CHAPTER EIGHT

Millstone

‘The Irish... will ever be a millstone hung to the necks of the English Catholics. It is our obvious policy therefore to keep ourselves as separate as possible from the Irish Catholics.’

Robert, Lord Petre

‘I AM NOT DISPOSED to incur the Penalties of Praemunire’ (which in theory included death). In these terms George Canning wrote to Lord Eldon on 20 November 1823. He was referring to the seemingly innocuous letter by which the new Pope Leo XII officially announced his election to the British monarch; it came first into Canning’s hands as Foreign Secretary.1

Canning was consulting the Lord Chancellor on the propriety of passing the letter on to King George IV, after which there would in theory be an equally formal reply. Eldon was the deeply Anti-Catholic Lord Chancellor of many years’ standing, now in his seventies. A Tory of humble Northern origins (rudely known as ‘Old Bags’ by the Royal Family), he was a man whose powerful intellect was matched by a dominating character. Eldon’s answer was negative: ‘this letter from the Pope is not such as... should be offered to His Majesty’.

Praemunire had its origins as a fourteenth-century statute, taking its name from the Latin meaning ‘to forewarn’. Its purpose was to prohibit the assertion or maintenance of Papal jurisdiction, and offending against it was treason, followed by the death penalty; a notorious example of its use being the indictment of Cardinal Wolsey in 1530. Three hundred years later, the caution of Canning, himself a declared advocate of Catholic Emancipation, in contacting the King had now been backed by Eldon’s interpretation of the law. This was a King who had received Cardinal Consalvi with something approaching enthusiasm, and numbered aristocratic Catholics among his personal friends, leaving aside the relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert. It was a warning that in England there might be a further obstacle to granting Emancipation quite apart from parliamentary voting: the weight of history as interpreted by various Anti-Catholic types, many of whom felt themselves to be defending that national treasure, the constitution.

The strong Protestant historical view of the Roman Catholic Church as a tyrannous enemy of liberty spilled over into the energetic protests of many people calling for liberty themselves, including poets. Wordsworth admired Liverpool’s ministry, as he made clear in a letter in 1813: ‘I much prefer the course of their Policy to that of the Opposition’; of the two points close to his heart, the second was ‘their adherence to the principles of the British constitution in withholding Political Power from the Roman Catholics’. Five years later, when John Keats called at Rydal during a walking tour of the Lake District, he was disappointed to find that Wordsworth was not there: he was supporting the interest of the Tory (and Anti-Catholic) Lord Lowther, his patron.2

The case of Lord Byron was more complicated. In 1812 he had spoken up for the Catholic religion in the House of Lords in a speech which put the reasonable liberal contemporary view very well.3 All are ‘advocates of Church and State’, said Byron, ‘the Church of Christ and the State of Great Britain; but not a State of exclusion and despotism, not an intolerant Church; not a Church militant, which renders itself liable to the very objection urged against the Romish communion’. He quoted ‘the great Lord Peterborough’ in the House of Lords a hundred years earlier: ‘he was for a parliamentary king and a parliamentary constitution, but not a parliamentary God and a parliamentary religion’. Provocatively, Byron then introduced the subject of the Irish peasantry and compared their lot unfavourably to the black slaves who had been emancipated without any petitions. ‘I pity the Irish peasantry for not having been born black.’ Pointing to the history of Ireland and its appalling poverty, he had no hesitation in blaming the Ascendancy: ‘Can you not relieve the beggar when your fathers have made him such?’ he asked its representatives in the House of Lords.

At the same time Byron also attacked the European Catholics, Britain’s ‘Popish allies’ in Spain and Portugal. Here Byron’s feelings for justice put him in the other camp, which condemned the Catholic Church on the basis of its past history. The shadow of the iniquitous Spanish Inquisition – might it return? – was ever present. Byron therefore was typical of many English liberals who experienced a conflict between the political cause of Emancipation and the actual doctrines of the real Catholic Church.

Coleridge, on the other hand, moved from romantic feelings about Transubstantiation in 1802 – ‘the beautiful Fuel of the Fire of Faith’ – to fiery articles in The Courier under the pseudonym of ‘Irish Protestant’ denouncing the spirit of ‘Catholic Jacobinism’.4 In his Lay Sermons of 1817 he parodied Byron’s invocation of the black slaves in comparison to the Irish by lumping together all superstitious peoples such as Papists, Muslims and Hindus: ‘amulets, bead-rolls, periapts, fetisches, and like pedlary, on pilgrimages to Loretto, Mecca, or the temple of Juggernaut, arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture on the other, followed by a motley group of friars, pardoners, faqirs, gamesters, flagellants, mountebanks and harlots’. He described Catholic Emancipation as an invitation to ‘this Dragon’ and ‘miscreated shape’ to enter the heart of government. It was not an attitude which held fast in Coleridge, but symbolized once again the ugly split between the liberal principles of Emancipation and the apparently illiberal Church it would promote.

In 1807, when he was in his thirties, Robert Southey made it clear that he looked at the subject of Emancipation from the point of view of the tyranny of the Catholic Church. He said of himself: ‘on the Catholic Question I am as stiffly against them as his Majesty himself’ (this was following the period when George III in effect outlawed the mention of Emancipation to him by his government). Southey’s projected Book of the Church was, as he wrote from Keswick in 1811, ‘A picture of popery and the evil from which the Reformation delivered us’. Five years later he denounced the mere idea of solving the problem of order in Ireland by such a method: ‘As for conciliating the Wild Irish by such concessions, the notion is so preposterous that when I know a man of understanding can entertain such an opinion, it makes me sick at heart to think upon what sandy foundations every political fabric seems to rest.’5

Southey was, however, prepared to extend a grudging welcome to convents. Perhaps their existence was essential in Catholic Ireland, in which case, ‘I would let them found convents’, only restricting the nuns ‘to taking the vows till after a certain age’, as had been practised in Russia. ‘The good would be, that they would get the country cultivated, and serve as good inns, and gradually civilise it.’ Even Southey had to admit: ‘As the island unluckily is theirs, and there is no getting the Devil to remove it anywhere else, we had better employ the Pope (represented by his nuns) to set it to rights.’6

In direct opposition to such myths – if that was what they were – a new, more nuanced Catholic interpretation of English history was being developed by John Lingard, a priest-cum-historian.7 Lingard, who was now in his early fifties, had been born in Lancashire into a working-class family; his father was a Catholic convert. A bright boy, he got a scholarship to Douai College; he managed to make an adventurous escape at the time of the French Revolution in charge of the schoolboy William Stourton, the fifteen-year-old heir to Lord Stourton, who was being educated there (the less fortunate college printer was hanged). He was ordained at the Bar Convent, York, in 1795, ending up in a quiet mission at the tiny village of Hornby near Lancaster. The connection with the Stourton family remained; hence his visit to Cardinal Consalvi with Stourton in 1817.

Lingard’s philosophy was summed up as a wish to write history which included rather than excluded Catholics from their own national story, and as he wrote in a letter, good was to be done by writing a book which Protestants would read. He numbered Dissenters – Unitarians – among his friends, as well as the great reforming lawyer and future Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, who used to visit him. Lingard’s work, published in 1817, ostensibly on the laws and ordinances of Catholic countries concerning their non-Catholic citizens, took the line that the civil power was separate. He commended, for example, the new United States of America, where ‘the Catholic clergy perform their sacred functions, and exercise their spiritual authority without molestation. The government meddles not with the appointment of their bishops, or their correspondence with foreign prelates.’8 Furthermore, if a Catholic bishop got an order from Rome affecting civil interests, not only would he be unable to fulfil it because he had no relevant jurisdiction, but also he ‘would not since the Pope had no civil authority, either directly or indirectly in this realm’. Perhaps it was not surprising that Lingard was denounced by the Anti-Vetoist Bishop Milner for such Cisalpine views.

Based on primary sources, including documents in Paris, Lingard’s fine History of England, the first volume of which was published in 1819, marked the summit of his ambition. (Ultimately Lingard was able to build a chapel out of its proceeds which he named ‘Harry the Eighth’s Chapel’.) In his History, the Papal Bull against ‘Harry’ was denounced as vindictive. And conversely the Catholic Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’ of Protestant tradition, was also critically treated. Lingard described the executions of Protestants during her reign as being ‘the foulest blot on the character of the Queen’, but pointed with justice to attitudes of the time: ‘it being her misfortune, rather than her fault, that she was not more enlightened than the wisest of her contemporaries’. He defended Mary Queen of Scots on the grounds that her guilt (over the murder of Darnley) was ‘unprovable’. On the other hand, he accepted the guilt of the Gunpowder Plotters, while attempting to arouse sympathy for them on the grounds that their ‘bigoted zeal’ had led them astray. Moderate in his treatment of Charles I – a lesson to royalty to mediate its pretensions in conformity with the reasonable desires of its subjects – it was only in the case of Oliver Cromwell and Ireland that Lingard let fly: the conquerors of Drogheda and Wexford were ‘ruthless barbarians’. Lingard continued the patriotic tradition of Joseph Berington in 1780 who, in The State and Behaviour of English Catholics, decried the conduct of some Popes in the past, while pointing out that modern Popes had neither horns nor cloven feet.9

Personal details about Lingard indicate a man of benevolence and whimsicality. As fame in his own field came to him, an Associate of the Royal Society of Literature and Corresponding Member of the French Academy, so did fame’s awkward kinsman, public attention. In order to elude publicity, he placed his dog Etna (a poodle) in his window to fool observers, wearing his spectacles and a coat so that travellers could see ‘Dr Lingard at work on his History’.^*1 The Anglican vicar living opposite Lingard trusted him sufficiently to ask him to care for his pets on his death.

Yet the unparliamentary obstacle – the continued rift in the attitudes of the various types of Catholics – persisted, for all the spreading of a more tolerant warmth. In January 1823 Lord Redesdale, a Protestant, declared he could not see how anyone of good sense would think that Catholic Emancipation would produce peace in Ireland.10 In one sense Redesdale was entitled to voice his opinion: a Tory politician and lawyer, he had been Speaker of the House of Commons and then Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1802 to 1806, as well as Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University. The Irish Catholic Richard Lalor Sheil granted that he was a man of great learning and diligence, despite his obsession against Emancipation and his profound distrust of the Irish priesthood.

Redesdale was able to quote the late Lord Petre (that grandee who had been George III’s host at Thorndon Hall), who ‘steadily held to the maxim of the English Catholics’ to avoid all political connection with the Irish because the views of the two bodies were different. ‘We,’ Petre said, ‘can have no hope of making England Catholic but the Irish still hope, and have ground for hope; and they will ever be a millstone hung to the necks of the English Catholics. It is our obvious policy therefore to keep ourselves as separate as possible from the Irish Catholics.’11

This view of Catholic Ireland as a millstone (including of course the ‘barbarous’ Irish peasantry) chimed with the kind of Anti-Papalism which existed not only in literary circles but even in the most liberal English environment. As has been seen, it had always been a strong element in Anti-Catholicism itself in the past, the Pope being regarded not without justice as an opponent in the reign of Elizabeth, and later as an easy target in times of stress such as the Popish Plot or the Gordon Riots. The tactful behaviour of the Papacy after the death of the last Stuart Pretender, Prince Charles Edward, and later his brother the Cardinal of York, eased the situation; its sufferings during the Napoleonic Wars aroused sympathy and tilted the balance further.

Nevertheless it was notable how even the most liberal Englishmen were capable of strong Anti-Papal reactions, even someone like the Whig grandee Lord Holland. ‘The Pope,’ he wrote on one occasion, ‘is more and more bigoted and is in a dreadful state of indignation.’ Lord Holland then alluded pointedly to Molière’s hypocritical character Tartuffe.12 Holland was referring to the new, highly conservative Leo XII and his rumoured edict against vaccination, which he apparently believed to be a dreadful interference with the will of Heaven. Yet Holland was undoubtedly a fervent Whig supporter of Catholic Emancipation. For many English people the Pope remained what in a modern catchphrase might be called the elephant in the room.

Coexistent with Redesdale’s doleful prediction and this continuing stream of Anti-Papal consciousness, there was an actual development in Ireland which told a very different story. The winter of 1822 was especially harsh there, with the usual painful consequence of famine – and that in turn followed by angry disruption from starving, rebellious peasants. Habeas Corpus was suspended (as it had been in England in 1817 over industrial unrest). January and February of 1823 were compared by Wellesley to ‘the Russian year’ of 1813. The situation was of sufficient threat for the Viceroy to install palisades of cannon around Dublin at several entrances to the city.

It was in the aftermath of this cruel winter that Daniel O’Connell took a step that was not intended to be publicly radical – but was to have radical consequences. There was a private dinner on 8 February in the snowy mountains at Glencullen in Wicklow at the house of T. O’Mara.13 Henry White, a Protestant now in his early thirties, was the son of a self-made Dublin man who had made his money as a bookseller and purchased the large Luttrellstown estate as a result; he himself had served in the 14th Light Dragoons in the Peninsular War, earning medals in the Battles of Badajoz and Salamanca. The wealthy bookseller had four sons, in fact, but when there was a vacancy in the winter of 1822, Henry White was deliberately chosen as candidate over his brothers because he was considered to be the Catholics’ friend, receiving a hearty endorsement from Daniel O’Connell.

It was White who had publicly proposed a toast to the Pro-Catholic Viceroy Wellesley in January. He was now elected to the House of Commons for Co. Dublin over a strong Tory candidate of considerable landed interests. As O’Connell told his wife, no popular triumph was ever half so great. It provided an impetus. The decision was taken. A new Catholic Association was to be formed. But this was to be an association with a difference. From the first, O’Connell intended to involve the Catholic peasantry, via their parishes.14

The importance lay in the founding text of the lawyer Richard Lalor Sheil: they must avoid every semblance of illegality or enmity to the established order yet kindle ‘the smouldering passions of an infuriated and oppressed people’. The vital words were in the first proviso. This was not a representative or delegated body, in order to avoid prosecution under the Convention Act of 1793. The crucial meeting was held in Richard Coyne’s bookshop in Sackville Street,^*2 with Coyne himself standing at the door in welcome; a figure of old-fashioned elegance, his silvery hair matched by his silver shoe buckles, with his frilly shirt and knee breeches. Subscription was to be one guinea (nearly £100 today) for full members, and one shilling for associates, per year.

About thirty-five people were originally present, with the Chairman, Lord Killeen, heir of the Earl of Fingall, representing at thirty-two the rising generation. To a certain extent the company was socially mixed, because it included not only members of the nobility and gentry, barristers and physicians but also merchants and traders. That encompassing aspect of the Catholic Association O’Connell now decided to take further by including within it the Catholic clergy – who after some debate were admitted without payment. In this way the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, James Warren Doyle, was able to join. The question of what was known as Catholic Rent was then raised: in essence these were financial contributions, not necessarily very large ones, to the cause of Catholic Relief in Ireland.

O’Connell first raised the subject of a small subscription which would enable all Catholics, however poor, to feel themselves part of the same movement, in January. It was an idea first propounded in the 1780s and O’Connell himself had put it forward in a limited way in 1812. Now the time for what was described as ‘the grand, the wise, the noble plan’ had come. The socially beneficial side of the Rent was stressed – support for Catholic education – so as to give it an innocuous flavour. The idea was to raise £50,000. In fact, so successful was the scheme that by December 1823 Catholic Rent was producing £1,000 a week (£75,000 today), with half a million associates paying a penny a month.

In all this O’Connell was careful to stress that this new Catholic Association was not and did not intend to be a sectarian body. It was open to Catholics and Protestants: Henry White, the new MP, became a member in October. O’Connell’s aims were manifold: to meet parliamentary and legal expenses, assist propaganda in the press, protect the privileges of the Catholics and prosecute aggressors. He fully expected, as he wrote at the end of December 1824, that the Catholic Rent ‘will surely emancipate us’. But while urging that it should be pressed ‘as much forward as possible’, he was careful to add that ‘a repetition of small payments is better than a large one’.15

In one parish in Co. Cavan, for example, contributors included a miller, a publican, a baker, a wheelwright and the son of a labourer, as well as farmers whose holdings ranged from four to thirty-four acres. Popular rhymes were quick to celebrate the event, as was reported to Robert Peel:

One penny each month, is your just due

Collected by some faithful brother

Then why should Patrick’s friends refuse

In this grand plan to assist each other.16

1824 saw the publication (anonymously) of a new work by Tom Moore: The Memoirs of Captain Rock.17 This prodigious bestseller gave a voice to an altogether less placid part of the Catholic population of Great Britain. The mysterious character of Captain Rock was encountered by Moore during a tour of southern Ireland. ‘Captain Rock’ was the name which signed actual threatening letters of a Robin Hood type against landlords and agents, possessing also something of the contrasting malevolence of the Sheriff of Nottingham. There were warnings against paying tithes to certain individuals, and if the warnings went unheeded, a violent night attack might follow. The winter of 1822 saw a peak of such attacks.

In the imagination of Tom Moore, Captain Rock took on a new life. He personified Ireland’s struggle for justice for the majority at the hands of the minority. So long as that struggle lasted, Captain Rock would flourish:

While Thousands proudly turn away

And to the Millions answer ‘Nay’,

So long the merry reign shall be

Of Captain Rock and his Family18

There was something almost poetic about the fictional Captain Rock’s eventual fate at the age of sixty. On one of his night-time escapades he is captured, without the authorities being aware of his identity. No one comes forward to testify against him. On the other hand, Captain Rock cannot give an account of himself: his crime therefore is to be ‘out in the open air by moonlight’. And this is a transportable offence. Thus Captain Rock is sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay and that distant country where so many lads ‘who love the moon’ have preceded him. ‘I may safely, I think, reckon upon the continuance of the Rock Dynasty,’ concludes Moore. Where Lingard wove his tapestry of subtle reconciliation, Tom Moore spoke up for a more romantic, more dashing – and ultimately more violent – attitude to Catholic justice in the future.

The Earl Marshal’s Bill of 1824, like Lingard’s History, in-dicated the softer mood in England – at least for the aristocracy. Like the history of Captain Rock, it was a symbolic point, and in this case a highly visible one. The question concerned the organization of future Coronations and the hereditary right of the Dukes of Norfolk, recently exercised by a Protestant deputy; nor was it necessarily a matter of pure theory, given the age and shaky health of the present monarch. Why should not the Duke of Norfolk exercise his hereditary right to conduct a Coronation? Unlike the cousin from whom he inherited, the full-blooded previous Duke, who had adopted Protestantism, Duke Bernard was a proud Catholic in the tradition of his ancestors; as such he supported Emancipation, and saw no reason why he should not enjoy his hereditary post even before this was attained. The Duke arranged for a Private Members’ Bill to be introduced to the House of Lords. During the debate, on 18 June, it was Lord Holland who pointed to the coincidence of the date: while Waterloo was being fought, ‘how could it be supposed that there was any more danger to the church from the stick of the Earl Marshal than from the sword of the army and navy?’19

Another lofty aristocrat, the Duke of Newcastle, took a very different line in the Lords. Newcastle had succeeded to the title when he was ten, and become Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire in his early twenties. Supported by the Earl of Abingdon, he made a speech that left little room for doubt about his deeply conservative principles (with an artless preliminary admission that he was very little used to speaking in public).

He had already protested against Emancipation in 1821 in a pamphlet addressed to Lord Liverpool, and would go on to be an energetic lobbyer against any kind of change to what he saw as the sacred established order; in other words he became what was termed an Ultra-Tory. The Bill violated the constitution by enabling ‘a Papist to hold high office near the person of a Protestant King’, dispensing with the Oath of Supremacy. This was his creed – and creed seems the appropriate word for such a rigorous statement: ‘On general principles, I object to any concession to the Roman Catholics, either collectively or individually.’

The Duke of York, heir presumptive to the throne as the King’s next brother, was also of course strongly against it, as he was against anything at all Pro-Catholic. An attack of dropsy made speculation about the future of George IV and the length of the reign an increasingly exciting topic. Creevey wrote: ‘We are full of a battle that is to take place in the House of Lords between the Duke of York and our Scroop [Duke Bernard].’ Creevey described how the Royal Prince was ‘perfectly furious’ and writing to every peer he knew, ‘calling upon him to come and protect the Crown against the insidious Scroop’. The King himself was also said to be angry. At the prorogation of Parliament when he made the customary regal appearance, according to Lord Colchester he looked ‘very heavy, languid, morbid and livid’, with the crown ‘pressing heavily on his brows’.20

Yet the Bill passed. The Duke needed to take no oath except the Oath of Allegiance and the Oath of Office.^*3 Lord Colchester probably phrased the attitude of the more practical Anti-Catholics best when he declared: let the Catholics enjoy ‘their mere honours’ so long as they do not share in ‘political power etc’. In 1824 it seemed to those English who were in a position to affect the decision that the English Catholics would very likely be satisfied with mere honours.

There remained the question of the millstone – Ireland. The men who loved the moon, in Tom Moore’s eloquent phrase for the rebellious peasantry, were not the only threat. There was a general fear of an uprising. ‘If we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington to Robert Peel in November 1824, ‘we must look to civil war in Ireland sooner or later.’21