William of Orange landed in England on November 5th 1688. News of his arrival stimulated the worst sort of rejoicing. In London, mobs attacked priests and broke into Roman Catholic churches and chapels. In Birmingham, troops who supported William first ransacked and then burned down the Catholic chapel. Mass houses in Cambridge, Hereford, Norwich, York and Bristol were attacked and damaged. At Ulverston in Lancashire, Clement Smith, a Jesuit, ‘was beset by a mob of nearly a hundred men … He passed the night in a little hut and at day-break betook himself to the woods …’ For three months he was ‘compelled to lie so loosely hidden that he was unable to pace about his room’.1 The Catholic governor of Dover Castle was evicted and replaced by a reliable Protestant who was a mercer by trade.
The monastery in Clerkenwell was burned down and the rioting became so severe that the City of London Aldermen – although in sympathy with the rioters’ cause – decided it was necessary to disperse the mob. Normally, the job would have been done by the Trained Bands but, since they could not be trusted to obey their orders, the army was called in. During the confrontation that followed, five rioters were killed. The inquest into their deaths concluded that they were respectable citizens who were loyal to the King whose assumption of the throne they had anticipated by several weeks. The verdict was murder.
When it was clear that the ‘glorious revolution’ had succeeded, attacks on Catholics and Catholic churches were replaced by panic at the prospect of the victims turning on their tormentors. A document – known as The Third Declaration and fraudulently published in William’s name – was circulated in the London streets. It warned of plans to massacre Protestants and of a Catholic plot again to set fire to London. Magistrates were instructed to disarm all Papists and execute any Catholic who refused to relinquish his weapon. The Lord Mayor of London – either as the result of stupidity or malice – believed the Declaration to be authentic and ordered the arrest of all Catholics who were found to be bearing arms within the city.
After James fled to France, the mobs – no longer terrified of a Catholic resurgence – began a second orgy of destruction and plunder. The house owned by the printer who had produced Catholic tracts for James was attacked. So were the foreign embassies and the lodgings of the Papal Nuncio. The fear of another Great Fire was replaced by the threat to burn down houses that were occupied by Catholics – accompanied by the oath that ‘the flames shall not be put out until the Prince of Orange comes to town’.2 Despite his attempts to demonstrate his support for William, George Jeffreys, the Lord Chancellor, was recognised as the judge who had presided at the Bloody Assizes and had condemned to death or deportation Monmouth’s followers after the West Country rebellion. He was committed, in protective custody, to the Tower of London. There was a brief resumption of panic – caused by the rumour that Irish immigrants had burned down Uxbridge and were advancing east. But that soon passed. Protestants felt triumphantly in control.
The Declaration of Rights – presented to William and Mary by Parliament on February 13th 1689 with the offer of the joint crown – was followed by a Bill of Rights, which gave the Declaration legislative effect. The spirit in which both documents were written was exemplified by a clause which prohibited a Catholic, or the spouse of a Catholic, occupying the English throne. The evidence suggests that most Catholics accepted the prohibition calmly. Being of a practical disposition, they were more concerned about the provision that – ironically and inadvertently – prevented even a benevolent monarch providing protection against a hundred and fifty years of legalised discrimination. Parliament had never been persuaded to repeal any of the penal laws. But, from time to time, the penalties had been suspended by the King exercising the royal prerogative. The Bill of Rights deprived the sovereign of that power. So the penal acts remained in force.
Within weeks the bill was augmented by two new statutes, which the new King’s fearful advisers were easily able to convince him – with the support of his aggressively Protestant wife – were essential protection against popish plots. The first prohibited Catholics from holding arms or owning a horse worth more than £5 – a provision which caused a sudden reduction in the valuation of the best hunters in Ireland. It also gave Protestants the right to purchase, for the same sum, any horse owned by a Catholic. Lord Arundel was said to have had four horses taken out of the shafts of his carriage, and there were stories of owners shooting their horses rather than selling them for a fraction of their true value.3 The exclusion of Catholic priests and dissenting ministers from Westminster and London, imposed during the panic of 1665, was confirmed in legislation which made their ‘internal exile’ permanent.
King William’s second act was as vindictive as it was vicious and made nonsense of the (still repeated) claim that the revolution of 1688 was made glorious by the civil liberties that followed. The edict gave notice that anyone who, after March 25th 1700, ‘apprehended a Popish bishop, priest or Jesuit’ and secured his conviction for ‘saying Mass or exercising his functions within the Realm’ was to receive £100. ‘Every Popish bishop, priest or Jesuit who said Mass should suffer perpetual imprisonment.’ Papists were disqualified from purchasing ‘land in this Kingdom or [making] a profit out of the same’ and a Catholic beneficiary of a family will could be required to sacrifice the legacy in favour of a Protestant with less claim to the inheritance. Catholic education, at home or abroad was prohibited.
Two months before the arrival of the Prince of Orange, the Catholic Church’s Northern District – a vast expanse of territory, stretching from the Trent to the Tweed – had acquired its first Vicar Apostolic. James Smith was welcomed to the north by a chorus ‘of the Clergy and Regulars who sang Te Deum publicly’4 and by the offer of a trooper from Lord Dumbarton’s Regiment to stand guard at the door of his York lodgings, which he humbly declined. A Vicar Apostolic was, by definition, excluded from the implied promise of tolerance towards discreet Catholics. So he went into hiding and ministered to his flock in secret. His reports to Rome were written in language that – even had they been intercepted – would not have revealed their true nature. Parishioners were called ‘friends’ and confirmations were referred to as ‘performances’.
From the comparative security of his constantly changing hiding places, Smith had preached the gospel of local loyalty. Priests, he claimed, had a duty to return after training to the area from which they came – no matter how great the danger and how intense the hardship. The proposal was calculated to help the hard north at the expense of the soft south – where the idea was rejected more because of the offence it would cause to gentry with resident priests than because of the reluctance to serve God in a cold climate. But in the north the number of priests increased – sometimes with a little help from the penal laws, which were operated most severely in and about London. Father John Marsh, evicted from ‘good places in the South’, responded to Smith’s call and ‘humbly betook himself to the most desolate and laborious place in the [Northern] district … To assist a great number of poore on the moores.’5
At the time of James’ flight and supposed abdication there were no more than 20,000 Catholics (about 25 per cent of the total population) in Scotland, served by twenty lay priests, nine Jesuits and four Benedictines.6 Despite their small numbers, or because of it, they affected the belief that James’ brief visit to Edinburgh would mark the beginning of a Roman revival. They were, therefore, disappointed when he offered his followers the uncharacteristically wise advice that they should ‘do their business quietly and calmly at the beginning lest they may be undone’.7 He then undermined his own admonition by ordering all Scottish priests home, to begin the work of reconversion. A printing press, for the production of Catholic literature, was set up, and sung Mass was celebrated in Holyrood House. In anticipation of a renewal of the Presbyterian persecution that had preceded James’ accession, the Pope appointed Scotland’s first Vicar Apostolic with power over all theological, devotional and liturgical matters. The Jesuits objected and reacted even more strongly when a Vicar General for the Highlands was appointed with the same powers. They appealed to Propaganda Fide, with disastrous consequences for their cause. The Vicar Apostolic was given complete authority over all Scottish priests, lay and regular.
Protestants – in the south of Scotland as in England – reacted to the forced abdication of James II with violent triumphalism. In Edinburgh, rioters attacked and sacked the Chapel Royal. Thomas Nicholson, the recently appointed head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, witnessed the procession which celebrated the sacrilege. ‘One of the [mob] went in front with a great crucifix, surrounded by a crowd of children and women carrying torches and shouting for joy.’8 The rioting confirmed that James’ attempt to pacify the Presbyterians had failed. He had hoped that enshrining the rights of the Kirk in law would develop the tolerance that is often the consequence of security. But south of the Highland line, anti-Catholicism was too bitter an instinct to be assuaged by promises of equal treatment for all denominations. The activities of the Jesuits were, as always, particularly resented. Edinburgh, a rabidly Protestant city, had been infuriated by the opening of several Jesuit schools – one in Holyrood House itself. And there was a ‘great noyse’ in Glasgow when a Father Leslie ‘opened up a kynd of private chapel’. From Galloway, James Bruce, a Benedictine monk, reported that the local citizenry was ‘much averse from poperie’ and the aversion was not moderated by the arrival of Protestant William. The same could have been said for most of the Scottish Lowlands. Life was different further north where, although there were fewer priests than in the south (four as compared to fifteen), there were six times as many communicants. In the early years of William’s reign, the Church was sufficiently hopeful about its prospects in the north-west to set up a seminary in Lochaber. Like so many Highland hopes, it did not survive the Jacobite Rebellion.
The Welsh Catholic Church was in too sharp a decline for its prospects to be further prejudiced by either statutory persecution or mob violence. Even the Jesuits were reduced in number after a Protestant raid on their headquarters in Cwm. The Catholics who remained were mostly of the superstitious sort that was peculiar to the Principality. Skirrid in Monmouthshire became a place of pilgrimage, in the belief that the nearby mountain split open at the moment of Christ’s death. King James’ fate could, by those who believed in such things, be attributed to the power of Welsh religious magic. In the year before he was deposed, he had travelled to the shrine at Holywell to pray for a son – the unexpected heir and successor whose arrival made his downfall inevitable.
James believed that he could regain the throne. For eighteen months he presided over a court in exile at Saint-Germain on the outskirts of Paris. Then, supported by French troops, he landed in Ireland on the first step of what he hoped would be a second Stuart Restoration. An Irish army – already employed in subduing Protestant resistance in the northern counties – was waiting to welcome him. The Irish Parliament declared James the lawful king. In doing so, it exceeded its powers. Poynings Law, which James had enthusiastically endorsed, made the Dublin Parliament subordinate to the Parliament in Westminster. But the temporary nationalists were not in a mood to respect constitutional propriety. Nor were they inclined towards magnanimity. Protestant churches – beginning with Wexford9 – were closed and confiscated.
On July 1st 1690 the English forces – under the command of John Churchill – defeated the Irish army at the Battle of the Boyne. Further south the war had still to be won for King William. At Limerick the Irish garrison – besieged, relieved and besieged again – held out until October. After six months more of bloody fighting, both sides were ready to negotiate peace. The Irish leaders’ initial demands were for complete toleration of Catholics and Catholicism, and the return of land to the owners from whom it had been stolen during the Commonwealth and the Restoration. William could not, or dared not, deprive his Protestant supporters of the spoils they had won in earlier wars – though he was prepared to sacrifice the land which King James himself had acquired in sixteen Irish counties. In the end, battle fatigue rather than benevolence prompted concession. William agreed to guarantee Catholics ‘such privileges as are consistent with the laws of Ireland or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles II’10 and the examination of individual claims for the restitution of land rights. What came to be called the Treaty of Limerick went on to promise that the Westminster Parliament would be assembled at the first opportunity and that the King would ‘endeavour to procure [for] the said Roman Catholics such further security … as may preserve them from any disturbance upon account of the said religion’. The wording of the English offer was deliberately perfidious. Progress towards toleration depended on the will of a partisan Protestant Parliament. But at least the land-claim promise was kept. By 1695, 483 of the 491 aplications, made under the provision of the Treaty, had been resolved in favour of the claimant.11 During the next four years thousands of Irish peasants were transformed into landowners. In Limerick alone, something approaching 1,200 claims were approved. Combined with the amnesty offered to soldiers who had fought for James, the restitution of land rights succeeded in neutralising the threat of another uprising. Eleven thousand Irishmen left Ireland to serve the King of France, and the legend of the Wild Geese was born. There were too many Catholics in Ireland to allow a general persecution to result in anything but continued revolt. So it was Protestant policy to placate the masses at the same time as their leaders were being persecuted and exiled.
By the time that James’ hopes of restoration had been extinguished on the banks of the Liffey, the English Parliament had passed the Toleration Act. Its true purpose was winning for William the unequivocal support of Nonconformists. Only those of its provisions that reduced the effect of the penal laws on Protestant Dissenters justified its name. Indeed, its effect might well have been to increase the likelihood of Catholic prosecutions since, by offering relief to anyone who took the Oath of Allegiance, subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles and repudiated the doctrine of transubstantiation, it explicitly denied them the toleration it proclaimed. But despite its limited application, the principle embodied in the Act proved infectious and there followed a period during which the penal laws were theoretically strengthened, but their application was increasingly ignored.
The Irish Protestant commercial classes – motivated more by greed than theology – used the fear of revolution as an excuse to demand the expulsion of Catholic merchants from Dublin. The City Corporation agreed. The unyielding attitude of the Church of England episcopate was typified by Anthony Dopping, the Anglican Bishop of Meath. His sermon, on the Sunday morning that followed the signing of the Limerick Treaty, proposed – in a play on words – renunciation of the agreement. Since the Irish followed what true Christians did not regard as a true faith, there was no need to keep faith with them.12 The King removed Bishop Dopping from the Privy Council, thus strengthening the argument of those Whig historians who chose to argue that William was more progressive than his Parliament and that he did all he could to moderate his ministers’ penal instincts. In fact his attitude towards Catholics in Ireland (too many to be suppressed and too far away to mount a rebellion) was fundamentally different from his attitude towards English Papists – as witness his reaction to the 1692 Bill of Indemnity.
The Bill of Indemnity – introduced into the (by then) Protestant Irish Parliament – began with the assertion of a general rule of toleration. But it went on to list so many exceptions that it became a directory of proscribed organisations and would have resulted in the enforced exodus of most of the Irish priesthood. At the suggestion of the Spanish Ambassador, William refused to sign it into law and, in consequence, provoked so wild a reaction among Irish Protestant MPs that the Lord Lieutenant thought it expedient to dissolve Parliament. At the same time in England the requirement that Catholics pay taxes at double the prescribed rate was extended to land tax.
Protestants were certainly right to warn that the Catholic followers of the Stuart cause still harboured faint hopes of James II and VII returning to the English and Scottish thrones. In Lancashire – a county where, by the standards of the late seventeenth century, Catholicism flourished – an Irish-supported rising, planned for 1694, was discovered before it began and its leaders brought to trial. They were imprisoned rather than executed. But the talk of insurrection was grist to the mill of those Westminster Members of Parliament who regretted the King’s refusal to sign into law an Irish Indemnity Bill. So they took up the fight, adopted the bill in Westminster and added a clause of their own which would have nullified the provision to restore sequestrated estates. As always, it was difficult to distinguish between religious bigotry, fear of a new revolution and the inclination of the English gentry to steal Irish land.
Parliament’s submission to the King contended that any relaxations of penal laws ‘carry in them a very strong encouragement for the Irish papists and an abasement of English interests there’.13 It was the Imperial Ambassador’s turn to persuade the King – who had come to power on a promise to sustain parliamentary government – that Parliament’s wishes must be frustrated. William again refused to sign. He was rewarded by the Emperor asking the heads of monastic Orders to warn their followers in England and Ireland against engagement in treasonable activities. Perhaps William saw danger in attracting support from the Holy Roman Emperor. Whatever the reason, his record of modified tolerance was blemished during the following year. In 1697 he was party to the Irish Parliament’s Bishops’ Banishment Act.
The Act expelled from Ireland all priests who exercised executive authority and all regular clergy. As a result, 153 members of various Orders were transported from Dublin, 170 from Galway, 75 from Cork and 26 from Waterford.14 Only two bishops left Ireland; six remained in hiding. According to Edward Comerford, Archbishop of Cashel, they hid in ‘cellars and cisterns, mountains and caves’. The secular clergy, exempted from the Act, went about their work harassed but not prevented from performing their offices, for the idea was to cut connections with Rome without further offending the common people. The objective was not completely achieved. Local Catholic life went on virtually undisturbed. But everybody knew that the Treaty of Limerick had been ‘broke by a Parliament in Ireland summoned by the Prince of Orange’ and a law that banished ‘in perpetuity Catholick bishops, dignitaryes and regular clergy’. There was no point in telling the Irish that they might have been treated worse. They had been treated badly and they knew it. The Bishops’ Banishment Act simply increased their alienation.
Confident that it represented the true faith, the Catholic Church in England never allowed external danger to distract it from struggling for internal improvement. In 1691, when it would have been reasonable for Catholics to think of little else except escaping penalties and punishment, the secular clergy of Hampshire announced that, after much consideration, they had decided that heads of households were morally responsible for the conduct of everyone in their care or employment and that, in consequence, it was sinful for Catholics to serve meat to Protestants on feast days or Fridays15 – thus causing great inconvenience to Catholic farmers who had Protestant labourers to feed. Their preoccupation with details of conduct was part of the great tradition of self-examination. The inconvenience caused by the profusion of feast days had exercised the ingenuity of the Yorkshire clergy five years earlier at a time when, thanks to the benevolence of James II, priests could afford to indulge a passion for the reinterpretation of God’s will. Their ruling had concluded, among other things, that ‘St James’ day to be easily dispensed with, but not so if it falls on a Wednesday or Thursday unless the season be very hazardous’.16 The rubric went on to describe the hazard that would justify ignoring St James, even on a Wednesday or Thursday, as ‘when there has been in the fore part of the week, rains or showers as are enough to spoil the greater part of a hay-day’. To the unbeliever, rulings of such arcane complexity seem absurd. But the fact that they continued through years of threat to life, as well as liberty, illustrates the strength of the conviction that made the Catholic Church in England invincible.
Those characteristics also helped to give Catholics a self-confidence which Protestant bigots regarded as effrontery. The Reverend Mr Peploe, a Lancashire Low Churchman, was just one of the Church of England ministers who were astonished by the Papists’ presumption. ‘In 5 or 6 places in this town where the Papists meet … They have Chappels deck’d out with all the Popish Trinkets. They go as publically to their meetings as we go to Church … Since I came to Preston I have observed that a Popish Bishop, one Layburn, has kept his regular Visitations and there is not a month passes but I am credibly inform’d there is a great number of Popish Priests who meet in this Town on Market Days.’
Wealthy Catholics – always afforded more tolerance than the poor – worshipped in increasing freedom. ‘The laws,’ wrote the Marquess of Halifax, ‘have made them men of pleasure by excluding them from public business.’17 Thomas Tyldesley of Myerscough in Lancashire was such a man, as his diary confirms: ‘To prayers [Mass] and home to dinner. Afterwards went fowling … Alday in town [Lancaster] … spent with Bro Dalton, Cos, Rigby and others at King’s Arms 1s 6d … Went duck hunting with 3 gentlemen … Spent 2s each, being invited to a pig feast.’
Despite the gradual emergence of a Catholic middle class and industrial proletariat, Rome still relied on the gentry to keep the faith alive in rural England and continued to do so throughout the eighteenth century. The Catholics of Birchley in Lancashire were protected by, and relied on, the Anderton family. At Claughton-on-Brock it was the Heskeths and the Brokeholes who built the church and paid the priest. Ann Fenwick did the same in the Lune Valley. Patronage was most common in Lancashire because that was the county in which Catholicism survived in greatest strength. But in every county there were priests and parishes which depended on the generosity of a local Catholic landowner or aristocrat.
In Yorkshire, a quarter of the major landowners were Catholics, and during the seventeenth century the West Riding alone produced eighty priests and forty-eight nuns. Other counties, with similar records of devotion, were home to families that responded, almost en masse, to the Church’s call. John Poulson of Desborough in Northamptonshire had seven sons. Six became priests. Henry Bedingfield of Oxburgh had eleven daughters. Ten became nuns. Of the six Gascoigne siblings, two became Benedictine monks, two became nuns and one became a secular priest. A single generation of Petres – a family that, as well as providing James II with his most controversial adviser, was to play a major part in the campaign for emancipation – included five Jesuits.
In King William’s England, although the anti-Catholic laws were constantly renewed or intensified, they were more often ignored than applied. Queen Anne, who succeeded to the throne in 1702, expected the magistrates to do their duty. Her husband had fought the battle against Catholicism in order to win and consolidate power. Anne fought a holy war that would not end until the enemy was wiped out. In 1704 and 1709 she legislated ‘to prevent the further growth of popery’. Regular clergy were banished. Parish priests were required to register and were limited to one per parish. Priests who turned Protestant were awarded a pension of £30 a year for life. Those who did not were denied the assistance of a curate and obliged to perform their offices in a chapel, which was clearly distinguishable from a ‘real church’ because it had no bell to ring and was not allowed to display a cross. Because the new laws imposed restrictions rather than penalties and punishments, it was easy for the Catholic gentry to convince themselves that, as long as they attended Mass on Sundays and feast days – and paid the recusants’ fine on the increasingly infrequent occasions when they were required to do so – they were living good Catholic lives. Nicholas Blundell, of Little Crosby in Lancashire, managed the balancing act between recusant and loyalist with extraordinary panache. He was devout enough a Catholic to arrange that, when the time came, he would be sent on his way to meet his Maker with a Requiem Mass conducted by four priests. But he also agreed to being appointed churchwarden of Sefton parish church – although he could not attend its services.
Most of the Catholic gentry accepted the disabilities that were imposed upon them and their faith – though rarely with the ingenuity that Nicholas Blundell displayed. However, an increasing minority grew to reject their second-class status. At the same time, Anglicans – especially in the counties where the Catholic gentry thrived – grew to resent the success of families who were regarded by them as certainly impious and probably treacherous. Greed also played a part. The Reverend Samuel Peploe spoke for envious Protestants. ‘The best estates in the country are in the hands of Papists … and the Romish party is, of late, very uppish.’18 Whatever the mood of the ‘Romish Party’, its members were still the victims of gratuitous – almost casual – extensions of discrimination that amounted to persecution. Peploe made his complaint in 1714, the year of the Schism Act: legislation that initially prohibited teaching without a licence from a Church of England bishop, but was amended to exclude tutors to the nobility and those who gave instruction in reading, writing and navigation.
The state-sponsored persecution was never sufficiently extreme to satisfy the bigots. Indeed, it increased rather than diminished their appetite. In 1709, London and the university cities had been convulsed by a bitter dispute over a sermon delivered by Dr Henry Sacheverell in St Paul’s Cathedral. The service was arranged to commemorate the deliverance of King James I from the death which the Gunpowder Plotters had intended, and of Britain from the tyranny of his son, King James II. No doubt the city aldermen expected a routine assault on Catholicism. They got the repetition of a sermon that had been delivered in Derby four years earlier – a condemnation of the Church of England, which was accused and convicted of tolerating behaviour and beliefs that amounted to treason as well as heresy. Sacheverell’s sentiments were unacceptable to his hosts, who refused to print his sermon. So he printed it himself and sold 100,000 copies. Intolerance breeds intolerance and Sacheverell was prosecuted for sedition. Weeks of riots followed, with the mob – once so anti-Catholic – demanding penal sanctions against both Dissenters and Church of England communicants who deviated from High Church (now called Anglo-Catholic) principles. Sacheverell was found guilty but was given the lightest possible sentence. The whole episode had a much greater effect on the standing of the Tory Party, which profited by endorsing Sacheverell’s extremism, than it had on the Church of England. The government introduced the Occasional Conformity Act of 1711. It was based on the false premise that the corruption of which Sacheverell spoke was the work of Catholics and Dissenters who must be dissuaded from continuing their wicked ways. In particular they must be prevented from avoiding the obligations of the Test Acts by occasionally attending an Anglican service. So the Act imposed a £40 fine on anyone who attended a conventicle or meeting house after taking Church of England Communion. More supposedly punitive, but generally pointless, legislation followed.
In 1714 the throne of England was handed to Prince George, the Elector of Hanover – not because of his position in the line of succession, but because he was a Protestant. Emboldened by the knowledge that, although supported by the Whigs, he was less than popular with the Tories, James Edward Stuart – the son of James II, whose paternity Queen Anne had doubted, and Stuart pretender to the throne since his father died in 1701 – decided that the time had come to reclaim his kingdom. By 1715 he had convinced himself that his arrival in Britain would inspire the uprising which had not materialised after an attempted coup of 1708. Naturally enough, he expected the wholehearted support of the Catholics – the men and women for whose religion his father had sacrificed his crown – and he anticipated that the Scottish Highlands were his for the asking. He was wrong. A force of 4,000 or 5,000 Scots had brief success in Lancashire, where they were ‘joined by a great many Gentlemen with their tenants, servants and attendants and some very god figures in the county but all of them still Papists’. The invaders – who were less welcomed by most of the local population than they had anticipated – were defeated at the Battle of Preston. The victors were merciful. Only twenty-six of the hundred captured officers were executed, and no more than one in twenty of the rank-and-file were deported to slavery in the West Indies.
What hopes the Jacobites had of support in the Scottish Highlands were based on the belief that a highly organised Church would mobilise the faithful behind a Catholic pretender. But Catholicism in the Highlands was historically almost entirely dependent on the activities of the religious Orders – particularly the Dominicans and the Jesuits. By the time of the 1715 rebellion, the Dominicans (increasingly committed to work in England) had begun to leave the field clear for the Society of Jesus, whose concern was souls and not the succession. They were led in James VII’s Scotland by Father Thomas Forsyth, who was encouraged to move to the north by Lewis Farquharson – a disillusioned candidate for ministry in the Kirk. The Kirk blamed Forsyth for reductions in the Church’s strength which he, no doubt, was proud to acknowledge as his responsibility. Before Forsyth’s arrival – the Kirk reported – there was ‘hardly a Papist to be found in all the country’.19 Naturally enough, the Jesuits boasted about Forsyth’s success. Scotland was a country ‘where the Catholic religion has scarcely been heard of before, since the introduction of heresy, and into which one of our fathers has penetrated as if laying the foundations of a new church’.
The General Assembly of the Kirk consoled itself with the thought that the Papists – ‘who are become so impudent’ after recruiting ‘upward of 200 persons in Braemar and Glengairn’ – were ‘Ignorant people naturally given to Superstition’.20 Other priests, lay and regular, built on the Jesuit foundations and, on the eve of the 1715 rebellion, they ‘swarme[d] like locust’ across the Highlands, generally unconcerned with affairs of state in Edinburgh and London. Highland Catholicism was led by men who believed in converting heretics one by one, not by the demonstrably futile attempts of a Catholic king to impose his religion on a reluctant people. Even the Society of Jesus had come to accept that Britain was a Protestant country.
After the 1715 rising failed there was no purge of Catholics or revived recourse to anti-Catholic law. Although some priests were roughly handled by King George’s Hanoverian troops, their worst ordeal was to be ‘forced to night in the hills on very cold weather’21 – exactly the treatment meted out to their own tenants by the Catholic clan chieftains during the Highland Clearances. Father Peter McDonald said Mass within sight of the Hanoverian garrison at Fort William ‘and publicly Invited the people of that town to hear and joyn him’. Scottish Catholicism – largely because it showed no real enthusiasm for the Stuart claim – escaped ‘the 15’ largely intact.
The Catholic Church in Scotland gained new members from conversion, but lost many more through the apostasy of the gentry and the emigration of the poor. The number of priests rose and fell between thirty and forty-five. Only one-third of them lived in the Highlands, the home of two-thirds of the Scottish Catholic population. Efforts were made to found a local seminary that would produce priests who were suited to the rough life in the wild north. The need for special training was confirmed by a report from the Vicar Apostolic. Priests returning to Scotland from foreign seminaries were soft. They were the victims of the easy life – the delizie straniere – which they had enjoyed before ordination.22
In England peace and tranquillity might have followed after 1715. The Act of Occasional Conformity and the Schism Acts were repealed. A modified Oath of Allegiance replaced the repudiation of Catholic doctrine and belief which had been the old test of loyalty. There was no longer any need to deny the Pope’s authority or to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation. The new Oath required no more than the promise to live in peace and to reject, or at least ignore, any incitement to treason. ‘I do promise to live peaceably and quietly under his majesty King George and the present Government and that I will not disturb the peace and tranquillity of this realm … and will not make use of any papal dispensation from the said oath.’23 Some of the great Catholic families – the Howards, Blounts and Stonors – found the words no more or less than a statement of their true position.
The hopes of tranquillity did not last long. Two years after the Hanoverian succession and one after the Old Pretender’s attempt to regain the throne there were 350 convictions for recusancy in the North Riding of Yorkshire alone. Antagonism and apprehension had been revived by a series of plots, and the pretence of plots – none of which amounted to much in itself, but all of which could be used by Protestant zealots as evidence that Catholicism and treachery went hand in hand. Chief among them was the Atterbury Plot, a conspiracy which had to be taken seriously because of its origins inside the Church of England establishment.
A year before her death, Queen Anne had appointed Francis Atterbury Bishop of Rochester, despite his High Church sympathies, which he had illustrated by his defence of Henry Sacheverell during the trial for high treason that followed the Protestant preacher’s denunciation of religious tolerance. Atterbury’s plan was to seize the Bank of England and then, with an army of 5,000 men, occupy the whole capital. Atterbury was certainly in correspondence with the Old Pretender, though whether or not he was planning, or even hoping for, a Stuart Restoration remains in doubt. However, the letters were enough to be used as justification not so much for new acts of repression as for attempts to insist on the stricter application of the penal laws that were still on the statute book. The revolt collapsed after the French, who were expected to finance the venture, revealed details of Atterbury’s plans to the English Government – but not until after the Duke of Norfolk had been arrested on suspicion of complicity.
Most English Catholics were too busy with the business of their daily lives even to think about revolution. Daniel Defoe, during his travels through England and Wales, found Durham ‘full of Roman Catholics who live peaceably and disturb no Body and no Body disturbs them’,24 although they went ‘publically to Mass’. At St Winifred’s Well in Flintshire, priests were ‘very numerous’ but ‘no Body takes notice of it or enquires where one another goes’.25 Even in Lancashire, Catholic militancy had faded – diminished by the change of leadership which followed the 1715. When the Jacobite grandees retreated to Scotland, leaving behind their local followers to face their fate, Lancashire had decided that Catholicism was about faith, not dynasties.
Throughout England the Catholic gentry who regarded the Church as their property – with some justification, since they employed the only priests in their villages – survived. But they decreased in absolute numbers and at a far faster rate as a percentage of the total Catholic population. Urban Catholicism was becoming a feature of the expanding towns as craftsmen, in the new trades, became as regular communicants as farm labourers and domestic servants. During the following decade, the shift to town from country was accelerated by a ‘noble family’ defecting from the Church in almost every county – including the Montagus, Gages and Shelleys in Sussex, the Molyneux in Lancashire, the Gascoignes in Yorkshire and the Chillingtons in Northumberland.26
Nowhere was that development more pronounced than in and around Birmingham, soon to become ‘the workshop of the world’. Bonaventure Giffard – the Vicar Apostolic for the Midland District – rejoiced at the ‘daily increasing number of people coming into the Church’ and one of his priests boasted of ‘the incredible success we have had in bringing proselytes of all ranks into our communion’.27 The Catholic Church’s success in Birmingham was partly the result of the Church of England’s neglect of new industrial Britain and partly the reward for realism. There was no immediate prospect of the whole of Britain returning to the faith. Priests gravitated to the West Midlands. Catholics huddled together in enclaves and made converts when and where they could. Father Randolph, a Franciscan, confined his work to isolated Edgbaston and made fifty-seven converts in the three years 1693–6. Catholic education – which had been established first in rural Osmotherley – moved its centre of gravity to Birmingham and the growing towns of the Black Country. The object was less to educate than to prevent lapses from grace. One prosperous Catholic family, the Purcells, recognised that poverty worked for the devil and paid for a priest to say regular Mass ‘for all poor Catholicks … in the neighbourhood’. In the East Midlands the Jesuits still harboured hopes of enough converts to ignite a Counter-Reformation. The public offensive – mounted from Holbeck in Nottingham – was intentionally ambiguous in that it was both an invitation and a challenge to the law. It asserted the ‘free liberty of the People of the Neighbourhood of the place to come at any time to their prayers and devotions’.
London was, in one particular, different. There the growth of a Catholic middle class had given the Church both stability and confidence and, in consequence, fearful and furtive worship was increasingly replaced by the open celebration of Mass and public preaching earlier than it was in the provinces. But the capital was typical of the rest of the country in another aspect of the gradual liberalisation. Protestant bigots were just as scandalised in London as they were in the furthest corner of the most remote county. One complained, ‘Mr Yates in Southampton Street has Mass said in his house every day. Also has Mr Conquest in the same street. Mr Talbot in Bloomsbury Square – his house swarms with priests. Mrs Ems in Eagle Street has preaching in her house.’28 Catholic sermons were advertised as inducements to patronise inns and taverns with landlords who were sympathetic to the Church of Rome. At the Sign of the Ship – an inn known as the Royal Anne – Richard Challoner, destined to become Vicar Apostolic of the London District, was said to have been apprenticed to the proprietor.
Challoner was typical of the new sort of Catholic. His father was a prosperous wine cooper (and Dissenter) who lived and worked in Lewes and, had it not been for his early death, his son might have remained true to his Protestant baptism. But when she became a widow, Mrs Challoner found work with a recusant family and it was, we must presume, through them that Richard found both faith and vocation. The story of his apprenticeship in his family’s trade is hard to reconcile with his enrolment in Douai two months before his fifteenth birthday – where he lived for twenty-five years as student and teacher. But whenever and wherever they were acquired, his passion was reading and his obsession writing. He was the author of sixty works on theology which, he hoped and believed, were as much part of his ministry as saying Mass or hearing confessions. But when he returned to England in 1730 – fourteen years after his ordination – he combined scholarship with the pastoral care of Catholics in London. He preached in unlikely places – probably in the cockpit in Drury Lane and certainly at the Sign of the Ship in Gate Street.
A biographer – writing three years after Challoner’s death – described the Vicar Apostolic’s meeting with his ‘persecuted flock at a public house in Gate Street’.29 Whether or not it accounts for the dubious story of the apprenticeship, it gives a vivid, if slightly over-dramatic picture of Catholic life in mid-eighteenth-century London. ‘A sturdy Irishman [stood] at the door [with instructions] to admit none but the faithful … and the venerable prelate, pitifully bowed down by circumstances under cruel penal laws, came in colourful clothes and preached a comfortable exhortation … with a pint of porter before him which the good Bishop never tasted … in case the Philistines should break in.’
Challoner had more to fear from the Philistines than from the penal laws. For it was a time when there was more persecution by private enterprise than by the courts. Indeed, by one of his most notable contributions to the work of the Church, Challoner made special provision for new Catholics living in a new, and marginally more tolerant, age. He was a direct liturgical descendant of John Gother who, as early as the end of the seventeenth century, had begun the campaign to encourage Catholics to understand what was going on in the Masses they were required to attend. His object was not, of course, to persuade them to participate. Participation was the preserve of the priest who officiated. Gother’s hope was that the congregation would learn to ‘accompany’ him rather than regard themselves as spectators, ‘some saying their Beads … others their Morning Prayers, others their Offices of the Day … with little regard for what the Priest does’.30 In 1705, he published Instructions and Devotions for Hearing the Mass. It was reprinted sixteen times before the end of the century. However, after about 1740 – although still popular – it was superseded, as the textbook of good Mass manners, by Richard Challoner’s The Garden of the Soul. Challoner (by then Vicar Apostolic of the London District) was firm in his support for the teachings of the Council of Trent. His philosophy of education was taken straight from the Council’s conclusions: ‘Bishops must teach in a manner adapted to the mental ability’ of those they instructed and must explain the ‘efficacy and use’ of the Eucharist.31 But, although the idea was not new, it was the right approach for a priest in the changing world of the late eighteenth century. So was his support for making the congregation at Mass more than passive spectators. The move had already begun. It took more than two hundred years to complete.
Challoner was a strict moralist who insisted that every Catholic must constantly examine his or her conduct and improve each day on the previous day’s performance. But he was also a realist who understood that – although the eternal truths of faith could not, by their nature, be questioned – the way in which the Church went about its business had to move with the times. He was the advance guard of change. His primary responsibility was for London – a city with 20,000 recusants, most of whom were the forerunners of the Industrial Revolution’s working class. But it is other aspects of Challoner’s life and work that confirm his place in the history of the Catholic Church in England. While teaching the young, he used Anglo-Saxon alternatives to the Latin nouns and adjectives of the liturgy. Perhaps more than any other priest of his era, he appreciated that the Church had to accommodate a new sort of Catholic – more questioning in temperament, as well as less rural in background.
Included among them were English Catholics who were impeccably loyal to the crown and searched for ways of practising their faith without incurring the civil penalties that increasingly replaced legalised persecution, or attracting the social odium that stigmatised Irish Catholics. The campaign for compromise was led by Sir Robert Throckmorton, who hoped to persuade fellow recusants to take the 1715 Oath of Allegiance and, in consequence, avoid the double taxation that was the punishment for refusal. The Duke of Norfolk – absolved, with suitable apologies, after his arrest following the Atterbury Plot – lent his aristocratic weight to a proposal which, had it been accepted, would have saved him a great deal of time and money. Throckmorton hoped that the Duke’s endorsement would guarantee that Bonaventure Giffard, the new Vicar Apostolic of the London District, would give the proposal the Church’s blessing.
Giffard neither endorsed nor rejected the plan. Loyal Catholics attributed his indecision to his age (he was seventy-four) and the persecution that he had suffered to a greater degree than most of the priests he led. According to a letter he wrote to the Venetian Ambassador, he had been imprisoned three times between April and October 1714. Old and tired, he spent much of his time on visitations to country houses, where he could be ‘amongst friends and relations with much ease and comfort’.32 So the leadership of the campaign to accept the revised oath was taken up by John Talbot Stoner, grandson of the Earl of Shrewsbury and the recently appointed Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. He was not the ideal advocate of a cause that was essentially a compromise. Nor was his acolyte, Father Thomas Strickland. Both men – scions of noble houses – were regarded by their contemporaries as arrogant, intolerant, ambitious and – worse still – were known to possess Hanoverian sympathies. It was said that, while he was Elector of Hanover, George I had asked the Pope to make Stoner a cardinal.
Stoner was not thought a suitable candidate for the eminence of a red hat, but he was sufficiently influential in Rome to succeed in persuading the Vatican tentatively to accept that English Catholics be allowed to swear ‘fidelity and intire Obedience to the present Government’. But the Pope wanted something in exchange for his concession.33 The English Parliament must repeal the penal legislation. Although the anti-Catholic laws were consistently ignored, the English Parliament insisted that they remain in place. The new oath was abandoned.
Official persecution became increasingly rare and only became a real threat to life and liberty at times when there were rumours of foreign, and therefore Catholic, subversion or when the Catholic powers of Europe acted against the perceived interests of Britain and the British. But private hostility, whether or not it was diminished by the reduction in the exercise of the penal laws, remained. Sometimes it bubbled under the surface of society and sometimes it burst out in an explosion of bigotry. From time to time, the more open practice of Catholicism which followed neglect of the penal laws provoked the more fanatical members of the Protestant clergy to warn the nation about an ever-present danger that, they complained, the government chose to ignore. Sermons were preached against the persecution of Protestants in Spain and France. Forebodings were expressed about the consequences of Irish immigration swelling the Catholic population of London. And in 1738 – after British merchant captains gave evidence to Parliament about the way in which their ‘lawful occasions’ were interrupted by the Spanish navy, including the removal of Captain Jenkins’ ear – the London mob took diplomacy into its own hands and once again sacked the Spanish Embassy and attacked anyone who was imagined to be of a Spanish appearance. At times of political hysteria, threats – real or imagined – from Spain were inseparable, in the prejudiced mind, from the likely treachery of Catholics. The poisonous combination of religion and chauvinism was said to result in ‘almost everybody having the greatest abhorrence of Papists coming to a Protestant country to pick Protestant pockets’. It also produced acts of meaningless violence. At the climax of the ‘Jenkins’ ear’ crisis, the chapel of the Sardinian Embassy was attacked by a mob who ‘not only ridiculed the divine service … but struck several persons who were at their devotions’.34 Fortunately such explosions of prejudice grew increasingly rare as Robert Walpole, who had scandalously used agitation about the Atterbury Plot to consolidate his position as Britain’s ‘first Prime Minister’, presided over a long and reassuring peace. And other hate-figures were created to meet the needs of unscrupulous politicians. Among the High Tories, who opposed Walpole’s Whig ministry, were residual Jacobites who regarded Nonconformists as the real enemies of both the state and true religion.
In Scotland, the years that followed the First Jacobite Rebellion were marked by both spectacular successes and deeply damaging divisions. In Ardnamurchan and Mull, Father Colin Campbell recruited, baptised and confirmed so successfully that the Kirk called upon the army to arrest him. In Inverness-shire, Father Gregor McGregor worked with equal energy and devotion, but by 1724 conceded that ‘our trading [code for ministry] was never as low as at present’.35 He was assailed by an unusually fierce counter-offensive by the Kirk. And at the same time the Catholics within his care were deeply divided between supporters and opponents of Jansenism – a new doctrine which, although condemned by the Papal Bull Unigenitus, was inherently attractive to stern, unbending Scots.
Cornelius Otto Jansen believed in predestination. His most important work – based, in part, on what he believed to be the teaching of St Augustine – asserted that only divine grace could save men and women from hell, and that Christ led a small band of the elect to eternal life while ‘the mass of perdition’ were doomed to damnation, no matter how extensive, continuous and self-sacrificial their good works. It was a variant of Calvinism which claimed to be supported by more theological scholarship than Calvin could boast, and although its Five Propositions were shown to be based on a selective reading of Augustine’s work, Jansenism possessed an attraction that far exceeded its theological merits. It enabled Catholics who chose to embrace it to claim that they numbered among the elect and were, therefore, set aside from the prenatally condemned. And it provided a stick with which to beat the Jesuits who, according to Jansen’s doctrine, defied God’s will by behaving as if all the world could be converted to Catholicism and saved. Christ on the Jansen crucifix does not have his arms spread wide to embrace the world. They are folded, to signify the exclusion of irredeemable sinners.
The division between Jansenists and supporters of the bull Unigenitus was social as well as theological. The Lowland priests who were, in effect, chaplains in noble houses opposed the bull. The itinerant Highland priests – Jesuit or not – supported it. The pattern of Scottish devotion was further complicated by the influence of Irish Dominicans in the north and west. In 1731, Gregor McGregor made formal charges of heresy against the Jansenists and, together with Colin Campbell – a priest from Mull – wrote to James Gordon, the Scottish Vicar Apostolic, with the demand that he require all Scottish priests to endorse Unigenitus and proposed the expulsion of Jansenists from the Scots College in Rome. Between 1730 and 1740 Propaganda Fide initiated three inconclusive investigations into the conduct of the college. They served, if they had any effect at all, to widen the breach between what came to be known as Parisians and Romans, as well as between north and south Scotland and between Jesuits and secular priests. The disagreement was still passionate and bitter in 1745 when Scottish Catholics were again called upon, and expected by both incumbent and claimant, to rally to the cause of a Catholic monarchy.