‘...thou art the isle on whose green shores I have desired to see the standard of liberty erected, a flag of fire, a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!’
Shelley, An Address to the Irish People, 1812
IN FEBRUARY 1812 Percy Bysshe Shelley, aged nineteen and recently expelled from Oxford University, travelled to Ireland. He brought with him his wife Harriet, with whom he had eloped the previous year when she was sixteen. Shelley had the avowed intention of supporting the Irish people: he wanted to draw attention to their sufferings at the hands of a tyrannical England.1
In particular he advocated two reforms: Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union. All this was seen in terms of liberty. Harriet Shelley fully shared his feelings: ‘Good God were I an Irishman or woman, how I would hate the English!’
Shelley had already written a poem to the Irish in 1809 which included an allusion to ‘the yelling ghosts’ riding by on the blast, incessantly crying, ‘my countrymen! vengeance’. Now he published a pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People, of which 1,500 copies were printed, at the modest price of fivepence in order to make it widely available. As the preliminary advertisement stated: ‘The lowest possible price is set on this publication, because it is the intention of the Author to awaken in the minds of the Irish poor a knowledge of their real state, and suggesting rational means of remedy.’
The language was ardent: ‘Oh! Ireland, thou emerald of the ocean... thou art the isle on whose green shores I have desired to see the standard of liberty erected, a flag of fire, a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!’ He also wrote a poem in tribute to Robert Emmet, executed in 1803 for his rebellion, and visited Emmet’s grave. The Shelleys returned to Ireland the next year although to Killarney, not Dublin. Later the poet described this time as the most ‘intensive period of practical political education that he had experienced in his life’.
This romantic view of a suffering Ireland needing ‘a flag of fire’ was in contrast to the practical steps towards Emancipation which continued to be taken in the newly united Parliament in London. As the Napoleonic Wars enveloped Europe and beyond, it was by no means clear which if either of the solutions – crudely summarized as Irish uprising or English political manoeuvring – would be successful. There was of course a third way: Irish political manoeuvring.
Shelley himself did not advocate violence: ‘firmly, yet quietly resist. When one cheek is struck, turn the other to the insulting coward.’ This was his recommendation in An Address to the Irish People. ‘Disclaim all manner of alliance with violence,’ he wrote, ‘meet together if ye will, but do not meet in a mob.’ In fact Shelley denounced at length the way the poor were put into uniform to kill each other: ‘the folly of killing and fighting each other in uniform for nothing at all. It is horrible that the lower classes must waste their lives and liberty to furnish means for their oppressors to oppress them yet more terribly’. But in realistic terms, it was difficult to see how a people, not only without a Parliament of their own but the majority of whom had no representation in the Parliament designated for them in a far-off city overseas, were to achieve anything by turning the other cheek.
The enforced captivity of the Pope at the hands of Napoleon for six years, only ending in May 1814, was an additional complication. Following the Concordat of 1801, Pope Pius VII had travelled to France for the Coronation of Napoleon as Emperor in 1804 – although, significantly, it was Napoleon who placed the crown on his own head. After that there was a sharp deterioration in relations: the Pope in confinement was moved throughout the territories controlled by the Emperor. Inevitably his enforced absence would affect the response of the Catholic officials left behind in Rome to questions concerning the Papal authority. The proposed Veto (by a Protestant King) over the appointment of bishops was one such question, which grew in urgency with the Pope himself in confinement. It was certainly a vital one for the advocates of Emancipation in England and Ireland – but one on which there was no helpful uniformity of view, rather the reverse.
The death of William Pitt in 1806, restored to office but faithful to his promise not to raise the question of Emancipation, was followed by the so-called Ministry of All the Talents, under the prime ministership of Lord Grenville. The name indicated its avowed aim of political unity in the interests of securing peace with France. Unfortunately, not only was peace not secured, but the coalition government lasted little more than a year. It broke up in March 1807 over the issue of disabilities, the second government to do so since the beginning of the century. In this case the issue was the (official) admission of Catholics to the army, including ‘foreign Papists’, and the Oath of Allegiance. Once again the King refused at the fence; once again the incoming Tory Prime Minister, the aged Duke of Portland, promised his sovereign a government in which the subject of disabilities would not be raised.
Furthermore, the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, withdrew his own previous public support for Emancipation, so popular among his Whig friends, as being inappropriate in the circumstances. He feared that such open support would bring back the insanity of his father – and that he would be blamed.2 The days of the unofficial (that is, invalid by the law of the country) marriage to the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert were over. George had married his Protestant first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795; their child, Princess Charlotte, was born the next year. The Prince had in mind the prospect of a new Regency, as the King wheeled back into madness following the death of a daughter. The Prince of Wales officially became Regent in February 1811 for the foreseeable future of the old King’s life. The ominous words of Hyacinthe Wellesley concerning the fatal mixture of religion and politics were once again proved true.
The principal advocate of Catholic Emancipation in the House of Commons during these years was Henry Grattan, an Irish Protestant MP. Grattan came from an established Anglo-Irish background, his father having also been an MP, and his grandfather Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Originally elected for the Irish Parliament in 1775 at the age of twenty-nine, he now represented Dublin City in the British House of Commons. Grattan, unlike Castlereagh, was a distinguished speaker, one who had studied the fabled orators of the past such as Bolingbroke and Junius. With his narrow face, long, thin, aquiline nose drooping over his upper lip and determined set mouth, huge burning eyes and wild windswept white hair, he also presented an impressive physical sight.
The Whig cleric Sydney Smith paid him a moving tribute: ‘The world could not bribe him,’ he wrote. ‘He thought only of Ireland; lived for no other object; dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendour of his astonishing eloquence.’3 As a moralist Grattan strongly disapproved of the Irish penal code, which deprived three-quarters of the population of its civil rights: he was an explicit advocate of Emancipation, as positive as FitzGibbon-Clare was negative. But Grattan saw no objection to the Veto.
The formation of the Catholic Board in 1808, along the same lines as the Cisalpine Club but larger and more influential, appeared to mark a step forward along these pragmatic lines. The Secretary was Edward Jerningham, closely related to most of the members. Here were nearly thirty Catholic peers. Naturally Stourtons, Cliffords and Lord Petre featured in the list; there were also sons of peers and twenty-one baronets. A new pamphlet by Sir John Throckmorton concerning a Petition of Irish Catholics to Parliament put the Catholic Board’s point of view very well.4 He reiterated what the Catholics had already proclaimed ‘a thousand times’ but, as it seemed, without effect: they admitted to the Pope ‘a power merely spiritual’. Throckmorton incidentally allowed himself a preliminary swipe at Henry VIII, aware of the festering matter of the Coronation Oath. It was Henry VIII who had begun by violating his own Coronation Oath ‘and on that basis was laid the first stone of the Reformation fabric’.
With the Catholic Board prepared to be accommodating on the subject of the Veto, and Grattan himself agreeing to it, there was a moment, surely, of promise for the future. On 25 May 1808 Grattan and George Ponsonby MP, an Anglo-Irish barrister and now a British MP, Lord Chancellor of Ireland under the Ministry of All the Talents, referred in a House of Commons debate to the fact that the Veto had been agreed with the Catholics.
Unfortunately the idea of the Veto was officially rejected by the Irish bishops a few months later. Bishop John Milner, appointed their agent in England, reversed his previous attitude a year later, and with all the sarcasm and power of his language condemned it too. Henceforward Catholic Emancipation would be faced with two barriers of a very different nature: one was the declared refusal of the sovereign even to consider it; the other was a major dispute of policy between the powerful Church in Ireland and the equally powerful aristocracy in England on the subject of the Veto – which, ironically enough, had itself been advanced as a pragmatic compromise intended to make things easier rather than more difficult. Then there was of course the deep-rooted Anti-Catholicism in the soil of the English nature: this found happy accord with the theoretical stance of the King, and expression in the views of many Tory MPs.
Debates on the issue, which were defeated in both Houses of Parliament in 1810, culminated in a resolution proposed by George Canning. This was carried in the Commons by a majority of 129 in June 1812. Like so many of the politicians involved in the fight for or against Emancipation, including the Wellesley brothers and Castlereagh, Canning, now aged forty-two, had an Irish Protestant background: both his parents were Irish, his paternal grandfather coming from Londonderry, although he himself was born in London. One consequence of this background was that Canning maintained a keen practical interest in the subject of Catholic Emancipation.
Canning’s father died when he was a baby. His mother, Mary Ann Costello, then supported them both by working as an actress, originally under David Garrick and then in provincial theatres.5 From this seemingly ‘scandalous’ world, a wealthy merchant-banker uncle rescued him and sent him to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Here he belonged to an elite debating society with ‘D. C. P. & F.’ on their cufflinks: for Demosthenes, Cicero, Pitt and of course Fox. The result of this education was a man famously brilliant in many different ways, an orator but also a wit capable of writing parodies which everyone scurried to read.
Canning first entered the House of Commons as MP for Newtown on the Isle of Wight in 1793 during the regime of Pitt, and himself described his reverence for Pitt as filial, something explained perhaps by his lack of a real father.6 When Pitt resigned in 1801 over the King’s refusal to consider Emancipation, Canning went too, despite his junior status. He was briefly Foreign Secretary in 1807 with the Duke of Portland as Prime Minister, and then out of office for several years.
What was constant in his life, apart from his admiration for Pitt, was his belief in the need for Catholic Emancipation to solve the security problem of Ireland, as opposed to religious toleration for its own sake. He did not, as it were, fraternize with Catholic priests and laymen, acquiring information indirectly or from the Catholic press. This aspect of ‘the Catholic Question’ was of course something others with an Irish background, such as the Wellesley brothers and Castlereagh, were also in a position to understand if they wished to do so. Such constancy was not, however, likely to recommend him to King George III; and there was an additional factor in the shape of his private life which was not likely to endear him to the Prince Regent. While Canning’s relationship with Caroline Princess of Wales may have been ultimately innocent – for better or for worse, she acted as godmother to Canning’s first child after his marriage to an heiress – it certainly did not prejudice the Regent in his favour.
Shelley’s visit to Ireland symbolized how to many in Europe (and the New World) the sufferings of Ireland had come to epitomize the fight for liberty. Thus Catholic Emancipation was no longer an equable wish by aristocrats to participate in the government of the country, but something more radical and potentially more dangerous. It was not quite clear in 1812 how radical the lawyer Daniel O’Connell actually was. He was now aged thirty-seven, having been born in the tiny village of Carhan, Co. Kerry. It was the benevolence of a rich bachelor uncle, known as ‘Hunting Cap’ O’Connell, which enabled him to be educated abroad at Douai, with the further encouraging prospect of being his uncle’s heir. O’Connell then progressed to Lincoln’s Inn in London where he became a barrister, and so to the Dublin Bar in 1796.7
This was the man who would one day be known as ‘King Dan’ or alternatively ‘the Liberator’. What is clear is that from early on, O’Connell displayed that extraordinary charisma which is the mark of exceptional people born in otherwise unexceptional circumstances. He proved to be an orator of unmatchable fervour: it was significant that while in London he declared his admiration for the performance of the great actress Sarah Siddons. O’Connell’s modest estimation of his own talent at about this time was as follows: ‘While I apply myself to the English language, I endeavour to unite purity of diction to the harmony and arrangement of phraseology.’8 His listeners put it differently. Thomas Wyse, who knew him well, in a book of reminiscences published in 1829 paid this tribute to his oratorical style, which perhaps explains the charisma: ‘He lends an eloquent voice to the sentiments, the passions, and even to the prejudices, of six million of men.’ In short: ‘He is a glass in which Ireland may see herself completely reflected.’9
O’Connell’s appearance, rather like that of his near-contemporary the Duke of Wellington, became with time in-extricable from the legend. Both men were born in Ireland within six years of each other, the one in an elegant house in Dublin, the other in a remote dwelling in the west of Ireland. In both cases, caricaturists were soon to rejoice in such a rich opportunity for satire, and in so doing helped the cause of the person: instant recognizability has, after all, never been a weakness in a leader. In the case of O’Connell, his big, burly figure seemed to indicate of its very nature health and strength; his handsome face with its bright blue eyes was rubicund, whether with good cheer or indignant passion; and as to the nature of that passion, according to Wyse there could be twenty different passions in two minutes.10
The diarist Creevey would call his style ‘far too dramatic for my taste’ while admitting that since the whole Irish nation was dramatic, they positively liked it.11 O’Connell was certainly a showman. More than one commentator over the years referred to him strolling through Dublin with his umbrella shouldered as if it were a pike. Describing him a few years later to Lady Morgan, William Curran wrote that O’Connell was progressing ‘in the full dress of a verdant liberator – green in all that may or may not be expressed, even to a green cravat, green watch-ribbon, and a slashing shining green hat-band’, and, added Curran, ‘he has a confident hope that “the tears of Ireland will prevent the colours from ever fading”’.12
O’Connell from the start was steadfast in his opposition to physical violence (as distinct from violence of eloquence) as a method of opposition, a principle he maintained and which was to prove of great significance in the years to come. This obviously divided him from the United Irishmen of the 1798 rebellion, when he would have been twenty-three, and Robert Emmet a few years younger. But his strongest desire was for the repeal of the Union, to which he was a dedicated adversary.
This meant that the Irish Catholic Committee, created in 1809 along the lines of the English Committee, in order to petition Parliament on the subject of Emancipation, was primarily seen by him as a political instrument rather than a religious one. This led inevitably to tensions within the Committee itself. There was a series of run-ins with the government on the subject of this Committee: on the grounds that it was contravening the law established in 1793 against petitioning for alterations in matters of Church and State, the so-called Convention Act.
It was this Catholic Committee to which the young Shelley, in the light of his Address to the Irish People, was invited in February 1812. In the course of his speech he referred to the decommissioned Irish Parliament building on College Green, sold to a bank after the Act of Union, as ‘that edifice which ought to have been the fane [shrine] of their liberties converted to a temple of Mammon’. He also emphasized ‘the necessity of Catholic Emancipation’ as well as ‘the baneful effects’ of the Union. In a report to the English government, an informer who was present – actually a chief constable – referred to a certain Mr Shelley speaking ‘who stated himself to be a native of England’. It was in fact the young poet’s first political speech. Another pamphlet, Proposals for an Association etc., followed.13
With time, Shelley moved towards the view that repeal of the Union would benefit the masses, whereas Catholic Emancipation, however desirable, was to the benefit of the great landlords, most likely the Catholic aristocracy: ‘I do not like Lord Fingall or any of the Catholic aristocracy,’ he wrote. ‘Their intolerance can be equalled by nothing but the hardy wickedness and intolerance of the Prince [Regent].’ His next visit to Ireland was a great deal less politically involved. Nevertheless his original intervention combined a denunciation of intolerance as literally unChristian, with a reference to the newly established United States: ‘The original founder of our religion taught no such doctrine [penalizing people for religious belief]. Equality in this respect was general in the American States, and why not here?’ This was one continuing aspect of the struggle for Emancipation: its symbolic value as representing the oppression of people. In the meantime, the practical political fight in Dublin continued, and Daniel O’Connell was an increasingly dominant figure.
In 1813 he acted as defence lawyer in the sensational trial of John Magee; this not only increased O’Connell’s popular fame but it also focused the fierce light of official obloquy upon him. Magee was the editor of the heavily Pro-Catholic Dublin Evening Post, who had already been found guilty of libel against the Dublin police the previous year. At this point he was accused as editor and proprietor of a libellous article he had printed concerning the Duke of Richmond, Lord Lieutenant (or Viceroy) of Ireland. This was a resolution passed by a Catholic meeting in Kilkenny condemning the previous trial, which denounced both the government and the administration of Irish justice generally.
Now in his fifties, Richmond had been appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1807 and maintained a lavish state at the Viceroy’s residences, Dublin Castle and his Lodge in Phoenix Park. Although social life in Dublin had distinctly diminished since the departure of Parliament, the Duke (and Duchess) maintained the old style, with the vast majority of guests coming from the Protestant Ascendancy. The Duke certainly had a magnificent concept of his duty as Duke and Viceroy; as for his wife, in Brussels later it would be the Duchess who was responsible for the famous ball on the eve of Waterloo.
Richmond was also a man noted for his charm and bonhomie, as well as being an ardent cricketer, qualities which it is to be hoped always coexist; he was a founder member of the Mary-le-Bone Cricket Club (MCC). The Duke also had time for drinking and skilful boxing, none of which reduced his bonhomie. He was obviously a member of the Church of England, but also a ‘Protestant’ in the way people were beginning to be defined, meaning that he did not support Catholic Emancipation. In keeping with his political convictions, Richmond had written in advance about his new Chief Secretary: ‘Pray don’t let them send me a Catholic [i.e. sympathizer] or a timid man.’14
The alleged libel on the Duke and his administration was certainly scabrous stuff. ‘He [the Duke] came over ignorant – he soon became prejudiced, and then he became intemperate. He takes from the People their money, he eats of their bread and drinks of their wine, in return he gives them a bad government... His Grace commenced his reign by flattery, he continued it in folly, he accompanied it with violence, and he will conclude it with falsehood etc. etc.’
In a version of the trial, published the same year under Magee’s imprint, the introduction declared that ‘the pen of Tacitus, good at Human Monsters, would fail before the Law-givers of Ireland’, before referring to the ‘unsparing scimitar’ of Cromwell, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which cursed Ireland with ‘a Slavery worse than African’.15 One feature of the trial – as with all other trials – was of course the fact that the jury consisted entirely of Protestants, Catholics being debarred from jury service.
O’Connell’s speech in defence was like a long blast on a trumpet, occasionally interrupted by William Saurin, the Attorney-General, with the angry toot of a rival instrument.16 Saurin, the son of a northern Irish Presbyterian clergyman, now in his sixties, was an able lawyer; he was also virulently Anti-Catholic: one who believed unapologetically that the Catholic Church was the main cause of Ireland’s problems and unlike, for example, Henry Grattan did not accept a compromise solution whereby the Irish state encompassed both religions.
Saurin objected to O’Connell denouncing Richmond’s predecessors as Viceroy in such terms as these: ‘They insulted – they oppressed – they murdered, and they deceived.’ How could a man be included in the crimes of his predecessors? O’Connell was up to the challenge, emotionally if not in terms of the law. What Saurin said was true enough. ‘But it is History; Gentlemen; are you prepared to silence the voice of History?’ cried O’Connell. He then read out the allegedly libellous description of Richmond at length, before turning to the details of Richmond interfering in the late elections. Lastly O’Connell asked the court to imagine a dramatic reversal of circumstances in which ‘The Protestant widow shall have her harmless Child murdered in the noonday.’ All the while it was noticeable that Saurin was alternately ‘green and livid’ and flushed, with quivering cheeks and lips as white as ashes.
O’Connell continued the theme of role reversal by lashing out at the treatment of Protestants in Catholic Spain and Portugal: ‘Do you enter into the feelings of Protestants thus insulted, thus oppressed, thus persecuted – their enemies and traducers promoted, and encouraged and richly rewarded... the emblems of Discord, the war-cry of Disunion, sanctioned by the highest authority, and Justice herself converted from an impartial arbitrator into a frightful partisan? Yes, Gentlemen, place yourselves as Protestants under such a persecution.’
At one point O’Connell turned, with a kind of prescience, to the newly appointed Chief Secretary. Richmond had certainly got what he asked for. This was no Catholic sympathizer. He was a certain Robert Peel, a brilliant, hard-working young man of twenty-five, the son of a rich industrialist whose middle-class birth, despite his own great talents, made him a target of snobbery. For one thing he retained the slight Staffordshire accent of his youth, which led one observer to say disdainfully that Peel could always be sure of an H when it came at the beginning of a word, ‘but he is by no means sure when it comes in the middle’. O’Connell, nephew of ‘Hunting Cap’, was not immune from this snobbery, describing Peel on arrival as ‘a raw youth, squeezed out of the workings of I know not what factory in England!’.17
It was perfectly true that the Irish establishment as a whole saw in Peel all that they resented and disliked about their Protestant rulers. This feeling matched Peel’s own innate contempt for the Catholic aristocrats. In February 1812 he had spoken out against any concession to Catholic claims, and his first speech in office consisted of a strong defence of the Protestant Ascendancy: as a result he was nicknamed, predictably, Orange Peel. He was frank about it: ‘Papal superstition’ was the cause of one half of the evils of Ireland, the country he had been despatched to administer. The prevailing religion in Ireland, that is Catholicism, operated as an impediment rather than an aid to ‘Civil Government’. Peel also opposed Catholic Emancipation in principle as the first dangerous step towards the repeal of the Union: any influential institution like a Church should be under the control of the State. ‘A foreign earthly potentate’ – that is, the Pope – had no place here.18 The issue was one of security against attacks from outside, but it was also one of natural order, of which a State Church was a necessary part.
Peel’s own religion was described later by his younger brother Sir Laurence Peel in a memoir as ‘of a home growth’. In their father’s mind, and in their father’s house, Anti-Catholicism was almost a religious faith.19 It might be said of Robert Peel that he was born Anti-Catholic in the sense that the historian Guizot described him as being born a Tory. Good-looking in a healthy, florid way, with red hair and a fresh complexion, no one ever said of Peel that he was a brilliant orator; he was however an excellent debater. On the other hand he was an honest man, with natural integrity. Yet he did not conceal his innate opposition to any concessions to ‘a set of human beings very little advanced from barbarism’, as he would describe the Irish in 1816, after some violent incidents had taken place. It was a view shared by a large proportion of his fellow Englishmen; but in a politician of Peel’s brilliance, it was a potential tragedy for the cause of Emancipation.
O’Connell, in turning to Peel, was appealing to the court on the subject of the Anti-Catholic Hibernian Journal, a newspaper which received public money. He also mentioned its limited circulation: how fortunate, given that it was ‘a Paper of the very lowest and most paltry scale of talent’! And yet it was receiving thousands of pounds from the very men it ‘foully and falsely’ calumniated. ‘Here Mr O’Connell turned round to where Mr Peel sat,’ stated the report of the trial published by John Magee afterwards.20 ‘Would I could see the man...,’ declaimed O’Connell, looking at him, that ‘salaried and rewarded the Calumniator’ responsible for prosecuting Magee ‘merely because he has not praised public men, and has discussed public affairs in the spirit of Freedom and the Constitution’. He directly contrasted Magee’s fate with that of the Proprietor of the Hibernian Journal, the one dragged to the Bar for a ‘sober discussion of political topics, the other hired to disseminate the most horrible calumnies’.
The unprecedented violence of O’Connell’s language – ‘I hurl defiance at the Attorney-General’ – ranged far beyond the actual case he was defending: at one point he actually threatened to ‘chastise’ Saurin, the Attorney-General. It became a question of whether O’Connell was not himself guilty of a more serious crime than the one he was defending. It explains why Magee now, in a remarkable development, disassociated himself from his counsel. It did not save him.
There was nothing even O’Connell could do to sway that jury in that court, something made quite clear by the concluding speech of Charles Kendal Bushe, the Solicitor-General: ‘I look upon Ireland as identified with England,’ he declared. ‘I hold the impossibility of a separate existence. I consider Ireland identified with England, not only by law, but by language – by interests, by blood and affection.’ Here Arthur Wellesley, currently Marquess of Wellington (advanced to Duke the next year), was introduced by virtue of his Irish descent: ‘I see Ireland repaying England for the triumphs of Nelson, with the victories of Wellington.’ The Solicitor-General, not for nothing known as ‘silver-tongued Bushe’, even dragged in Madame Roland, famously guillotined in 1793, and her immortal last words: ‘Oh! Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ He adapted them to his own satisfaction to the present case, where an innocent and distinguished man, the Duke of Richmond, was traduced: ‘Oh! Toleration, what Intolerance is not practised in thy name!’21
The court report was terse. The jury retired and, ‘after a short consultation’, brought in a verdict of – Guilty. Magee was sentenced to prison for two years and six months, in separate terms, and fined as well. He was then immediately committed to Newgate Prison in Dublin, despite O’Connell’s pleas. He asked first for Magee to remain at liberty with securities till the next term, for the proper judgment of the court. That was rejected. O’Connell then asked for the less rigorous Kilmainham Gaol; the Attorney-General said he would consider it and in the meantime Magee was taken to Newgate.
Peel and O’Connell were now ranged against each other in Dublin, the one in a position of official power, the other a rising barrister whose power depended on his own genius. It was a game which began originally within the green shores of Ireland, in Shelley’s incantatory phrase. There would be a question of an actual physical duel between the two men in the future. In Europe, however, the long Napoleonic Wars were moving to some kind of ending, with consequences which directly affected Catholic Emancipation in its very heart. It was a question of that contentious issue: the Papacy.