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chapter 4 In January of 1840, about half a year before Wat Tyler began its serial run, Harrison Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes began serial publication in Bentley’s Magazine, where it immediately followed his immensely popular Jack Sheppard.1 Like Wat Tyler, Ainsworth’s novel depicts a disenfranchised people—in this case Roman Catholics—employing moralized physical force in order to gain the franchise and full citizenship. Like Egan, Ainsworth explores this form of social agency by transforming a figure who had traditionally been treated as one of the villains of British history into a man of moral integrity. Whereas Egan framed the Peasant Rebellion in terms of Chartist discourse, however, Ainsworth employs parliamentary discourse that enables him to envision a tolerant Whig middle class that incorporates Catholics into the nation, even as it denies citizenship to the working classes. Parliamentary discourse of the 1830s exploited Catholicism, as it did Chartism , as a means of setting forth the Tory aristocracy’s and Whig middle class’s respective claims that they could best govern the nation. The Whigs had pushed through the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 against Tory opposition, and the question of whether Catholics should be enfranchised continued to be subject to debate throughout the following decade. In response to the Whigs’ return to power in 1835, the Tories sought to win support from dissenters who had supported Whig reform by appealing to their prejudices against Catholics (Cahill 66; see also Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism 200). The Whig press responded by portraying the Tories as bigots mounting a “no-Popery” campaign “play[ing] upon the love and attachment which the people of Great Britain have to their religious faith” in order to pursue “political” objectives.2 Of course, the Whigs’ advocacy of reliUnconsummated Marriage and the “Uncommitted” Gunpowder Plot in Guy Fawkes the “uncommitted” gunpowder plot in GU Y FAW K ES 51 gious tolerance was no less politically calculated than the anti-Catholicism of the Tories. The resulting parliamentary discourse drew upon and promoted depictions of the Gunpowder Plot focused on the question of whether Catholics were loyal citizens or sought to overturn the constitution by making England a Catholic state. As James Sharpe has shown, Catholic emancipation, which began in the late eighteenth century, coincided with a change in representations of the Gunpowder Plot that shifted responsibility from the Catholic Church and Catholics in general toward a handful of conspirators, the effect of which was to suggest that most Catholics, unlike the conspirators, were loyal citizens (115–16, 138). In line with their advocacy of tolerance, the Whigs embraced this revisionary history, while Tory discourse maintained that Catholics’ divided loyalties—to Rome as well as to England—had not diminished since the era of the Gunpowder Plot. The first important revision of the history of the plot was set forth by John Lingard, a Roman Catholic priest who, though not a Whig apologist, had connections with Whig circles in part because of their sympathy for emancipation. In his History of England, which began appearing to considerable acclaim in 1819, Lingard employed a two-pronged approach to Catholics’ role in the plot. On the one hand, he suggested that the plot was justified because the Catholics had been deprived of their rights by an “inexorable” monarch who had “extinguished the last ray of hope” for justice (9.37). On the other hand, he sought to demonstrate that the majority of Roman Catholics nonetheless remained loyal citizens and did not support the plot, reinforcing his argument for their loyalty by contending that Rome and the church had no hand in it and that the Jesuits who advised the conspirators even sought to prevent it.3 Moreover, he constructed his narrative so as to suggest that even after the conspirators formulated the plot to blow up Parliament, they saw the plan as a measure of last resort and continued to work for a negotiated settlement. When, a few years later, the barrister and legal scholar David Jardine evaluated the legal evidence in the second volume of his edition of State Trials (1835), which Lingard in turn cited in the revised edition of his history consulted by Ainsworth, he concluded that in its main outlines Lingard’s account was correct (xi). While acknowledging that, from a legal point of view, the conspirators were clearly guilty, he nonetheless concurred that their “political situation,” in which they were deprived of “the common rights and liberties of Englishmen,” provided “sufficient motives to insurrection” (7...

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