Divided Loyalties: The Question of an Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century by Patrick Fagan (review)

560BOOK REVIEWS byterianism" of the Jansenists had nothing in common with the Calvinist conception ofministry. They functioned within the Catholic hierarchical and sacramental system and simply advocated a "constitutional" structure of the Church based upon a reinterpretation of late medieval conciliarism, as Van Kley shows well. Saint-Cyran and Arnauld after him were adversaries of absolutism in the Church, present in their eyes in the post-Tridentine Papacy and its Jesuit supporters ; a return to an idealized church polity was an important element of their program ofreform, which would realize what neither the Reformation nor Trent had achieved. This program was continued by Quesnel and its explicit condemnation by Unigenitus produced the mutations carefully analyzed by Van Kley. Both persecuted minorities may have shared a spirit of resistance to political absolutism fostered by their experience, but this does not necessarily imply ideogical affinity beyond common references to Augustinianism. It is all a question of perspectives; raised in the Calvinist tradition (p. 10), Van Kley is attentive to the similarities; from a Catholic viewpoint the differences seem quite as much incontrovertible. This is an important book, therefore, that deserves, indeed, to become "a standard work in the field," despite the fact that it bolsters the association, misleading in my eyes, between Calvinism and Jansenism. The absence of a bibliography is unfortunate; at least a list of the references used in the notes would have been helpful. Jacques M. Gres-Gayer The Catholic University ofAmerica Divided Loyalties: The Question of an Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century. By Patrick Fagan. (Dublin, Four Courts Press. Distributed in the U.S. by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., Portland, Oregon . 1997. Pp. 202. $45.00.) For more than a century now, much has been written on the penal laws inflicted on Irish Catholics from 1691 to 1829, and on the sporadic attempts made to abrogate them. Each successive scholar to take up the question, if one excepts Maureen Wall, was interested in some particular aspect or episode to the exclusion of others. As often as not, their work appeared in obscure journals or booklets not easily found. The merit of Patrick Fagan's book is that he takes a basic point, namely, the various oaths ofallegiance, abjuration, and supremacy, and uses their gradual evolution to provide a solid framework for a study of the laws as a whole. He comes well equipped for the task, having already written biographies of Cornelius Nary (d. 1738) and Sylvester Lloyd, Bishop ofKillaloe (d. 1747), both early spokesmen on the Catholic side, and edited in two volumes the Irish material among the Stuart Papers now at Windsor Castle. His familiarity with the published and unpublished writings of Charles O'Conor of Belanagare (d. 1791) greatly enriches this account. book reviews561 One could say that Fagan's chief interest is in the period before 1778 when Luke Gardiner's parliamentary bill,"a watershed in history,"enabled Catholics to take long leases and put paid both to "discoverers" of Catholic property and to the"gavelling act,"which broke up their small estates. For the period after 1778, one should also read Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise ofthe Irish Nation.The Catholic Question, 1690-1830 (1992), which, though it says little of the early eighteenth century, offers a rich panorama of later decades from a purely political point of view.Yet Fagan does discuss in greater detail the later relief acts of 1782, 1792, and 1793. Even the so-called "Emancipation Act" of 1829 required a new oath of Catholic members of parliament, while denying to the regular clergy any legal recognition of their existence. The author's long analysis of names in the Test-Book (1775-76) and Catholic Qualification Rolls (1778-1830 ca.) is extremely useful, not least because it explains exactly which records survived the destruction of the Record Office in 1922 and where exactly one may find them. For this reviewer, the chief advantage of the book is that it draws into a cohesive whole a series of episodes and problems hitherto treated in isolation, such as Nary's controversy with the Protestant archbishop Synge (1733), the Stuart nomination of bishops, the "Trimblestown pastoral" (1756...