benjamin Disraeli; the “back-to-the-land” wing of the Chartists, led by Feargus O’Connor; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by John Ruskin and William Morris; and the Distributist movement, led by Chesterton and Belloc. Each of these political and cultural movements had their roots, at least in part, consciously or otherwise, in Cobbett’s revisionist revelations of the false narrative of “Tom-fool Protestant history.” 

We began with Belloc, whose seminal history of England, The Servile State, was influenced by both Lingard and Cobbett; we will end with Belloc’s great friend, G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a biography of William Cobbett in which he sang the praises of this unsung hero of Christendom as we are doing here. Writing of Cobbett’s exposé of the Tudor pillage and the Protestant Reformation which was its consequence, Chesterton praised Cobbett for exposing a historical crime which Protestant historians had sought to hide from future generations:

He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he would say, might think it a matter of regret to be expressed in murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of “Murder!” wrung from him as he stumbled over the bones of the dead England, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.