CHAPTER TEN

Noise of No Popery

‘A defeat [for Palmerston] will be a complete triumph for the No Popery faction... and the noise of it will ring thro’ every corner of the kingdom’

The Rev. Adam Sedgwick on the Parliamentary Election, Cambridge, 1826

DURING THE GENERAL ELECTION of 1826 in England cries of ‘No Popery’ were heard in constituencies from north to south, from Yorkshire to Cornwall.1 The Catholic Question was turning out to be the main point of argument, although the government’s rising support for adjustment of the Corn Laws also featured.

Raucous words did not preclude actual blows. Arguments frequently turned to physical force: there were deaths at Carlisle and Leicester, and serious riots and attacks at Lincoln, East Retford and Northampton. In Caithness the defeated candidate inspired a large mob to attack a freeholder who was believed to have betrayed him. The Marquess of Blandford, heir to the Duke of Marlborough, a rumbustious character at the best of times, notoriously rioting as a schoolboy at Eton, was standing for the local seat of New Woodstock; he joined zestfully in the street fighting with his brother.

In the Cambridge University seat, Lord Palmerston stood again. His support for Emancipation had been consistent, remembering that lyrical evocation of his native Ireland in 1813 with its reference to the ‘unstoppable spring which gushes from the earth’. Palmerston shared the point of view that times had inevitably changed, and the argument to history could not be sustained: what if Nelson, Fox and Burke had all happened to be Catholics by birth? Would it have been right to deprive the nation of their services? This support cast his victory in doubt as well as incurring Whig rather than Tory support. The Rev. Adam Sedgwick, one of Palmerston’s supporters and a Fellow of Trinity College, wrote to John Hobhouse that a defeat for this candidate would be ‘a complete triumph for the No Popery faction... and the noise of it will ring thro’ every corner of the kingdom’. Instead they must work to defeat his opponents, ‘the County Parsons and the bigots who are at the moment dishonouring the land we live in’.2

‘No Popery’ protests were not necessarily the product of principled Anglican belief. On the contrary, a cynical campaign had been building up nationwide to benefit from the issue of Catholic Emancipation to the detriment of its supporters. In the borough of Taunton, for example, Anti-Catholic candidates successfully contested the seat against sitting Members who had supported Burdett’s Bill for Catholic Relief the year before. In Coventry, two Pro-Catholic MPs were abandoned by their political agent; he advertised for two candidates who would pledge themselves to oppose Catholic Emancipation. At East Retford an Independent True Blue Club was formed with the specific aim of banning Pro-Catholic candidates. Anti-Catholicism, in short, supplied a convenient focus for opposition in the summer of 1826.

The situation in Windsor was especially galling from the Pro-Catholic point of view. The sitting MP, Sir Edward Cromwell Disbrowe, learned that the King had determined to withdraw his support from him at the coming election in consequence of his recent vote on the Catholic Question. Sir Edward, despite a middle name that indicated descent from the Protector’s sister, came from a family of royal servants, his father having been Chamberlain to Queen Charlotte. A diplomat by profession, he had replaced his brother-in-law in 1823 as Member for Windsor in the court interest.

In true diplomatic fashion, he was now anxious that the King be informed via his powerful Private Secretary, Sir William Knighton, that it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding. He thought he was free to express ‘his own individual sentiments’, and if he had realized his vote could have been construed as committing His Majesty’s opinion ‘on so important a question’, he would not have given it. Sir Edward humbly pointed out his endeavours ‘to keep up the Court interest in the borough, in which he has not been sparing of time or expense’.3 The King, however, was adamant; a new candidate was chosen for 1826 and Sir Edward duly returned to the practice of diplomacy, from which he had so regrettably lapsed in more ways than one.

The Pro-Catholic party as a whole favoured discretion, in contrast to their adversaries, if not the craven obeisance of Sir Edward Disbrowe (who was after all sitting for Windsor itself with the Castle looming both metaphorically and actually above his head). The Whig grandee Lord Althorp, of strongly liberal views, disapproved of a county meeting being held in Northamptonshire in February 1826, just in case Anti-Catholic feelings should be aroused.

The reasonable Protestant point of view held that the Catholics, treated benevolently, would behave in similar fashion. This was put most cogently by the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith, with all the wise wit at his command. In a speech of 11 April 1825 to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of the East Riding of Yorkshire he suggested that ‘a Catholic layman who finds all the honours of the state open to him, will not, I think, run into treason and rebellion’. In his anonymous Letters, on the Subject of Catholics, to my brother Abraham, who lives in the country, by Peter Plymley, published shortly after the fall of the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806 (addressed to a fictional country clergyman), he had written in a similar vein: if the Catholics ‘taste the honey of lawful power they will love the hive from whence they preserve it’.^*1 The fictional Rev. Abraham, however, was granted very different views, based on the entrenched version of Anti-Catholic history – what Smith called the tradition of ‘fire, faggot and bloody Mary’. Smith in his role of Peter Plymley expostulated: ‘Are you aware that there were as many persons put to death under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary?’4

From the beginning of their imaginary correspondence, Smith sounded a mocking note: ‘In the first place, my sweet Abraham, the Pope is not landed – nor are there any curates sent out after him – nor has he been hid at St Albans by the Dowager Lady Spencer – nor dined privately at Holland House – nor been seen near Dropmore.’ Although it was true that if the Pope probably was hovering about the coast in a fishing-smack, there he would fall prey to English shipping. The Pope was indeed the bogeyman throughout their correspondence, with Peter Plymley demanding scornfully: ‘I thought that the terror of the Pope had been confined to the limits of the nursery, and merely employed as a means to induce young master to enter into his small clothes with greater speed and eat his breakfast with greater attention to decorum. For these purposes, the name of the Pope is admirable, but why push it beyond?’ Unfortunately, nearly ten years after the publication of Peter Plymley, Smith was protesting in a country where ‘No Popery’ was still the most popular election battle cry.5

There was another eloquent argument to history and tradition, less crude than the ‘Bloody Mary’ line of talk if equally unrealistic to the detached observer: the question of ‘recovery’ by Emancipated Catholics of the pre-Reformation Protestant churches which had once been their own. This was well expressed by Wordsworth in the series of sonnets in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822.6 Wordsworth himself suggested that the sequence derived from a view of the site of a new church his patron Lord Lowther was building in 1820: ‘the Catholic Question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in the same course’.

He drew attention to the dread possibility of the ‘recovery’ in the event of Emancipation, in a story about the ‘very clever R. C. lady’ wife of the agent to the Duke of Norfolk. She was asked what would satisfy her. ‘ “That Church”, replied she, pointing to a large parish Church in Sheffield where the conversation took place.’ Wordsworth added: ‘This, at the bottom of their hearts, is the feeling of them all.’ Naturally Wordsworth supported the Anti-Catholic Lowther interest again in Westmorland, where Brougham challenged it for the third time in 1826.7 He feared lest the law be changed, and this supposed terrible fundamental feeling at the heart of all the ‘R. C.s’ to roll back and thus destroy the noble Protestant heritage should prevail.

In terms of the future, the most significant episodes of the General Election of 1826 took place in Ireland. Once again there would be no Catholic candidates able to put themselves forward, despite their constituting the vast majority of the population. Around this time, Tom Moore satirized the flagrant disproportion of Protestants to Catholics in the population of the island, as also their lethal attitude to their compatriots:

To the people of England, the humble petition

Of Ireland’s disconsolate Orangemen, showing

That sad, very sad is our present condition...

That forming one seventh...

Of Ireland’s seven millions of hot heads and hearts,

We hold it the basest of all base transactions,

To keep us from murd’ring the other six parts...8

O’Connell at least was determined that the six million disconsolate Irish Catholic peasants should be discouraged from similar crimes.

In Ireland, violence – the violence of a suppressed and poverty-stricken people with little to lose, helped on by drink when possible – was endemic, not necessarily in a political cause. In counties like Galway and Kerry these kinds of conflict occurred during the election as they always had. But there were also significant and novel gains for the Catholic cause: pre-eminently that of Waterford. Here, in the words of Lord Duncannon, heir to great Irish estates, the election was not only a triumph for the Catholic cause, but it was conducted ‘much to their credit with the most perfect order and regularity’. Furthermore, as Duncannon put it, ‘the priests have tried their strength and succeeded against the landlords’.9 Daniel O’Connell and his associates were actively involved in the whole process.

In Waterford it was decided to challenge the power of the local great family, the Beresfords, with their chief the Marquess of Waterford. The scion of the family who fought the election on this occasion was Lord George Beresford, son of the Marquess. Now in his mid-forties, he had been an MP since 1802 and held this seat since 1814. A soldier in his youth, he had been made Comptroller of the (Royal) Household in 1812 and a Privy Councillor. A vigorous opponent of Catholic Emancipation, a diehard generally in his social views, his arrogant attitude to the Catholics explains perhaps why opponents of the family resorted to calling them ‘the Bloody Beresfords, alternatively the blood hounds or “Orange Blood-suckers”’.10 More politely, the extent of the Beresford patronage over army, navy and Church in Ireland, where they were deemed to control a quarter of all the places, was summed up as ‘nothing too high or too low for their grasp’.

Lord George told the local Catholics that they should be grateful to their ‘natural protectors’, the aristocrats. And he turned fiercely against the priests, whom he accused of profaning the Sabbath and polluting the altar. He also denounced ‘a few itinerant orators, emanating from a scarcely legal body called the Catholic Association’ who, aided by the priests, were trying to impose their views upon the legitimate electors of the county. His style of oratory often found him, according to reports, literally foaming with rage, so as to render him for better or for worse practically inaudible.

The man chosen to oppose him – a Protestant naturally, ac-cording to the law – also had local connections: Henry Villiers Stuart, aged only twenty-two, owned estates in Waterford in-herited from his maternal grandfather, having been born into the Scottish noble family of Bute. In the autumn of the previous year, he had offered publicly to step down from campaigning if Beresford would guarantee not to oppose Catholic claims, an offer which was duly treated with contempt by Beresford and his supporters.

As it was, the events of the election were to be a sad disillusionment to Lord George. The Catholic (freeholder) voters arrived in huge numbers prepared to vote against him. No longer was he to be comfortably returned by a mere show of hands. Indignantly Lord George demanded a poll, which according to the rules would last for a month, and necessitated a public declaration of each vote: surely the electors would quail before publicly defying the powerful Beresford faction? O’Connell had the answer. The Forty-shilling Freeholders were marshalled into the city of Waterford, accompanied by their families; temporary arrangements were made for their food and housing. Then, for six days, there were processions as singing and cheering voters decked out in the green ribbons of the Catholic Association, or carrying green branches, went to register their votes – for Villiers Stuart. In so doing they showed the courage to defy the power of the great landlords, and as tenants undoubtedly risked their own livelihoods.

As Thomas Wyse wrote in his 1829 account of the Catholic Association, they were supposed to be ‘mere serfs’ so far as exercising a free vote was concerned.11 Wyse, an Irish Catholic landowner educated at Stonyhurst and Trinity College, Dublin, was a keen advocate of Emancipation. He had recently married Letizia Bonaparte, niece of the Emperor, when she was only sixteen. Letizia showed her allegiance, not with green branches but with Orange ribbons which she tied to the soles of her shoes, to make it clear she was symbolically trampling on the Orange faction.

At the end of the six days, Lord George Beresford retired from the contest when Villiers Stuart had polled 1,357 votes to his own 528. He announced that he would petition to have the election declared void on the grounds of intimidation by the Catholic clergy, who had ‘applied the terrors of another world to the political concerns of this’. Beresford did not succeed, and Villiers Stuart went on to justify the confidence in himself by making his maiden speech in the House of Commons on the necessity of Catholic Emancipation, the present lack of which he contrasted with the more enlightened conditions in Canada and India.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole Waterford election of 1826 was O’Connell’s successful campaign to ban alcohol. The pork butchers of Waterford, for example, who had a reputation for serious roistering under normal circumstances, took a pledge to drink no whiskey till after the election. Instead they patrolled the city by night to make sure others imitated their own self-denial. The perfect order and regularity of which Duncannon spoke obviously owed a great deal to this self-imposed – or butcher-imposed – restraint.

Of course the power of the priesthood was not always exercised so peacefully as in Waterford. John Leslie Foster, the Anti-Catholic sitting Member for Louth, complained of ‘a personal fury almost demoniacal’ stirred up against him: ‘Very many Protestants were forced to vote against me by the threats of assassination or having their houses burnt.’12 The people he described as ‘my voters’ had to be locked up in enclosed yards to save their lives. Foster had refused to vote for Catholic Relief, on the grounds that Emancipation was against his ‘conscience’; in particular he deplored the influence of the priesthood, but he was also prepared to contemplate practical measures such as ‘a modification of the franchise’, eliminating many Catholics for the sake of security.13

The families of the Protestant Ascendancy were not always united either in favour of or against the cause of Catholic Relief. Palmerston cited Hercules Pakenham, MP for Westmeath since 1806, as one who had once been ‘most adverse’ and then changed his mind. Pakenham, brother of the Earl of Longford, came of a classic Anglo-Irish Protestant family which had acquired its Westmeath estates when an ancestor came over in Cromwell’s army in the seventeenth century; the Duke of Wellington had married Kitty Pakenham. Hercules was a veteran of the Peninsular War. He would be described by the official History of Parliament as a ‘lax attender’ at the House of Commons, with no interventions at all recorded in 1824. He had voted against Catholic Relief in 1821, and voted for the suppression of the Catholic Association.

At some point his attitude altered and he voted for Catholic Relief in 1825. Now he was able to identify with the plight of the Catholics. A man ‘could scarce begin his career when he was checked, not by difficulties that might be overcome by daring spirit or patient resolution, but by a statute, that impenetrably barred his advance’. Could any man with common feeling and sympathies bear this state of things? Hercules could put his hand to his heart and confess that he did not think he could bear it.14 Unfortunately this led to Pakenham being discarded for the parliamentary seat of which his brother Longford (a strong opponent of Emancipation) was patron. This was said to be in ‘the high Protestant interest’. The Catholic press was full of indignation that he was the victim of the positive vote he had given the year before.

Gustavus Rochfort was chosen instead after a gruelling contest, a soldier from a large, poverty-stricken family in Westmeath. Rochfort justified the Protestant faith in him: soon he was presenting Petitions against Catholic Relief in Parliament, and voting with the consistency of a thoroughgoing member of the Ascendancy – that consistency which Hercules Pakenham had felt moved to abandon. However, the second Member elected for Westmeath (which was a two-Member constituency) illustrated the fluid nature of the election: Hugh Morgan Tuite was also a Westmeath local, and offered himself specifically because he was Pro-Catholic. After a struggle, he won the second seat by twenty-four votes, although he then had to endure many months of Petitions against him, alleging electoral improprieties committed by his supporters.

Nothing could gainsay the fact that at Waterford the great landlords had been defied, and defied successfully; furthermore, it was O’Connell who had helped achieve the victory. ‘The Beresfords are gone! Gone for ever!’ cackled the Dublin Evening Post. Of course the Beresfords were not gone. But the Protestant Ascendancy had had a notable and very public defeat.

Of the 380 constituencies in the election, just under a third were contested, and most of the results were known by the end of June.^*2 A recent ‘realistic assessment’ puts the net gain overall for the Anti-Catholics as thirteen seats. In England,15 Cambridge University was not, however, one of the Protestant gains: Palmerston came second in the poll to the Tory Sir John Singleton Copley, beating the Anti-Catholics Bankes and Goulburn, and was thus one of the two elected Members. He now reckoned that the ‘No Popery’ cry had been tried in many places and not succeeded after all: ‘there does not exist among the people of England that bigoted prejudice on this point’ of which the Anti-Catholics accused them.16

The new session in Parliament would test the truth of Palmerston’s judgement. George IV, according to custom, opened it in a speech from the throne on 21 November. Canning, as Foreign Secretary, wrote to the King that night with due respect, ‘humbly’ hoping that he had not suffered any inconvenient fatigue. But his basic message was a gloomy one: ‘Mr Canning is sorry to say that he thinks he sees indications of rather a troublesome Session. But he especially fears that the subject of Ireland will be forced early into the discussion.’17

The government reassembled under the premiership of Lord Liverpool. He remained an opponent of Catholic Emancipation, on grounds of the monarch’s special relationship with the Church of England. Equally, his Cabinet remained mixed on the subject, with Canning notably in favour and Peel equally prominently against. By now, however, the subject of Emancipation was so far merged into Canning’s ‘gloomy message’ of Ireland that security issues could never be wholly divorced from it. Liverpool himself was certainly willing to admit that certain measures were necessary, even if his basic opposition remained.

All of this was troubling enough to the King, not in the best of health, as Canning feared. But he had at the same time a personal concern which was very likely to meld into the political. This was also to do with health: the rapidly degenerating health of his brother, the rabidly Anti-Catholic Frederick Duke of York, whose succession to the throne had been so much dreaded by the supporters of Emancipation. For the Pro-Catholics, indeed, the most succinct reaction to the Duke’s ‘speech of terror’ in 1821 was that of the liberal peer Lord Ashburton. He simply wanted to call out meaningfully in reference to the Duke of York’s possible succession: ‘Long Live the King.’18

Now the younger brother seemed increasingly likely to pre-decease George IV, with consequences which could not be reliably foreseen. William Duke of Clarence was next in line, generally believed to be a more liberal figure altogether. Actual influence over the emotionally pliable monarch such as Frederick exerted, was a different matter; for lower down in the vast family of George III there lurked the sinister figure of Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland.

Already in June the King had written a distraught letter to his brother York in which concern for the future of the Crown was implied.19 Frederick must pay ‘the absolutely necessary and requisite attention’ to his general health according to the advice of his physicians. He owed it to himself but at the same time it was ‘a positive moral duty’ by which he was beholden to his brother and the country. ‘For God’s sake, for my sake, and for the sake of all those to whom you are so very dear, let me enjoin you, let me implore of you now,’ he wrote, to persevere in the regime which had been prescribed until he was completely recovered. ‘My heart is too full, to say much more at present... God bless you, D[eare]st Frederick’.

A libellous attack in Dublin by Richard Lalor Sheil on his ‘Dearest Frederick’ during the recent election sent the King into predictable spasms of rage. ‘The late outrage by a barrister in Ireland against the character of His Royal Highness the Duke of York’ was how the Viceroy described it. Peel as Home Secretary had already ‘begged to assure’ King George that something ‘so revolting to every feeling of common decency and humanity’ as Sheil’s speeches had not escaped his attention.20

The Viceroy, Wellesley, hastened to assure the King that ‘this unparalleled crime has excited universal disgust and horror in the breasts of all your Majesty’s faithful and loyal subjects in Ireland’, especially at a time when the Duke of York’s health was in such a painful state, causing feelings of sorrow and ‘fraternal grief’ to the King. Wellesley referred further to ‘the brutal disturbance of suffering hitherto deemed sacred by the common consent of civilised society’. Given that Sheil alluded to the colourful past of the Duke, including the corrupt business concerning his mistress Mary Anne Clarke, as well as reading aloud his private love letters (describing him as ‘hot and reeking’ from concubinage) in order to put ‘his morality in comparison with his religion’, this official indignation was easy to understand.21 On the other hand, in view of the all-out nature of the Duke’s attack on the Catholics, perhaps the Viceroy exaggerated slightly in his use of the words ‘universal disgust’ to describe the reaction in Ireland.^*3

Nor did the depredations of dropsy cause the Duke of York to cease in making such attacks. For better or for worse, he also maintained his lifestyle; he was witnessed by Prince Pückler-Muskau in late October drinking six bottles of claret at dinner with ‘very little change in his countenance’, although otherwise he was a shadow of the stately man he had once been.22 In November he insisted on having a personal conversation with the Prime Minister, Liverpool, ‘on the critical situation in which this country is at present placed’. The various points of discussion were then summarized and sent to the King, who had not been present.

The Duke’s main fear was that the official neutrality – still maintained – of the government on the subject of Catholic Emancipation was putting the Protestant establishment in peril. Writing to his brother, Frederick ended: ‘the great body of the British nation staunchly clings to the same principles, those principles in which we have gained honour and security since the year 1688’. Such blatant interference of a public nature aroused disapproval even among the diehard Anti-Catholic members of the Cabinet; in fact Peel believed that the Duke regretted it later, ‘although he said he was not ashamed of it’. But the Duke indicated a climbdown by blaming his illness for a possible element of exaggeration in his fears.23

On 5 January 1827 the voice of the Duke of York fell silent for ever. Charles Greville, the diarist, hoped to visit him as he was dying, having been ‘the minister and associate of his pleasures and amusements for some years’, one of those, unlike the Catholics, who paid tribute to his great kindness. He arrived too late but in time to pay his last respects: the Duke was sitting exactly as he had at the moment of his death, in his great armchair, dressed in his grey dressing gown, his head inclined against the side of the chair, his hands lying before him and looking as if he was in a deep and quiet sleep.24 York’s death brought fearful grief to the ‘dear King brought up and educated with him’, in the words of the younger brother Cumberland. The whole country was plunged into mourning, with black crêpe on hats and black gloves, black-edged writing paper and servants in black liveries.

Mrs Arbuthnot waxed sentimental in her Journal: ‘We shall not look upon his like again in a Prince; kind-hearted, amiable, constant in his friendships, good natured to the greatest degree... Publicly too, he is the greatest loss, for he was the rallying point for the Tories and bulwark of the Protestant cause.’ She did add that his illness dated from a chill he got from laying the first stone for the mausoleum of his mistress the Duchess of Rutland: a true Hanoverian fate, given that the pair of them were to be seen frequently canoodling in public despite their advanced years: ‘It is very odd our Royal Family should take to being si amoureux after sixty years old,’ as Mrs Arbuthnot put it.25

Other reactions varied from concern at the fate of the Liverpool government, which some believed owed its continuing existence to York’s support, to outright rejoicing. As early as November John Campbell, a future Lord Chancellor, had predicted that his death would be ‘a great public benefit’. Mrs Arbuthnot’s hero Wellington believed that the Anti-Catholic speech of 1825 had given ‘all the low, shabby people in Parliament a sort of standard [flag] to which they may rally’. In Dublin at a Catholic meeting, the attacks on the Duke of York were so vehement that O’Connell was moved to intervene. ‘We war not with the dying or the grave. Our enmities are buried there. They expired with the individual.’26

In January 1827 it remained to be seen whether the noise of ‘No Popery’, heard throughout the recent General Election and so ardently proclaimed by the Duke of York, would show any signs of dying with its royal supporter.