Jane Austen: A 250th Anniversary Celebration

In much the same way that Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies are all too often overlooked or ignored, so too are Jane Austen’s religious sense and her sympathetic view of Catholicism.

It was a quarter of a millennium ago today that the great Jane Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon in the south of England. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman, the early years of her life were spent during a turbulent period in English and world history. By the time that she was thirteen years old, revolutions in north America and France had shaken the political landscape to its foundations, the seismic ramifications of which, the aftershocks, would be felt for generations to come. Within England, the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 divided the nation, sparking the infamous Gordon Riots of 1780 in which anti-Catholic mobs were unleashed in towns and cities across the country, protesting the limited freedom that the Act had granted to England’s Catholics. The riots lasted a week and could only be quelled by military intervention. Catholics were burned alive in their homes following arson attacks and others were lynched.

In 1790, when Jane was fourteen years old, Edmund Burke published his seminal work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which condemned the previous year’s revolution and the anti-Catholic persecution which followed in its wake. Many of Burke’s views would emerge in the character of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, an indication of Austen’s sympathy for Burke’s anti-revolutionary position. Such sympathy is surely suggested still further by Austen’s naming of the hero of the novel, Edmund Bertram, a phonetic allusion to Edmund Burke himself, suggestive that Burke had been as much an influence on the young Miss Austen as Bertram had been a positive influence on, and a mentor to, the young Miss Price.

A year after the publication of Burke’s book, the fifteen-year-old Miss Austen wrote a brief “History of England” which offers further insights into her religious and political perspective. In this delightful and charming piece of juvenilia, consisting of brief biographical vignettes of English monarchs from Henry IV to Charles I, we discover Miss Austen’s sympathy for Catholicism and her disdain for those who persecuted the Church. With unflinching candour, she judges that Henry VIII’s “only merit was his not being quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth”. Having offered him this most scathing of backhanded compliments, she continues with equally scathing satirical humour and irony:

The Crimes & Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned & nothing can be said in his Vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of Time has been of infinite use to the Landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motivation for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who has no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for Ages been established in the Kingdom?

Following Miss Austen’s question with an obvious follow-up question of our own, can we really believe that Miss Austen considered the dissolution of the monasteries as being anything other than a “crime” and a “cruelty”, and that it had been an unmitigated disaster with respect to the religious life and liberty of England?

As for the young Jane’s view of Elizabeth I, she describes her as “that disgrace to humanity, that pest of Society” who was “the Murderess of her Cousin”. The “cousin” was of course Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of Scots, whom Miss Austen champions with unabashed verve and vigour. Bloody Bess is vilified as the “murderess” but the blame is shared by her malicious and malevolent advisers, her partners in crime: “It was the peculiar Misfortune of this Woman to have bad Ministers – Since wicked as she herself was, she could not have committed such extensive mischief had not these vile & abandoned men connived at & encouraged her in her Crimes.” Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham and other chief officers of the Elizabethan state were “such Scandals to their Country and their Sex as to allow & assist their Queen in confining for the space of nineteen years a Woman who … had every reason to expect Assistance and Protection….”

Miss Austen’s admiration for Mary, Queen of Scots is evident in the manner in which she imagines the heroism of the Queen’s final moments:

[A]bandoned by her son, confined by her Cousin, abused, reproached & vilified by all, what must not her most noble mind have suffered when informed that Elizabeth had given order for her death! Yet she bore it with a most unshaken fortitude; firm in her Mind; Constant in her Religion; & prepared herself to meet the cruel Fate to which she was doomed, with a Magnanimity that could alone proceed from conscious innocence. And yet could you Reader have believed it possible that some hardened and zealous Protestants have even abused her for that Steadfastness in the Catholic Religion which reflect on her so much credit? But this is a striking proof of their narrow Souls & prejudiced Judgment who accuse her. She was executed in the Great Hall at Fotheringay Castle (sacred Place!) on Wednesday the 8th of February 1586 – to the everlasting Reproach of Elizabeth, her Ministers, & of England in general.

Having seemingly canonized the Queen of Scots, declaring the place of her death to be a holy shrine, she describes the Queen’s character with the nuanced subtlety with which she would later delineate the characters of her fictional heroines. The Queen of Scots, having become the victim of the pride and prejudice of her adversaries, had “never been guilty of anything more than Imprudencies into which she was betrayed by the openness of her Heart, her Youth, & her Education”.

Intriguingly, Miss Austen  concludes her discussion of the Tudor Terror with a eulogy to the Earl of Essex, “this noble & gallant Earl” who, like the Queen of Scots, would be beheaded on Elizabeth’s orders. Such praise indicates Miss Austen’s sympathy with the cause of the Essex Rebellion, a sympathy which she shares with Shakespeare and with Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, who would be imprisoned for his role in the Rebellion. And so we see the kinship of spirit of England’s greatest poet and playwright with arguably England’s greatest novelist. In much the same way that Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies are all too often overlooked or ignored, so too are Jane Austen’s religious sense and her sympathetic view of Catholicism. Indeed, as the world celebrates the 250th anniversary of Miss Austen’s birth, it is likely that such sympathies will not form part of the celebration of her life or the critical appraisal of her legacy.

So be it. As for those of us who can see and celebrate the spiritual kinship of the incomparable Will and the indomitable Jane, we will rejoice that their works, their wit and their wisdom will continue to witness to Christian light and life in the darkest and deadliest of times.

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