3 - Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body

Summary

[P]ersecution is Religion's handmaid. – You must persecute to be consistent.

— William Makepeace Thackeray, letter to Percival Leigh

Yet it may seem well to ask ourselves … when we read of … great religious persecutions on this side or on that … not merely, what germs of feeling we may entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of consideration, may be actually present to our minds such as might have furnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those legal crimes, with plausible excuses for them …

— Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

Religious persecution offered much sensational interest in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture. The physical and psychological torments of heroic martyrs – perplexed by conflicting loyalties to state and church, family and conscience – are a stock feature of popular Victorian fictions by both Catholic and Protestant authors. Even though critics derided such works ‘as a “literary nuisance’, the exciting blend of gory tortures, riotous mobs, and wily entrappers of the innocent faithful provided vicarious adventure and spiritual gratification simultaneously. This chapter argues that the complex Victorian rhetoric of Catholic torture, persecution and suffering is of particular importance for understanding nineteenth-century anxieties about the individual's relation to institutional authority, expressed in terms of the rights of the law over the body.