SOURCE: “Parsons, Priests, and Politics: Anthony Trollope's Irish Clergy,” Eire Ireland, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 80-97.

[In the following essay, Johnston assesses Trollope's portrayal of members of the clergy in his Irish novels, and maintains that Trollope's views regarding both Irish Catholic and Irish Anglican clergymen are more complex than critics typically assume.]

Couple the name Anthony Trollope with the word “clergy,” and the coupling will likely produce a series of images of that galaxy of colorful Anglican clerics in rural Barsetshire. Trollope, however, created another colorful collection of clerics, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, in his novels of Victorian Ireland, where he lived, as a British Post Office official, from 1841 to 1859. Trollope's portrayals of these Irish clergy appear in the novels The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), Castle Richmond (1860), An Eye for an Eye (1879), and the unfinished The Landleaguers (1883).

That noteworthy clerical characters figure in each of these five Irish novels testifies not merely to Trollope's abiding interest in clerical matters, but also to his awareness of the major role played by the clergy in the life of nineteenth-century Ireland. That awareness is underscored in a discourse in The Macdermots on the education of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy and in his essay, “The Irish Beneficed Clergyman,” published in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1866,¹ which discusses the position of the Irish Anglican clergy, members of the minority, but Established, Church of Ireland.

‘Anathema Maranatha!² get thee from me, thou child of Satan—go out into utter darkness, thou worker of iniquity—into everlasting lakes of fiery brimstone, thou doer of the devil's work—thou false prophet—thou ravenous wolf!’

Such, Trollope narrates, in The Kellys and The O'Kellys, “was the language of Rev. O'Joscelyn's soul at the sight of a [Roman Catholic] priest,” and such

would have been the language of his tongue, had not, as he thought, evil legislators given a licence to falsehood in his unhappy country, and rendered it impossible for a true Churchman openly to declare the whole truth.

(KO'K 3: 233)³

O'Joscelyn is a Church of Ireland clergyman whose anti-Catholicism is such that he

pitied the ignorance of the heathen, the credulity of the Mohamedan, the desolateness of the Jew, even the infidelity of the Atheist, but he execrated, abhorred, abominated, the Church of Rome.

(KO'K 3: 232-33)

Father John McGrath of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, is a priest of the church abominated by O'Joscelyn. To Trollope, Father John is “that good man” (MB 1: 165)⁴ whose “unceasing charity … made the great beauty of [his] character” (MB 2: 66). Years after The Macdermots first appeared, Trollope remarked, “in the character of Father John … I have drawn as thoroughly good and fine a man as I know how to depict.”⁵ Critical response to the characterization of Father John seems to bear Trollope out, and is well represented by Robert Lee Wolff's comment:

There is not a touch of condescension in this admiring portrait of a Catholic priest by a novelist who would in future make his chief reputation as a delineator of Anglican clergymen. Fully aware of the mighty prejudice in England of the late 1840's against Catholics, against Irishmen, and against priests, [Trollope] made the most sympathetic character in his first novel a man who was all three.⁶

Trollope's characterization of Rev. O'Joscelyn and Father John essentially reflect the received opinion on Trollope's view of the Irish clergy. For example, and by way of elaboration on Wolff's comment, Ruth ap Roberts, in her introduction to Clergymen of the Church of England, points to the novelist's “… remarkably sympathetic and respectful pictures of [Irish] Catholic priests, from the early The Macdermots of Ballycloran in 1847 … to the late An Eye for an Eye in 1879” (CCE 17), and John G. Hynes refers to “the customary respect Trollope reserved for Roman Catholic priests.”⁷ On the other hand, the evangelical nature of the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland produced a viscerally negative response in Trollope. His upbringing, as his first biographer T. H. S. Escott pointed out, was “altogether anti-evangelical,”⁸ and he developed in Wolff's words a “strong distaste” (xx) for Protestants of that bent. So strong was this distaste that, as Arthur Pollard points out, Trollope's “… Evangelical personages are often severe, intolerant, and censorious,”⁹ and the Irish ones, at least, possessed what the novelist himself bluntly refers to, in Castle Richmond, as “peculiar idiosyncrasies” (CR 3: 117).¹⁰

The received opinion concerning Trollope's views of the Irish clergy ignores, however, some interesting complexities involved in Trollope's attitude. True, Father John and Rev. O'Joscelyn are types, respectively, of his Irish Catholic and Protestant clergymen. But Trollope did not allow his distaste for evangelicism, nor his pleasure in poking fun at it, render him unsympathetic to the very real difficulties faced by the clergymen of the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland. Nor did the fact that he “always had a soft spot for the Catholic faith”¹¹ lead him to an indiscriminate affection for Irish Catholic priests. The dispensing of Trollope's affection was not unrelated to the particular priest's political tendencies. If those tendencies did not essentially mesh with Trollope's, the priest was likely to be portrayed with such little affection as to render somewhat dubious Trollope's well-known claim that “… I have never drawn [a Roman Catholic priest] as bad, or hypocritical, or unfaithful.”¹²

Let us now take a more extended look at Trollope and the Church of Ireland clergy. This excerpt from the witty opening paragraph of the essay “The Irish Beneficed Clergyman” would remind one of the fictitious O'Joscelyn:

The normal Irishman is a jolly fellow; but the normal Irish Protestant clergyman is a severe, sombre man, one who speaks of life in sad, subdued tones,—unless when he is minatory in the pulpit. … He is preaching every moment of his life, preaching in his gait, preaching in every tone of his voice, preaching in every act that he does, preaching in every turn of his eyes. Find him asleep and you will find him preaching with a long-protracted, indignant, low-church Protestant snore, very eloquent as to the scarlet woman.

(CCE 105-6)

But Trollope is quick to point out that the reasons for this unattractive behavior are “not far to seek,” and he goes on to explain them in terms of “anomalies” in the clergyman's situation. The anomalies are several. There is the Established status of the Church of Ireland in a country with a large, inimical Roman Catholic majority. Disestablishment, which Trollope strongly favored, took place in 1869, and it is curious to note that the two Irish novels that come after that date contain no Church of Ireland clergymen of importance. There is the frustrating paradox that the Church of Ireland pastor sees in Roman Catholicism “only the small points of divergence from his own [creed], and [Catholicism] is, therefore, worse to him than the creed of Musselman or of Jew” (CCE 107). Further, he is expected by his superiors to exhibit a “fiery Protestant zeal” (CCE 112) if he expects advancement. Yet, because he has a small congregation, his English coreligionists criticize him as underworked and overpaid (CCE 117). Well might Trollope ask, “how can we wonder at [the Irish clergyman's] idiosyncrasies?” (CCE 111).

In the Irish novels, we find a lively evocation of those idiosyncrasies. On a par with the bigoted O'Joscelyn is the Rev. Aeneas Townsend of Castle Richmond, which deals with the Famine of 1845-49. Trollope dryly introduces Rev. Townsend as so “averse … to the intercessions of saints, that he always regarded as a wolf in sheep's clothing a certain English clergyman who had written to him a letter dated from the feast of St. Michael and All Angels” (CR 1: 186). And Trollope further mocks the nonsense inherent in bigotry as he shows Townsend pondering his wife's contention that the local Catholic priest, Father McCarthy “was pitch, pitch itself in its blackest turpitude … [a priest] of the altar of Baal” (CR 1: 190-01). On the same level, when Townsend reluctantly agrees to serve with the priest on a famine-relief committee, he “almost felt he was yielding to instigations from the evil one” (CR 1: 191).

Such extreme intolerance of Catholicism inevitably led to attempts to proselytize, or, in Trollope's ironic image, attempts to “lead troops of the Roman Catholics of Ireland in triumph to the top of the Tarpeian rock of conversion” (CCE 107). But if Trollope was ironic about proselytism itself, he was quite caustic about one of the conversion methods frequently used by some Church of Ireland clergy—the method that became known as “souping.” This involved the enticing of starving Catholics to Protestantism by feeding them soup or other food. Rev. Townsend self-righteously believes that “If he could find hungry Papists and convert them into well-fed Protestants, he must be doing a double good” (CR 1: 188). He compounds the self-righteousness by drawing his inspiration from the biblical story of the loaves and fishes. Trollope is equally cutting about The Landleaguers' Rev. Joseph Armstrong, “who held it to be an established fact that a Roman Catholic must necessarily go to the devil,” and therefore fed hungry Papists scraps of meat on Fridays, “thinking that the poor wretches who had flown in the face of their priest by eating the unhallowed morsels, would then have made a first step towards Protestantism” (L 1: 215).¹³

In his portrayal of the Church of Ireland clergy, Trollope also shows an amused sense of the paranoia that frequently attends bigotry. Rev. O'Joscelyn of The Kellys and the O'Kellys is taken with a large pinch of salt, even by his Protestant dinner companions, as he describes a lively but peaceful local Catholic night-time demonstration, related to the 1844 sedition trial of Daniel O'Connell, in terms of a potential pogrom of his family and himself. “‘Wait till I tell you,’” he endlessly intones, as he luridly draws out every detail of the demonstration, from “‘the horrid yells of the wild creatures’”—his Catholic neighbors—to their “‘huge masses of blazing turf’” (KO'K 3: 243). His companions respond with crushingly calm questions: “‘But did they commit any personal outrages, Mr. O'Joscelyn?’”; “‘Did they burn anything except the turf, Mr. O'Joscelyn?’”; “‘Did they come … near the house?’”; “‘You didn't suffer much, then, except the anxiety, Mr. O'Joscelyn?’” (KO'K 3: 242-45). But perhaps the paranoia of the colonial clergyman is caught at its most amusing earlier in this scene, when O'Joscelyn, despite being worried that Queen Victoria's advisors “do not dare to protect the Protestant faith,” graciously concedes that Victoria herself “is a sincere Protestant” (KO'K 3: 238-39).¹⁴

The scene involving O'Joscelyn, who, as Trollope puts it, “had been an Orangeman, and was a most ultra and even furious Protestant” (KO'K 3: 232) is, indeed, entertaining. But, as Owen Dudley Edwards points out, the scene “plays no part in the story at all.” While it does show the more liberal clergyman George Armstrong in an appealing light, “disgusted by [O'Joscelyn's] hatred and paranoiac fears of insurrection,” the whole episode “adds nothing to Armstrong's own work in the story, from which immediately afterwards he fades without even a farewell in the Conclusion.” Edwards's well-taken point here is that Trollope included this scene, not for plot purposes, but because of his strong “hatred of Protestant bigotry.”¹⁵

That Protestant bigotry led not just to paranoiac fears in the clergy, but also, naturally, in their flock, and Trollope demonstrates a humorous awareness of how that flock must have added to their clergy's sense of paranoia. In Castle Richmond, for example, Rev. Townsend, having, despite his wife's counsel, served on the famine-relief committee with the “diabolical” Father McCarthy, unwisely remarked to Mrs. Townsend, “‘[The priest] is not so bad as I once thought him’.” Ever wary of slippage in the ranks, she responds in horror, “‘I hope you are not going over too, Aeneas?’” (CR 2: 298). In Castle Richmond, Mrs. Townsend and Miss Letty Fitzgerald echo what Trollope caught so nicely in Rev. O'Joscelyn: that peculiar coupling of paranoia with the colonists' belief that their own dedication to the cause—in this case, a sectarian one—is purer than that of their coreligionists in the mother country. They agree that, if Letty's nephew Herbert is to be ordained, it should not be in Puseyite England, but “in good, wholesome, Protestant Ireland, where a Church of England clergyman was a clergyman of the Church of England, and not a priest, slipping about in the mud half-way between England and Rome” (CR 3: 47).

Among Trollope's Church of Ireland clerics, one proves something of an exception to the rule on the issue of bigotry—George Armstrong of The Kellys and The O'Kellys. Rector of a remote Country Mayo parish, he gets on famously with his overwhelmingly Catholic neighbors. “Overwhelmingly” may, however, be the operative word here. If Irish Protestants were a minority in the country at large—for example, in the County Kildare of Rev. O'Joscelyn and the County Cork of Rev. Townsend—they were truly a tiny minority in Rev. Armstrong's rural west. Trollope evokes Armstrong's situation thus:

How could a Protestant rector be a good parish clergyman with but an old lady and her daughters, for the exercise of his clerical talents? [Armstrong] lauded the zeal of St. Paul for proselytism but, as he himself once observed, even St. Paul had never had to deal with the obstinacy of an Irish Roman Catholic.

(KO'K 2: 158)

As a result of his situation, Armstrong has become “a loose, slovenly man, somewhat too fond of his tumbler of punch” (KO'K 2: 159). He appears, in fact, to be the other side of the coin from his bigoted clerical brothers, his Protestant zeal dampened by the “idleness which [his] want of work engendered, and the habits which his [consequent] poverty induced” (KO'K 2: 158). He is at heart a kind man, as indeed are O'Joscelyn and Townsend, but it is also clear that he has thrown in the evangelical towel.

Equally clearly, Trollope has a certain sympathy for the Irish evangelical clergy, despite his constitutional distaste for evangelism. In the “Irish Beneficed Clergyman” essay, for example, he can begin a sentence, “Of all men, the Irish beneficed clergyman is the most illiberal, the most bigoted, the most unforgiving …” and yet and the sentence, “the most sincere, and the most enthusiastic” (CCE 115). And the essay's conclusion is decidedly sympathetic:

The anomalies of the Church of England in Ireland are terribly distressing, and call aloud for reform. But to none can they be so distressing as to the beneficed clergyman in Ireland; and in the behalf of no other class is that reform so vitally needed.

(CCE 118)

As Ruth ap Roberts notes, “the reformer's voice breaks through the gently satirical surface.”¹⁶ The sympathetic side of Trollope's approach to his fictional Irish evangelicals is also clear. George Armstrong's congregation may be insignificant, and he may be loose and slovenly, but he is accorded a courageous and pivotal role in bringing the two plots in The Kellys and the O'Kellys to a happy conclusion.¹⁷ Rev. Townsend, in Castle Richmond, serves on the famine-relief committee partly through public pressure, but also through “the innate kindness of his own heart” (CR 1: 191). And, even though Rev. O'Joscelyn is presented in a somewhat ludicrous light, he was, “Apart from his fanatical enthusiasm, … a good man, of pure life, and simple habits. …” (KO'K 3: 234). It is further noteworthy that Arthur Pollard's comment “To all his antipathetic Evangelicals Trollope attributes an ill-favored appearance and a base ambition”¹⁸ is barely applicable to Trollope's Irish fiction. True, Rev. Townsend should “brush his hair, and occasionally put on a clean surplice” (CR 1: 160), and Rev. Armstrong of The Landleaguers is “thin” (L 1: 215). But there is nothing wrong with Rev. O'Joscelyn's appearance, and, more important, to none of these three “antipathetic” evangelicals does Trollope attribute a “base ambition.”

Trollope's attitude to the Irish Roman Catholic clergy, as he reveals it in his fiction, is markedly less ambivalent than his attitude to their Church of Ireland counterparts. He is clearly sympathetic towards one type of Catholic priest and quite hostile towards another. In the Irish novels, there are four priests towards whom Trollope is sympathetic—Father John of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Father McCarthy of Castle Richmond, Father Marty of An Eye for an Eye, and Father Giles of The Landleaguers. All four have strong common bonds. Fathers McCarthy and Giles are minor figures, however, so this discussion shall concentrate largely on the more fully developed characters of Fathers John and Marty. The bonds which unite the latter pair elaborately illustrate all that Trollope liked in an Irish Catholic priest.

Both priests are “composed of the same amalgam of forthright honesty and tolerant charity. …”¹⁹ They are also French-educated, elderly, established, and powerful, having attained the rank of parish priest. Trollope, incidentally, shows a fine awareness of the high degree of social as well as religious influence that the rural parish priest possessed. The education of Fathers John and Marty would have taken place in pre-Revolutionary France, at which time there were no seminaries permitted in Ireland. The seminary at Maynooth opened only in 1795. That their families could subsidize a continental education for them suggests that both priests came from comparative affluence. Thus, they would have some degree of interest in preserving the status quo, and this is indicated by their easy relations with the local British military establishment. They would, by background and attitude, be “gentlemen” in Trollope's eyes, but gentlemen of a particularly appealing kind, for both priests deal with crises in their parishes, crises that have clear political implications, within the bounds of a political philosophy that was dear to Trollope, that of conservative-liberalism.

The crises faced by Father John in The Macdermots of Ballycloran are profound. On a general level, he must deal with the grinding poverty of his parishioners, many of them victims of a rack-renting, absentee British landlord; others, who traffic in illegal spirits, victims of the overly zealous Revenue Police.²⁰ On a particular level, he is concerned with the troubled family of the novel's title, poor Irish Catholic landlords whose loyal tenants can rarely afford the modest rent. To add to Father John's worries, the naive Macdermot daughter, Feemy, has fallen in love with Myles Ussher, the calculating and unpopular Revenue Police captain, who, as Sarah Gilead puts it, “oppresses the starving in the name of the law, and preys economically and sexually on those too weak to fight back.”²¹ The priest himself, in general, “rather liked” (MB 1: 143) Captain Ussher, a Protestant loyal to England, since the policeman, unlike Father John's parishioners, had a modicum of formal education.

Although he might not have been able to define the term, it is plainly as a conservative-liberal that Father John deals with his parochial problems. And the importance to Trollope of that modus operandi, and its relationship to his fiction, is well documented in An Autobiography.²² Essentially, conservative-liberalism looks for an improvement in the lot of the socio-politically disadvantaged, an improvement so gradual, however, that there will be no disruption of the socio-political infrastructure. Like one of his favorite Palliser characters, the Duke of St. Bungay, Trollope was “never … a friend of great measures, knowing that when they come fast, one after the other, more is broken in the rattle than is repaired in the reform.”²³ Father John acts as if he were at one with the duke on this matter. He sees his parishioners as his family (MB 3: 147), and regards them as victims

driven from their cabins and little holdings, their crops and cattle taken from them … everywhere around desperate with their poverty and discontented equally with their own landlords, and the restraints put upon them by Government.

(MB 1: 148-49)

He will, however, countenance no “great measures” to improve the situation. When some parishioners join radical agrarian secret societies, he comes down heavily on them. It would be irrelevant to Father John that these societies' efforts could be viewed, in historian R. B. McDowell's words, as “a crude form of politics by which the will of the community was enforced, and evils ignored by the legislature redressed.”²⁴ To the priest, these secret society radicals are “‘infamous characters—men never or seldom seen at mass—makers of potheen … call[ing] themselves by some infernal name, and sect, by belonging to which they have all become liable to death or transportation’” (MB 2: 132-33).

When Father John is not angry with the proponents of radical ideas, he tends in fatherly fashion to dismiss such ideas as immature. For example, when Thady Macdermot, the novel's young protagonist, in a partially grasped perception that the source of his family's misery is in some way related to Ireland's colonial status, declares to the priest, “‘An it warn't for Feemy, then, Father John. … I'd strike one blow for the counthry and then, if I war hung or shot, or murthered anyway, devil a care’,” he is met with the soothingly stern response, “‘Oh, nonsense, Thady, about blows for your country, and getting hung and murthered, you're very fond of being hung in theory, but wait till you've tried it in practice, my boy’” (MB 1: 101-2).

Thady, in fact, does strike a blow for his country, but his unplanned blow adds to his own miseries and to Father John's burden. Mistakenly thinking that Ussher is physically removing Feemy from Ballycloran against her will, he strikes and unintentionally kills the policeman. Father John does his utmost to assist Thady, but strictly within the bounds of a conservative-liberal view of the world. Though he must have been aware of the harsh nature of the law in dealing with agrarian crime,²⁵ he “adopts the guise of catalytic agent in persuading Thady MacDermott to give himself up and confess to killing Ussher. …”²⁶ When, to Father John's horror, Thady is condemned to death, the priest again acts conventionally, if generously. He organizes a clemency petition to the lord lieutenant in Dublin, and, when this fails, ministers unstintingly to Thady until the young man's execution. He ministers similarly to Feemy, pregnant with Ussher's child, until she dies shortly before Thady, and then to Larry Macdermot, the demented pater familias.

Trollope's portrayal of Father John, while it may be “remarkably sympathetic,” is so to a considerable extent because the priest practices what Trollope preaches politically. In addition, and as part of that political practice, Father John, despite his resentment of the restraints put upon his parishioners by government, never raises the issue of Britain's right to hold Ireland as a colony. Father John's avoidance of this issue would certainly meet with the approval of the young British Post Office official who, according to Michael Sadlier, saw himself as an unofficial ambassador, explaining Britain's Irish policy to the Irish, and living “in disputatious amity with one of the most race-conscious nations in the world.”²⁷

Apart from similarities already noted, Father Marty, of An Eye for an Eye, like Father John, has no interest in any radical change in Ireland's colonial situation: “Father Marty was no great politician, and desired no rebellion against England. Even in the days of O'Connell and repeal, he had been but lukewarm” (EE 1: 112).²⁸ He is warm in his affection, however, for the British military establishment, in this case represented by the novel's protagonist, Army Lieutenant Fred Neville, later earl of Scroope in Dorchester. As the novel opens, Neville is stationed near Father Marty's parish in remote West Clare. So easy is Father Marty with Lieutenant Neville that he can make light with him of an issue most of his Irish contemporaries would not take lightly—Britain's treatment of Ireland over the centuries. Fr. Marty trivializes this issue as, while on his way to deal with a dairyman who has been watering the parish milk, he jokingly tasks his English friend with responsibility for the problem: “‘Nothing kills me, Mr. Neville, but when I hear of all them English vices being brought over to this poor, suffering, innocent counthry’” (EE 1: 128). On one occasion, he appears to have a serious thought about Anglo-Irish relations, as Fr. Marty muses “So little had been given to the Irish in these days, that they were bound to take what they could get” (EE 1: 112). What the Irish could get, however, is limited in Fr. Marty's mind to “justice for Ireland in the guise of wealthy English husbands for pretty Irish girls” (EE 1: 112).

The priest's hopes for justice focus specifically on the romance that develops between his lovely young parishioner, Kate McNamara, and Lieutenant Neville, to whom he has introduced her. Unfortunately for everybody concerned, the romance develops into a tragedy in some ways reminiscent of that in The Macdermots of Ballycloran: a Protestant British officer impregnates Catholic Irish girl, and once again, murder, misery, and madness are the order of the day. Neville will not go through a regular marriage with Kate, as he comes to feel that an Irish Catholic of inferior social standing should not become countess of Scroope. Kate's mother, in fury, pushes Neville off the Cliffs of Moher to his death. The mother is found guilty of murder, but insane, and confined for the rest of her life. Kate's baby is stillborn, and she emigrates at the end of the novel.

As this tragedy gradually unfolds around him, Father Marty acts as Father John would have. In fact, an authorial comment in An Eye for an Eye, “On the unhappy priest devolved the duty of doing whatever must be done” (EE 2: 199), could apply to the situation of either parish priest. As soon as Father Marty sadly suspects that Fred Neville might not play fair with Kate, he responds to the crisis bravely, kindly, and decisively, using everything from persuasion to threats on Neville. But it is important to note that this second most complete portrait by Trollope of an Irish parish priest is also the portrait of a conservative-liberal. For, despite the fact that he confronts the British officer with a courageous wrath, it never occurs to Father Marty to make any connection between Neville's personal exploitation of Kate and the more general colonial exploitation which made it possible. That exploitative element is reflected in Neville's thinking that, while he was in Ireland, “none of the ordinary, conventional usages of society were needed” (EE 2: 34). It would be alien to the priest's way of thinking to view the Neville-Kate relationship as Robert Lee Wolff suggests it might be viewed, “an allegory of England the aggressor and Ireland the helpless victim.”²⁹ It would be alien to Trollope's way of thinking, as would a similar correspondence pointed out by Robert Tracy be antipathetic to Trollope, Father Marty, and Father John taken together: “The heroines of The Macdermots of Ballycloran and An Eye for An Eye are violated and abandoned by their English lovers, like symbolic Kathleen Ni Houlihan or Dark Rosaleen, the popular nineteenth-century emblems of violated and downtrodden Ireland.”³⁰

In fact, among those who would see matters in that allegorical fashion are the clergy whom Trollope portrays in quite a hostile fashion—the nationalist Catholic priests. They believed that the fundamental cause of Ireland's problems was its status as a British colony. Like Fathers John and Marty, with their French education, modest social graces, and parochial rank, the nationalist priests have common bonds too. They are Maynooth-educated, uncouth, and never rise above the rank of curate. A further common bond, for two of the three most noteworthy of these curates, is that they have the “ill-favored appearance” which Arthur Pollard ascribes to Trollope's “antipathetic Evangelicals.” Trollope's dislike of the nationalist clergy is evident in his portrayal of Father Cullen, curate to Father John of The Macdermots:

He was educated at Maynooth … was perfectly illiterate, but chiefly showed his dissimilarity to the parish priest by his dirt and untidiness. He was a violent politician; the Catholic Emancipation had passed, and he therefore had no longer that grievance to complain of, but he still had national grievances, respecting which he zealously declaimed, when he could find a hearer. Repeal of the Union was not [in the 1830s] the common topic … but there were, even then, some who maintained that Ireland would never be herself, till the Union was repealed, and among these was Fr. Cullen … [He was] in language most violent and ungrammatical—in appearance most uncouth—in argument most unfair.

(MB 1: 71-72)

This is our introduction to Father Cullen. It is at a simple dinner at Father John's that we see the curate in action. Cullen interacts with Thady Macdermot, Captain Ussher, and Father John himself, in a manner that clearly shows Trollope's contempt for both the curate and his opinions. Thady, having arrived early, is sleeping before Father John's fire awaiting the priest's return. He is unpleasantly surprised to awaken to “the lank and yellow features, much worn dress, and dirty moist hand of Father Cullen” (MB 1: 142). Preoccupied with his own problems, Thady's consequent inattentiveness to Cullen's protests about England's treatment of Ireland hardly lends a sense of importance to those protests. Father John's cheery arrival interrupts what Trollope dryly calls the “further expression of Father Cullen's favorite political opinions” (MB 1: 147).

During the dinner, Cullen's complaints turn to a protest about the local doctor. Fr. Cullen's chronic whining, of course, casts doubts on the legitimacy of his political complaints, as does the good-natured Father John's description of him as a “fine martyr” (MB 1: 151). When Captain Ussher drops in briefly, he is treated to a simplistic religious homily by Cullen, who, as he finished “turned round his large obtruding eyes for approval” (MB 1: 159), an approval he fails to get from his fellow Catholics. After Ussher has left, the manner in which Father John, anxious to talk with Thady, gets rid of Cullen shows Trollope neatly putting the curate and his opinions in their proper place. Having ensured that the curate wants no more after-dinner punch, Father John paternally dismisses him with a “‘Then just go home, there's a good fellow’” (MB 1: 162).

There is some historical validity to Trollope's portrait of the unappealing Cullen. The opening of Maynooth meant that men from much poorer backgrounds than Fathers John and Marty could aspire to the priesthood, and their politics were frequently those of the dispossessed. (It is rarely pleasant to listen to the complaints of the dispossessed.) On the other hand, a prominent twentieth-century Irish Protestant historian, J. C. Beckett, observes that while nineteenth-century Maynooth did produce priests who were accused, with some justification, of having “the bitterest feelings of the partisan and the grossest habits of a peasant,” there is “a good deal of exaggeration” in the accusation.³¹ One should add here that Cullen cannot have been, in Trollope's words, “perfectly illiterate.” Illiteracy is, and was in Trollope's time, a bar to ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.

Trollope, however, does not take Beckett's perspective in viewing Maynooth's graduates. Not unlike Cullen is Father Creagh, curate to Father McCarthy, parish priest in Castle Richmond. Trollope presents Creagh as a sycophantic jingoist, “red-haired, slightly marked with the smallpox, and [having] a low forehead and cunning eyes” (CR 2: 76). We see Curate Creagh in action on the famine-relief committee on which Father McCarthy, the reluctant Reverend Townsend, and the local Anglo-Irish gentry served. Having first ingratiated himself with the gentry, he “altogether laid aside his bland smile, now that the time had come, as he thought, to speak up for the people” (CR 2: 77). Feeling that the public works projects connected with famine-relief are unfair, he bombastically proclaims

“They may bear [public works] in England, but they won't here … the Government, as you [gentry] call it, can't make men work. It can't force eight millions of the finest pisantry on God's earth—.”

At this juncture, Creagh is “cruelly and ruthlessly stopped by his own parish priest” (CR 2: 77), who reminds him that they are getting off the track. Creagh, then, is the second of Trollope's nationalist curates, who is clearly an irritant to, and must be put in his place by, a more reasonable parish priest. Father McCarthy is, incidentally, the least sharply evoked of Trollope's parish priests from a political standpoint, but it is clear from the priest's treatment of Creagh and from his cooperative attitude on the famine-relief committee that he believes, like Fathers John and Marty, in working within the system.

The elderly Trollope came to see the parish priest-curate dichotomy as a pattern in Irish life, as he explains in his final Irish novel, The Landleaguers (1883). This novel portrays the period 1879-82, when the Irish National Land League agitated for what became known as the “3 Fs”—fair rent, fixity of tenure, and freedom of sale—and ultimately for peasant proprietorship of the land, most of which belonged to Anglo-Irish landlords. Simultaneously, the Irish Party in the London Parliament, led by Parnell, strove, with great promise of success, for Irish Home Rule.

In a discourse early in The Landleaguers, Trollope sums up his forty-year perception of the Irish Catholic clergy: “There used to be two distinct sorts of priests; of whom the elder, who had probably been abroad, was the better educated; whereas the younger, who was home-nurtured, had less to say for himself on general topics” (L 1: 43). Trollope suggests that the Home Rule and Land League issues have politicized and polarized the Irish priesthood to a greater degree than in the past, and he lays the blame at the curates' feet. While “There is still the old difference between the elder and the younger priests” (L 1: 43-44), the curates seem to be even more radical than they were about forty years ago, in the times of Curates Cullen and Creagh:

The parish priest is willing that the landlord shall receive his rents, is not at least anxious that he shall be dispossessed of his land. But the curate has ideas of peasant proprietorship; is very hot for Home Rule, is less obedient to the authority of the bishops than he was of yore, and thinks more of the political, and less of the religious state of his country.

(L 1: 44)

Attempting to hold the line in The Landleaguers against the curates' radical thinking is Father Giles. Although Giles plays only a minor role in the novel, Trollope gives us a description of him sharp enough to let us see that he conforms to the pattern of the novelist's Irish parish priests. Father Giles is

… the parish pastor of Headford, in which position he had been for nearly forty years. He was a man seventy years of age, in full possession of all his faculties, very zealous in the well-being of his people, prone to teach them that if they would say their prayers, and do as they were bid by their betters, they would … go to heaven. But they would also have enough to eat in this world. …

(L 1: 45)

Note the strong conservative-liberal quality of Father Giles. While he is “zealous in the well-being of his people,” he still wants them to do what they are told “by their betters.” Clearly, Father Giles is a kind man, and we tend to sympathize with him when we learn that he is “troubled with the [radical] political desires of his curate, Father Brosnan,” whose conduct has brought the parish priest “in his old age into infinite trouble” (L 1: 45).

Curate Brosnan's political desires are troublesome to Trollope, as well as to Father Giles. Brosnan enthusiastically supports both the Home Rule and Land League movements, both of which were anathema to the novelist. In a digression in The Landleaguers, Trollope states bluntly that it is “necessary … for England's safety,—that Ireland should belong to her” (L 3: 148), and he accuses the Land League of attempting to “alter the laws for governing the world” (L 3: 153-54). It is not surprising, then, that Trollope's portrayal of Brosnan is something of a caricature.³² For example, when one of Brosnan's flock is refused a rent abatement, “Wrath boiled within [the curate's] bosom” (L 1: 47). He does not become normally angry, but rather “hot with righteous indignation” (L 1: 48). Brosnan seems, in fact, to have as much trouble with his temperature as with his temper:

At every victory won by the British Parliament his heart again boiled with indignation. At every triumphant [pro-Irish] note that came over the water from America … he boiled, on the other hand, with joy.

(L 1: 48-49)

Even when Brosnan is not “boiling,” he remains a fanatic: “He had gleams in his mind of a Republic. He thought of a Saxon as an evil being.” This pair of balanced sentences suggests, of course, that anyone sufficiently extreme to want a republic must correspondingly view the Saxon as evil. The narrative continues:

The Lord Lieutenant was a British vanity and English pomp, but the Chief Secretary was a minister of the evil one himself. … [Brosnan] was a man thoroughly disloyal, and at the same time thoroughly ignorant, altogether in the dark as to the truth of things, a man who whatever might be his fitness for the duties of the priesthood, to which he had been educated, had no capability of perceiving political facts, and no honesty in teaching them.

(L 1: 49)

Small wonder that, at the conclusion of this vignette of the nationalist curate, we learn that the reasonable Father Giles “looked upon Father Brosnan as an ignorant impertinent puppy …” (L 1: 50), for that is how Trollope looked upon him too.

Trollope portrays three distinct types of cleric: the evangelical Church of Ireland rector, George Armstrong of The Kellys and the O'Kellys being an appealing variant; the conservative-liberal Catholic parish priest; and the nationalist Catholic curate. Despite his fundamental dislike of evangelicism, and despite the glee with which he satirized the Irish evangelicals, Trollope did not lack sympathy for them in their uneasy colonial situation. He was certainly more sympathetic to them than he was to Barsetshire Low Church clerics like Mr. Slope. This may have been due, at least in part, to Trollope's colonial experience in Ireland. Much as he enjoyed and valued his Irish years, as he tells us in chapter four of An Autobiography, the English Post Office official never forgot where his primary loyalty lay.³³ Thus, he could probably empathize with the divided loyalties of the Church of Ireland clergy, Irish-born men who took their religious and political cues from England.

Trollope's political convictions played a sharply defined role in his portrayal of the Irish Catholic clergy. He had no time for those who wished to deprive England of its Irish colony and, in addition, overturn what Trollope saw as the proper hierarchic relationship between landlord and tenant. Although Trollope wanted improvements in the lot of the Irish peasantry, as set out in chapter nine of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, he did not want such improvements at the cost of major socio-political change. Thus, he parodied and often excoriated the young curates who wanted such change. Indeed, to return to the Trollopian claim noted at the outset of this essay, it is difficult not to see Cullen, Creagh, and Brosnan as priests somewhere in the range of “bad, or hypocritical, or unfaithful.”

On the other hand, Trollope delighted in the established, kindly, often foreign educated, parish priests who worked for their flocks without bucking the status quo. The importance to him of this type of priest is underscored in The Macdermots of Ballycloran's discourse on the education of the Irish clergy where, despite the controversial nature of the issue, Trollope strongly favored the support of Maynooth College with British Protestant taxpayers' money. His rationale was that a well-endowed Maynooth would raise its standards, producing fewer Curate Cullens and more Father Johns—that is, more men of a conservative-liberal bent who would reject radical change. As Trollope puts it, in a phrase so comfortable as almost to conceal its political implications, he wanted Irish Catholic priests who would “enter in their duties with abated prejudices and enlightened feelings” (MB 3: 84-85).

Notes

1. Anthony Trollope, “The Irish Beneficed Clergyman” (1866) in Clergymen of the Church of England, ed. Ruth ap Roberts (1870; rept. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974), pp. 1-42, hereafter cited parenthetically thus: (CCE).

2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Maranatha” is “An Aramaic phrase occurring in I Cor. XVI, 22; often erroneously regarded as composing with the word that precedes it in the text a formula of imprecation, anathema maranatha. Hence (as an abbreviation of this formula) used subst. for: A terrible curse.”

3. Anthony Trollope, The Kellys and The O'Kellys, 3 vols. (1848; rept. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979), hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (KO'K 3: 233).

4. Anthony Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 3 vols. (1847; rept. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979), hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (MB 1: 15).

5. Letter to Mary Holmes in The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. N. John Hall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 645.

6. Robert Lee Wolff, “Introduction,” The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1979), p. xiii.

7. John G. Hynes, “An Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope's Irish Masterpiece,” The Journal of Irish Literature (May, 1987), 56.

8. T. H. S. Escott, Anthony Trollope: His Work, Associates, and Originals (New York: John Lane Co., 1913), p. 223.

9. Arthur Pollard, “Trollope and the Evangelicals,” Nineteenth Century Fiction (December, 1982), 336.

10. Anthony Trollope, Castle Richmond, 3 vols. (1860; rept. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979), hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (CR 3: 117).

11. C. P. Snow, Trollope, His Life and Art (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1975), p. 112.

12. The Letters of Anthony Trollope, pp. 545-46.

13. Anthony Trollope, The Landleaguers, 3 vols. (1883; rept. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979) hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (L 1: 215).

14. Trollope would be amused, or perhaps depressed, to see that the attitude of the Rev. O'Joscelyn toward Queen Victoria and her advisors is precisely paralleled in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s by the attitude of the Rev. Ian Paisley to Queen Elizabeth II and her advisors.

15. Owen Dudley Edwards, “Anthony Trollope, The Irish Writer,” Nineteenth Century Fiction (December, 1982), 33-34.

16. Ruth ap Roberts, “Introduction,” Clergymen of the Church of England, p. 34.

17. In the main plot he acts as a love emissary for the protagonist, Lord Ballindine, in a very delicate situation. In the subplot, he bravely assists in putting an end to the dangerous activities of the villain, Barry Lynch.

18. Pollard, 334.

19. Hynes, 58.

20. The Revenue Police were a fully armed militia whose main job was to stop the manufacturing of illegal liquor.

21. Sara Gilead, “Trollope's Ground of Meaning: The Macdermots of Ballycloran,” The Victorian Newsletter (Spring, 1986), 23.

22. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947) pp. 151, 243-46.

23. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, p. 136.

24. Quoted in Galen Broeker, Rural Disorder and Police Reform in Ireland 1812-1836 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 10.

25. The illegal agrarian secret societies of the 1830s were much feared by the Dublin and London establishments, and the courts were correspondingly harsh. Thady's own lawyer refers to Ireland as being in “a deplorable state … entirely [owing to] secret societies …” (MB 3: 144-45). The judge at Thady's trial refers to “the irreparable injury such illegal societies … must do in the country …” (MB 3: 396-97).

26. Hynes, 58.

27. Michael Sadleir, Anthony Trollope, A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 140-41.

28. Anthony Trollope, An Eye for an Eye, 2 vols. (1879; rept. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1979), hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (EE 1: 112).

29. Robert Lee Wolff, p. xxi.

30. Robert Tracy, “‘The Unnatural Ruin’: Trollope and Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction,” Nineteenth Century Fiction (December, 1982), 360.

31. J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603-1923 (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 306.

32. He appears to be a caricature especially when one considers the brilliance of the actual spokesmen for the Land League and Home Rule—Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell.

33. As Hynes puts it, “… a man's sense of national pride and solidarity is never greater than when in an alien country.” John G. Hynes, “Anthony Trollope and the ‘Irish Question’: 1844-1882,” Études Irlandaises (December, 1983), 220.