CHAPTER ONE

That Fallen Worship

‘She was a Catholic... And deemed that fallen worship far more dear Perhaps because ’twas fallen...’

Lord Byron, Don Juan

IT IS TIME TO CONSIDER the Catholic world which the savagery of the Gordon Riots of June 1780 was intended to destroy. A year and a half earlier, shortly after the passing of the Catholic Relief Act, the whole household of Lord Petre at Thorndon Hall in Essex was in a state of joyous preparation. This was because King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte, together with their travelling royal panoply, had proposed themselves for a visit timed to coincide with the inspection of some troops in Essex. In English Society, distinguished birth evidently trumped the theoretical disability of a proscribed religion.

In the present instance, Lord Petre was in every way a suitable courtier and host – with the exception of his Catholicism. Cardinal Newman would later describe the English Catholics as having spent decades ‘in the shadows’, and then added: ‘more accurately the shadows of obscure country houses’. This was certainly not true of all the ancient surviving Catholic families: some of the houses were very large and grand and, in Newman’s sense, diffused a good deal of sunlight. Had not Lord Petre’s father been given a licence by the Archbishop of Canterbury to marry his mother in 1732 – although both were well known to be Catholics?1

Lord Petre was confident of his position in the world, which he regarded with a certain hauteur. This was a man who, with a lofty sense of priorities, paid his Jesuit household chaplain £20 a year but his cook £40. (A generation later Sir William Jerningham paid his chaplain a princely £300; as he happily remarked when the man died, now he could give the salary as pin money to his wife.) At the same time Lord Petre was markedly charitable to the less fortunate, and in fact expended ‘his time, his mind and his fortune’ helping them, in the words of Charles Butler in his Historical Memoirs respecting the English, Irish and Scottish Catholics, published in 1819.2

A particular indication of his esteemed personal status is given by the fact that he was actually nominated Grand Master of the Masonic Order in 1772, this being before the Papal condemnation of the Freemasons. The new Meeting Hall in Great Queen Street, London, was dedicated to him, in recognition of his sterling work in raising money for it. His portrait^*1 shows a fine, upstanding man of great dignity, whom the Freemasons would later salute: ‘In an age of religious bigotry he rose superior to the partisanship of all faiths and creeds... A true and liberal Christian.’ Another nineteenth-century ecclesiastic, Cardinal Manning, said that he knew the Church was built on the foundations of St Peter, but he had discovered it was also built on those of Lord Petre.3 It seemed appropriate to his rank to entertain his Protestant sovereign, although he would be devastated when his daughter married a Protestant (subject).

The largest landowner in Essex, with financial resources backed up by owning a great deal of timber, Robert Edward, 9th Baron Petre came of an ancient family which had managed to hold on to their wealth despite potential penalties. Sir William Petre had been Secretary of State to Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary Tudor in succession; the first Lord Petre was created in 1603. Unfortunately, there was a reverse towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the Lord Petre of the time was imprisoned in the Tower of London as a result of the false denunciations of Titus Oates in the so-called Popish Plot.

This malevolent fantasy of 1678, a hundred years before the Catholic Relief Bill, resulted in the execution of various innocent Catholics, including priests. Four priests died in prison, one at the age of eighty-four, probably as a result of being thrown down three flights of stairs.4 Lord Stafford endured a lifetime’s imprisonment and died in the Tower. It remained a vivid if vicious part of the Anti-Catholic propaganda which reached its culmination in the Gordon Riots. In that capacity it could be linked to other legendary episodes of horror in which innocent Protestants were persecuted by villainous Catholics. The fact was that these episodes were horrendous either way: whether true – as some were – or fabricated – as many others were.

One of these was the (genuine) Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day of 1572 in which 3,000 French Huguenots died in Paris and as many as 70,000 in the rest of France. It was notable that a pamphlet was issued in 1678, the time of the Popish Plot, entitled A Relation of the Barbarous and Bloody Massacre of about an hundred thousand Protestants, begun at Paris, and carried on all over France by the Papists, in the Year 1572. Lest anyone forget, it ended with a specific denunciation of the Pope: ‘Nor did the Pope think there was yet Blood enough shed, but that which all the World condemned as excessive Cruelty, he apprehended was too gentle.’ In short, in the words of a recent historian, since the sixteenth-century Reformation, Catholicism had been regarded ‘as a form of national treachery’.5

In 1666 it had been an automatic reflex to link the tragic accidental Great Fire of London which ignited in Pudding Lane to ‘the Papists’. On the first day, there was a rumour that 5,000 French (Catholic) troops had landed in the south of England.6 Given the primordial desire for some kind of visible target as spurious comfort in a time of disaster, who better than the Papists? The Jesuits were as always convenient targets: Titus Oates, recalling that the Jesuits had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, accused them of having another go in 1666.^*2 At the time an hysterical false confession, probably under torture, by a deranged Catholic watchmaker called Robert Hubert had conveniently implicated the French and given the slender proof that was needed. (He was hanged for it despite the doubts of the judges concerned.)

In 1681, a plaque clearly blaming the Catholics was put up commemorating the Great Fire on the house where it had started in 1666: ‘Here by ye permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this protestant city from the malicious hearts of barbarous papists, by the hand of their agent Hubert, who confessed, and on ye ruines of this place declared the fact for which he was hanged that here began that dredfull fire.’^*3 Similarly, a monument erected to the Fire by Christopher Wren had an Anti-Catholic message carved on its east side in 1681, which caused Alexander Pope, himself a Catholic, to deplore its message in the next century:

London’s column, pointing at the skies,

Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies.7

If one delved further back into the unconscious of the sixteenth-century mob, not to say the Protestant memory, one might find the deaths of Protestant martyrs decreed by the last English monarch who was openly Catholic throughout her life. Queen Mary Tudor, known as ‘Bloody Mary’, was estimated to have killed 300 people for the sake of religion (the executions carried out in the subsequent reign of her half-sister Elizabeth – 123 priests and more than sixty laymen, including women – were of course part of the Catholic memory, not the Protestant one, and in any case took place over a far longer period of time).8 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563 at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, went through several new editions, including cheap instalments, in the eighteenth century. Here brutal religious persecution was linked with Catholicism and foreign intervention, whereas the Protestant martyrs represented ‘everyman’, including women and babies.

Where individuals were concerned, it was the Pope who was so often the problem. When the Jesuit Father Edmund Campion was sentenced to death, he declared with the eloquence of the future martyr: ‘In condemning us [the Catholics] you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient priests, bishops and kings, and all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of St Peter.’9 It was the last phrase which was lethal.

And yet in the Protestant memory there was that notorious Bull Regnans in Excelsis of Pope Pius V of 1570, following the accession of Elizabeth in 1558, excommunicating her. Far from helping the fortunes of so-called ‘recusants’ or Catholics, it had a devastating effect. By formally releasing Elizabeth’s subjects from their loyalty to a heretical sovereign, it enabled them all to be treated as potential traitors in the eyes of the government. The Catholic Cardinal William Allen, for example, did not pretend to believe that Catholics and Protestants could live together, and aimed, on the contrary (if unsuccessfully), at the reconversion of England by a form of conquest.10 He assisted in the planning of the invasion of the Spanish Armada of 1588.

Most potent of all, perhaps, because it had become an annual ritual of cheerful Anti-Popery, was the image of the bonfires set alight throughout the country on 5 November, in memory of the so-called Gunpowder Plot of 1605. This was another genuine plot, even if the details were not as straightforward as the government of the day pretended. Ever since, an effigy representing the most memorable conspirator, Guy Fawkes, in his trademark black slouch hat, might be burnt on a village green or similar public space to universal glee; alternatively, some image of the Devil or the Pope (in so far as there was perceived to be a difference) provided good sport.

The vilification of the Pope, the cardinals who surrounded him, and all the other trappings of the Roman Catholic Church was amply demonstrated in the scandalous satires of the eighteenth century. The ostensible celibacy of both men and women in religious orders was mocked, as in a couplet of 1733: ‘Their Church consists of vicious Popes, the rest Are whoring Nuns and bawdy bugg’ring Priests.’

By way of illustration here were cardinals, identifiable by their hats and robes, lewdly kissing; their love objects were not necessarily female, although when women were involved the dress, if any, was scanty, the flesh by way of contrast lavish, and the sex often visibly unnatural. As the blasphemous text beneath one such picture, Le Magnificat de Priappe, had it: here was the physical demonstration of the famous words, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’.11

Enormous British interest, with numerous newspaper articles and best-selling translations of the legal briefs, was taken in salacious reports of a case for abuse brought in 1730 by a twenty-year-old French woman in Toulon against a Jesuit priest described in a popular jingle as:

That compound of a goatish Lecher

And a most edifying preacher.

There were numerous newspaper articles and best-selling translations of the legal briefs. One letter to a newspaper hoped that ‘every British subject and true Protestant’ would now understand ‘by what villainous and diabolical Arts’ Catholic priests maintained ‘absolute Dominion’ over the consciences as well as ‘the Persons’ of their devotees.12

All this was the work of passion – and the work of prejudice. But there was a whole other aspect to Anti-Catholicism which might be termed ‘politics and foreign policy’. The Stuart threat to the Hanoverian dynasty on the throne had once been a real one, with two armed invasions, coupled with rebellions, in 1715 and 1745.

Furthermore, they had been backed by Catholic powers. Earlier it was the French in the form of Louis XIV who had supported the Catholic James II to fight the new Protestant King of England, William III, in Ireland. James fled to France after his deposition and, following his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne, Louis XIV gave him refuge for the rest of his life. In short, throughout the eighteenth century the English were regularly involved in wars with Catholic France and Catholic Spain. There might be said to be a hereditary enmity of which their different official religions were symbolic, even if there were many other causes as well.

In 1778 reality was different. The past could not be altogether obliterated: the mother of Lord Petre, for example, host at Thorndon Hall, was the daughter of the Earl of Derwentwater, who had been executed for his part in the rebellion of 1715. But the Stuarts were represented in 1778 by Charles Edward, King Charles III in loyal Stuart parlance. This man, grandson of the king deposed by William III in 1688, had once been known as the Young Pretender, and even as Bonnie Prince Charlie. By this time he no longer represented youth and adventure, but had ‘a melancholy, mortified appearance’, in the words of a contemporary.13 He was now approaching sixty, with his ‘countenance heavy and sleepy’, a bloated red face due to excessive drinking, a lugubrious gaze, his big frame bowed down – in other words, no hero figure to anyone.

Charles Edward had no legitimate heir, and on his death the Stuart claim, if pursued, would thus pass to his only brother Henry. This was the man now designated as Cardinal Henry of York, who had been ordained as a priest and was long resident in Rome. It was true that both men had spoken English since childhood – Henry was described in later years as speaking English ‘pretty well for a foreigner’ – but his cardinalate was obviously held against him in a Protestant country, even if Charles Edward had had a secret ‘conversion’ to Protestantism in 1750 on a clandestine visit to London. When it came to the two royal houses, Stuart and Hanover, it could not be questioned that the Hanoverians were by now thoroughly Anglicized by residence for over sixty years since 1715, whereas the Stuarts, in contrast, were aliens. (In his eighty-two years, Cardinal Henry, the Stuart heir, spent twenty months outside Italy, but none of them in England.)14

Pointing again in the direction of tolerance was the Quebec Act of 1774. Following the treaty which ended the Anglo-French wars in North America, Canada passed to the British. Yet the largest part of the population was Catholic. Later on, George III personally expressed understanding, and referred to ‘the old inhabitants whose rights and usages ought by no means to be disturbed’.15 Certainly, he acquired at this point about 70,000 new ‘Popish’ subjects. And there was the practical matter of security. Anti-Catholic penalties had not developed here, animated by passion and prejudice: where politics and foreign policy were concerned, it would be dangerous to impose them. So the Quebec Act was passed, guaranteeing free practice of the Catholic Faith, and, in a significant foretaste of what was to be so controversial in Britain twenty-five years later, removed a reference to the Protestant Faith from the Oath of Allegiance.

The English Catholic world in the eighteenth century, in contrast to such stirring events, presented outwardly a curiously untroubled appearance, given the technical illegality of so many of its practices. Estimates of the actual numbers of Catholics vary, as any estimate of a body practising a religion forbidden by the law of the country must inevitably do. There were probably about 70,000 or 80,000 British Catholics in the 1770s, out of a population of seven million, with estimates of the specific Scottish Catholic population varying between 12,000 and 19,000.

In the future, the rise of the middle classes in the burgeoning industrial cities would be a significant factor. For the time being the continuing influx of Irish workers, who were all Catholic, was an unsettling element, as everything about Ireland at that time was unsettling to the class known as the Protestant Ascendancy which ruled it. In the meantime, the county families who pursued the way of life of their ancestors could do so largely without interference except in times of national danger, as it was perceived by the authorities.

It hardly needs saying that county families who expressed their restless worldly ambitions, if any, by a keen competitive interest in racing (like the Petres) were very much part of English life. Then there was cricket. John Nyren, the great early chronicler of the game in The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, was born at Hambledon in Hampshire in 1764 into a Scottish Catholic family which had been implicated in the earlier Jacobite risings and fled to England. Nyren was educated by a Jesuit. His father, Richard Nyren, was founder and member of the famous Hambledon Club which gave laws to English cricket, and his daughter Mary went on to be Abbess of the English convent at Bruges – a conventional path for a girl of her religion at that time. The original list of members of what was then known as the Mary-le-Bone Cricket Club included wealthy Catholics such as a Stonor and Thomas Lord himself, a Catholic by birth, whose name is still commemorated by the ground.16

The harsh laws and the live-and-let-live reality were two very different things. This world was divided into the upper classes, the aristocracy and the gentry, and what were literally the working classes. Undoubtedly, the survival of Catholicism in the past was due largely to the dogged, but hopefully inconspicuous, protection provided by the former to the latter. Country neighbours, Anglicans and Catholics, lived amicably together in keeping with this laissez-faire reality.

If we take the Welds, an ancient Catholic recusant family established in Dorset, it was significant that at the time of the Forty-Five Rebellion, when all Catholics were supposed to be suspect – not unreasonably – there was trouble for them at Poole Harbour. Rumours were abroad of a plot to release Catholic prisoners held at Plymouth, along the coast. Nevertheless, the local magnate, the Lord Lieutenant, found these charges ‘malicious and improbable’. Edward Weld was equally accommodating in turn, and sent his coach horses to a neighbour’s stables ‘that I may not be in any way obnoxious to the government’. There was general agreement in the neighbourhood that the Welds would give no trouble, and Lord Shaftesbury went further: ‘you might have your horses whenever you pleased’.17

Meanwhile the lower classes, such as servants of various degrees and farm workers, miners, mill workers and tradesmen, responded with loyalty, hard work and gratitude for the opportunity to practise the faith of their fathers (and even more importantly, in many cases, their mothers). Their contribution should certainly not be ignored, even if it is for obvious reasons more difficult to uncover than that of their theoretical superiors. The unspoken survival of the Catholic community in England, despite the Penal Laws, depended also on these local families unknown to history whose existence is recorded as Catholics in Anglican parish registers. That of Walton-le-Dale parish church, near Preston in Lancashire in 1781, for example, records 178 families, with 875 individuals as ‘Papists’. Where baptisms are concerned, parental occupations are stated as weaver, husbandman and labourer, with names such as Turner, Wilcock, Baldwin and Charnley.^*4^,18

Records of graveyards bear witness to the kind of benevolent indulgence by which local people seen as harmless have always managed to get by. Thomas Errington, a noted London silversmith, father of a future archbishop, bought a large estate in 1800 at Clints in Swaledale in Yorkshire. On 8 October 1779 Anne Preston, the cook at Clints, died: ‘She was a Papist but [underlined three times] had the Burial Service read as usual.’ On the other hand, ‘Bryan son to Miles Stapleton Esq. of Clints and Lady Mary his wife born not baptized by me as the family are papists.’19 Evidently neither of these events caused any disruption as, according to the law, they might have done.

The great houses had their chapels, which might perhaps for the sake of form be described as libraries, just as chapels had been secret upper rooms in the dangerous times of the sixteenth century. Priests, on the other hand, were openly acknowledged as such, where once they had been described as tutors. (In the 1590s the Jesuit Father John Gerard had the great advantage of gentlemanly birth and manners: his skill on the hunting field, especially falconry, made him a plausible family tutor.) Yet technically they were illegal: as we have seen, it was still possible to impose a sentence of life imprisonment upon a Catholic priest. In a survival from the bad old days (from the Catholic point of view), the Mass was carefully described in public as ‘Prayers’.

Lord Byron, in Don Juan, unfinished in 1824 when he died, created a romantic character in Aurora Raby, a sixteen-year-old girl famous for her purity who attracted the passing fancy of the Don. She was an adherent of ‘that fallen worship’, Catholicism, and ‘deemed that fallen worship far more dear / Perhaps because ’twas fallen’. This loyalty, this solidarity, was another residue of the bygone age of danger and execution, equivalent to the folk memories of the Popish Plot. For obvious reasons the Catholic aristocracy was heavily intermarried. Petres, Dormers, Fitzherberts, Stonors, Gages, Welds, Stourtons, Throckmortons, Howards – the leading family of the Dukes of Norfolk – all found partners among themselves with relentless regularity; with, it has to be admitted, occasional slippings-away of great families, when the lure of more obvious worldly advancement was felt to be too great. But, more conventionally, in two generations the Petres made three prestigious interconnected Norfolk marriages. The 9th Lord married, first, Anne Howard, the niece of one duke, and, the year after her death, Juliana Howard, sister of another. His son married Mary Bridget Howard, the sister of Juliana, his own stepmother.

Preparations for the royal visit to Thorndon Hall began ten days before the projected arrival of the royal party on 2 October.20 They were certainly on a royal scale, just as the house itself, a huge, newly built Palladian mansion with a Corinthian portico, was fit to be a palace. Damask for furnishings was sent from London, with the proviso (which has a curiously modern ring) that it should be English damask. In the end Indian damask was also needed, of ‘a very beautiful green’, for the Drawing Room and the King’s Dressing Room, while the Queen’s Bedchamber had a more restful ‘low-coloured Damask’. A few days later two whole coaches of female upholsterers, gilders, japanners, cabinet-makers and painters arrived, which with the addition of men and women hired locally came to about a hundred people toiling away. A procession of French cooks began, accompanied by their professional moulds, and special confectioners. Another coach full of cooks arrived on the eve of the visit. Except that, as it turned out, it wasn’t.

On Friday, 2 October, when all was prepared, an express message came from Lord Amherst. The King had decided to postpone the visit by nearly three weeks to 19 October. The cooks stopped cooking. Everything that was edible had to be eaten up, with special local dinner parties arranged for ‘those dishes that would not keep, very good things,’ wrote Lord Petre afterwards. (Given his benevolent attitude to the local poor, one assumes that they also benefited.) So the cooks departed.

On 14 October back came the cooks, and the preparing started all over again. Grandees such as Lord Waldegrave, Lady Mildmay and the Duke of Norfolk himself had lent gold plate. The whole scene glittered when, at ten minutes past three, in the words of Lord Petre’s journal: ‘behold in the Avenue the finest sight of the kind I ever saw’.21 The sun was bright and shone on the soldiers drawn up on each side as the King and Queen appeared. The massive artillery was engaged in a perpetual noisy salutation, which echoed back from the woods and joined the enthusiastic shouts of the people. The whole county, some on horse, some on foot, were assembled.

The man who now stepped into view was aged forty and had occupied the throne he inherited from his grandfather George II for the last eighteen years; well built but not overweight, with the florid looks which would become associated with his family. John Adams, as America’s first Minister to the Court of St James, would deliver the following verdict on him a few years later: King George III had all the ‘affability’ of Charles II and all the ‘domestic virtues and regularity of Charles I’22 (a reversal of these judgements would certainly make for a much less suitable occupant of the throne).

There was no public hint at this point of the mental – or was it physical? – instability which would haunt the later years of his reign. In fact, his principled firmness at the time of the Gordon Riots was the subject of comment: ‘Never had any people a greater obligation to the judicious Intrepidity of their Sovereign’, in the words of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. It was symbolic of his equability – at this date – that he had actually been born in Norfolk House, belonging to the leading Catholic peer, the 9th Duke of Norfolk, with the strong-minded Mary Blount, who was said to be able to ‘act the man’ when necessary, as his Duchess.23 And this Duke of Norfolk was the uncle of Lady Petre, his hostess. In both cases, the values of the aristocracy trumped those of the illegal religion.

Queen Charlotte, the German princess the King had married sight unseen soon after his accession, was neither ‘tall nor a beauty’ but very pale and thin, according to Horace Walpole, describing her at the Coronation which followed shortly after the marriage. On the other hand, she seemed ‘very sensible, genteel and remarkably cheerful’.24 Now in her mid-thirties, Queen Charlotte had proved herself right royally (in the way many queens did not) as a deliverer of princely progeny. She was already the mother of twelve out of the fifteen children she would bear altogether; the eldest, George Prince of Wales, was sixteen at this time.

The visit itself was on the same magnificent scale as the arrival, including the fact that the King and Queen were grand enough to need separate dining arrangements. Having escorted them to bed at one, the hosts then enjoyed their own supper at three o’clock in the morning. The royal couple arose for a special breakfast à deux in the noble Presence Chamber: ‘all sorts of cakes were served up’. The military review which provided the focus for the visit took place in the morning, a special stand having been built so that the Queen could watch. The next day the royal couple departed for the house of Lord Waldegrave, leaving behind a gracious present of 100 guineas for the servants.

The cost to Lord Petre was estimated at over £1,000 (about £75,000 today). Judging from his response to the King, it was all more than worth it. And yet the message was not without its political significance: ‘I shall always feel it as the most flattering circumstance of my Life,’ wrote Lord Petre, ‘that your Majesty gave me an opportunity of shewing him in the ordinary course of life that respect, Loyalty and affection which the laws of my country prevent me from doing on more important occurrences.’ He meant his inability as a Catholic peer to sit in the House of Lords.25 It was an attitude eloquently displayed by his fellow Catholic Lord Arundell of Wardour, who was painted by Reynolds in his official peer’s robes – despite the fact that he was barred from taking his seat.

On the one hand the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 aroused further political hopes, as delicately hinted by Lord Petre; on the other hand the violent reaction which followed it in June 1780 confirmed the difficulties which lay ahead before Emancipation and freedom from legal restraints could be achieved. The setting-up of the so-called Catholic Committee brought into prominence a third and potentially lethal feature of the debate: a split between the well-born Catholic laity, the natural governing class had it not been for their religion, and the Church itself. In short, the laity was seen, not without some justification, as trying to free itself from ecclesiastical control in the interests of worldly advancement. ‘That system of lay interference’ was the angry description of Bishop John Milner later – a key figure in all this, but not on the side of the aristocracy.

The original Catholic Committee consisted of a group of lawyers called together by Lord Petre, to discuss how to bring Relief Acts before Parliament. They had gathered before the 1778 Act in the Thatched House Tavern in Essex Street, taverns being the traditional place for such meetings. At this point the ancient Bishop Challoner, he who would die shortly after the Gordon Riots, gave cautious approval. Challoner, however, born in the previous century, represented the more passive English Catholic Church of yesteryear. Four Apostolic Vicars presided over various geographical areas, with priests beneath them – none of them of course with any legal status, rather the reverse, in the United Kingdom.

The Catholic Committee was reconvened in 1782, and refounded in 1787 with Lords Petre, Stourton and Clifford among the peers, Sir John Throckmorton and Sir William Jerningham – all distinguished Catholic names – among the others. The decision it now took to present a Petition was a fateful one for the English Catholic community because of its nature. The Petition suggested that Catholics should take a new oath of loyalty to the King explicitly denouncing the Stuart claims to the throne. So far, so good, or rather so placatory. But the oath was also to contain another clause even more important for the future: Papal jurisdiction in England was also to be explicitly denied. William Sheldon, the first Secretary of the Catholic Committee, rejected any idea that the Catholic clergy in England should be consulted over temporal, that is, political matters. Their authority – like the Pope’s – was to be spiritual only.

The thirty-year-old Sir John Throckmorton wrote pamphlets on the subject which he distributed free of charge. They proposed the election of bishops by the laity according to ancient tradition, and in general advocated less Papal interference. ‘I have no other object in this Address to you,’ wrote Sir John, ‘than the desire of seeing our religion practiced in its primitive purity.’ Less engaging was his bald announcement in April 1785 to the Catholic Committee: ‘We don’t want Bishops [at the meeting].’26

This attitude among the prominent English laymen came to be known as ‘Cisalpine’: that is to say, ‘on this side of the Alps’, as opposed to the rest of Italy, where lay the magnetic force called Rome. It was a state of mind which made it easy to understand why the heir to the throne, George Prince of Wales, might describe the Catholic religion as ‘the religion for a gentleman’. The easy contacts with Catholics made by young aristocrats during their Grand Tours of Europe (the equivalent of the modern gap year) were not likely to turn their minds towards personal bigotry on return. In the same way, Charles James Fox enjoyed ‘Popish libraries’ abroad, and Whigs whose lack of doctrinaire beliefs made them tolerant would not distinguish between Catholic friends and others while laughing at the ridiculous nature of Popish beliefs.

There was, however, a problem with the Cisalpine philosophy. It might or might not appeal to the King of the country of which they were proud to be nationals, but it was not calculated to appeal to their own Catholic clergy getting their authority from Rome. In the years to come the English Catholic clergy, above all the abrasive Bishop John Milner, saw this for what it was: a radically different approach to Emancipation from the mere request for Relief. If the Catholic Church was not to be directed by the Vicar of Christ, currently resident in Rome, then by whom? The distinction drawn by the Petition between spiritual direction and temporal orders relating to national affairs was one which might satisfy the Catholic gentry, longing to be full members of the society to which their families had belonged since ancient times. But, as the clergy perceived, it could be highly dangerous from the point of view of their own status.

Who, for example, should appoint bishops? If the clear answer was the English Catholic Church to which they belonged, then did not the monarch have any say in the appointments – on grounds of security, in view of the Catholic past of rebellion and disaffection? There were many possibilities which might satisfy the need for a formally good relationship between the King and the Catholics. Perhaps the King could be presented with a short list and choose one from among the names on it. Perhaps the King could have a ‘Veto’ on the Catholics’ own choice – the word Veto was to become extraordinarily contentious in the future, not so much between the King and the Catholics, but among the Catholics themselves, including the Catholic Church in Ireland.

The contribution of the working class has been mentioned. There was one particular way in which the sons of labourers and farmers, mine workers and others of hereditary physical stamina exercised a strong, unintended influence on the progress of Emancipation. This was by serving in the army.27 Theoretically the army could not include Catholics, owing to the need for an Oath of Allegiance which precluded such, and theoretically all the men – who enlisted as ‘Protestants’ – had to attend Anglican services. In practice, with Scottish Highlanders and with Irish fighters, no such distinction was exercised. Where Ireland was concerned, in 1774 the Irish Parliament passed an Act to allow subjects ‘of any persuasion’ to swear allegiance. In 1777 it was considered safe to use Scottish Highlanders.

When it was a question of Canada, the Catholicism of the native inhabitants was treated by the army with respect from the first, for good pragmatic reasons. There were standing orders to the British garrison of Quebec in 1759 that officers were to pay ‘the compliment of the hat’ to any Catholic processions made in the public streets: it was a civility due to ‘the people who have chosen to live under the protection of our laws’. After the capture of Montreal, it was noted with alarm by one Anglican clergyman that the soldiers of the garrison frequently married French women and then had ‘Romish Priests’ to baptize their children. But since there were few Protestant clergy around (and presumably few Protestant women), it was all part of an inevitable process of practical assimilation by the army.

The generals, not the most obvious class of politically tolerant men at first sight, were in practice extremely realistic, as they needed to be. They saw more clearly than prejudiced dignitaries at home the absolute absurdity of denying their men their Mass, and indeed compelling them by law to attend Anglican services, when it was physical strength and devotion to the military struggle which was demanded of them, not spiritual allegiance. And there was another kind of social absurdity, by the standards of the time, when Lord Petre raised 250 men in 1796 for the French wars, expecting that his son should command them: Mr Petre, however, was sternly told to serve in the ranks, to the ‘sensible mortification’ of the noble Lord. (It was also arguably illogical, since if his Catholicism did not preclude service in the ranks, why should it bar him from command?)

The British Army in India included many Catholic soldiers who naturally wanted their own priests to tend to them, whatever the law. At Dinapore in 1808 the Anglican Company Chaplain described the visit of ‘an Italian padre’; when he came into the barracks ‘the Catholics crowded about him by hundreds’ and pointed in triumph to his decorous dress (he was actually a Franciscan friar), contrasting it with that of a clergyman of the Church of England, ‘booted and spurred and ready for a hunt’.28

The need for recruitment, especially in the Scottish Highlands, became acute at the time of the revolt of the American colonies against British monarchical rule. And there was another huge shadow, in this case across the European, not the American, map: this was the threat of revolution in the country just across the Channel. The storming of the Bastille by a revolutionary mob on 14 July 1789 was the first unmistakable public manifestation of what would be known with hindsight as the French Revolution.