The Gordon Riots of 1780 – far from unnerving the Catholics of England – gave added impetus to the demands for emancipation. True, the crown had been slow in suppressing the mob and, even when the troops were eventually called out and assured of their legal right to act, the anxiety to preserve public property had seemed greater than the determination to protect Popish lives. But the Church had not only survived. It had retained the ‘relief’ which the riots had been raised to repeal. The Act of 1778 – which had provided a degree of civil, though not political, emancipation – encouraged influential Catholics to press the government to move further and faster towards granting them full civic rights. The alliance of rich men which chose to call itself the Catholic Committee was reconstituted in 1782, ‘for five years to promote and attend to the affairs of the Roman Catholic body in England’. Its status, and therefore its name, were in dispute from the start. John Milner – then a priest in Winchester, but destined to become Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District – always referred to the Committee’s foundation as being the work of ‘certain Catholics’, to emphasise that ‘the pretended committee of the Catholics had no commission whatever from anyone except themselves’.1
The Committee’s membership – Lords Stourton and Petre, Mr (afterwards Sir John) Throckmorton, Mr Thomas Stapleton and Mr Thomas Hornyold – was certainly socially unrepresentative of English Catholics in general. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Church was still heavily dependent on the patronage of wealthy believers. But they were mostly prosperous country gentry. The petitioners for more relief were rich to a degree that the description ‘prosperous’ underestimated and, notwithstanding their being Papists, they were influential members of a London elite. They were also men who, personally, had most to gain from political emancipation. When it was eventually achieved, Barons Petre and Stourton immediately took their seats in the House of Lords. The Earl of Surrey, the Duke of Norfolk’s son, was the first Roman Catholic MP to sit in the House of Commons after the repeal of the penal laws. Throckmorton’s nephew was the second. Charles Butler, the Committee’s secretary, was the first Catholic, under the new dispensation, to be called to the Bar. But the clamour for civil rights was not confined to men of property and status. Humbler Catholics believed passionately in the justice of emancipation – even though, because of the property qualification, many of them would not be entitled to vote even when it was achieved. They saw it as a sign of national respect. But they had different day-to-day concerns and priorities.
At the time when metropolitan leaders of the Catholic laity were preparing to storm the heights of political power, Father Simon Bordley of Aughton wrote to his bishop with a complaint. His neighbour, Father Caton of Fornby, would only hear confessions on a Saturday evening – a time of great inconvenience to his parishioners who were domestic servants or had business in the Liverpool market. He had also increased the expected Mass offering from a shilling to half a crown. Worse still, he did not preach, but read ‘a bit out of a book’ – a task which ‘any old woman’ could perform.2 Father Bordley was seventy-nine and had served his parish for forty continuous years. We have no way of knowing if his complaint was justified. But if Father Caton did neglect both his offices and his parish, he was not typical of a Church that had begun to take advantage of its new freedom – everywhere except in Wales.
Welsh Catholics – perhaps because of neglect – stubbornly refused to put aside their old superstitions. Instead they incorporated them into a hybrid of folklore and Christianity. ‘They invoke not the Deity but only the Virgin Mary and other saints: Mair Wen [White Mary]. Jao [James], Tailaw Mawr [Teilo the Great]. Celer, Gelynnogg and others.’3 Despite that, or because of it, attendance at Mass was sparse. The one cause for rejoicing was Perthir, where Matthew Prichard established a Franciscan outpost. Catholic baptisms increased (on average) from 2.3 a year between 1761 and 1766 to 5.6 between 1799 and 1806.
Members and supporters of the essentially metropolitan Catholic Committee did not concern themselves with such mundane issues as rural baptisms, Mass charges or the times at which it was possible to make confessions without requiring labourers to choose between work and prayer. But – though divided by wealth and class from the generality of Catholics – they espoused an idea which they insisted, without very much evidence, was popular throughout the Catholic Church in England. It was set out in a letter which they sent to the Vicars Apostolic on May 24th 1783. The letter offered ‘aid and support in taking such measures as may be effectual to constitute them [the Vicars Apostolic] with the full power of ordinaries in order that frequent depositions to Rome for dispensations and other matters might cease’. The Vicars Apostolic, far from welcoming the offer to increase their independence, denounced the proposal as being the first step towards bishops being elected by their peers, acceptance of the notion that priests and people had equal authority, and the creation of what amounted to a national Catholic Church. There was no direct evidence to confirm those fears in either the Committee’s message to the Vicars Apostolic or in the ‘Letter to the Catholics of England’ that it published on the same day. But subsequent events were to prove those fears to be entirely justified.
Monsignor Christopher Stoner, the agent in the Vatican for the English Vicars Apostolic, represented the view of most priests in an angry letter from Rome. It was headed ‘The Proceeds of Our Committee as they Call Themselves’. The message was as blunt as the title: ‘What displeases me most in all this affair is to see a set of secular gentlemen intermeddling in matters outside their sphere and assuming an air of authority to which they are not entitled.’4 The emphasis on the Committee’s exclusively secular composition was a criticism too damaging to be ignored. Its members still believed that ‘the English Roman Catholic gentlemen, being quite able to act and judge for themselves’, no clerical help was needed. But, faced with hostility at once so great and so distinguished, the Committee wisely retreated and three priests were asked to join them. The most senior was James Robert Talbot, the recently appointed Vicar Apostolic of the London District. His colleagues were Joseph Wilkes, a Benedictine priest from Bath, and Charles Berrington, Coadjutor (but soon to become Vicar Apostolic) of the Midland District.
The invitation to Berrington was intended to ensure that at least one clerical member of the Committee supported the lay members’ proposals. Berrington had lost his professorship at Douai because of his unorthodox view that the celibacy of the clergy was justified by reference to neither the Bible nor ancient texts, and because of his doubts about papal infallibility. He had become the Catholic Committee’s candidate for Vicar Apostolic of the London District and, when John Douglass was nominated, Berrington’s admirers had continued to press his claim with an anonymous letter to the clergy which argued that the laity should have been consulted about the appointment and that the Pope’s endorsement was unnecessary. Berrington had wisely renounced all claim to London and become chaplain and confessor at Ingatestone Hall, the home of Sir John Throckmorton – the author of the anonymous letter – and was, initially, refused facilities in the London District which he had aspired to lead. All in all, he personified the Committee’s view that the Catholic Church in England belonged to them.
It was agreed, at what the Catholic Committee called a General Meeting of the Catholics of England, that the Committee of Five be reconstituted, with the addition of two new lay members and the three priests, as the Committee of Ten. But although it was no longer a purely secular body, it could still not be said to be representative of Catholics at large. Its new members – clerical no less than lay – all had aristocratic connections. The Committee’s unorthodox views were not a secret. Father Thomas Weld of Lulworth declined an invitation to become a member with the explanation that his Jesuit education had taught him not to flirt with heresy and that there was only one possible view of the Pope and his powers.
Although its aristocratic composition was the Committee of Ten’s greatest weakness, it was also its greatest strength. It could be dismissed as wholly unrepresentative of most Catholics, but its connections enabled it to go where humbler Catholics would not have been admitted. In February 1788, at what it described as a ‘meeting of the English Catholics’, the Committee had been empowered to draft a ‘memorial’ for examination by the Prime Minister, William Pitt. It dealt, almost exclusively, with the need for further relief. The time had come for a meeting between the Prime Minister and the Committee’s leading members. Pitt wisely asked for ‘authentic evidence of the opinion of the Catholic clergy and the Catholic universities with respect to the existence and extent of the Pope’s dispensing powers’. It is not clear how the view of the English Catholic clergy was obtained. The Catholic universities of Paris, Louvain, Douai, Alcala and Salamanca were all approached direct. Their answers satisfied the Prime Minister. Pitt was particularly reassured by the unanimous verdict that the doctrine ‘faith need not be kept with heretics’ had no standing within the Church. Oaths – an essential part of all relief legislation – were as likely to be respected by Catholics as by Protestants. It was time to move on.
Pitt, bound to the Committee by ties of class (though not of religion) and naturally sympathetic to emancipation, accepted that the self-appointed ten emissaries spoke for all English Catholics. In fact they held a view of their Church’s proper future which was exclusive to their place in society. The Committee represented those Catholic gentlemen who, during the time of overt persecution, had befriended and defended their local priest – who was often in their employ – and had, in consequence, developed a proprietary feeling towards the Church. They had no wish to interfere with – even less change – what they regarded as theological matters. But they disagreed with more orthodox churchmen about where the boundary between spiritual and secular questions lay. The Committee’s view was essentially pragmatic. They believed themselves to be both devoutly Catholic and patriotically British and proposed to reconcile those two positions by rendering unto Caesar the things to which Caesar could reasonably lay claim. They would die (indeed, some of their forebears had died) in defence of the Pope’s spiritual supremacy. But they could not accept the Pope’s authority over the sovereign Parliament and people of Britain. Their tactic – perfectly consistent with their convictions – was to negotiate a new agreement in which taking an extended oath and accepting a limit on the Pope’s authority entitled a Catholic to full civil rights.
Encouraged by Pitt’s response, the Committee drafted a new Relief Bill. It proposed that an extension of rights should be granted to every Catholic who had taken, or agreed to take, the oath that was included in the Act of 1778. What progress the bill would have made, given a clear run, is in doubt. Its progress was first impeded and then brought to a halt by an initiative taken by Lord Stanhope, a well-meaning but foolish Protestant who hoped that, by uniting the Established Church, Dissenters and Roman Catholics in the cause of relief, he would make the progress of the bill irresistible. Despite Lord Stanhope’s ecumenical hopes, the document he drafted as the basis of agreement was entitled ‘The Declaration and Protestation of English Catholics’. Since he was not, himself, a Catholic, the exercise was innately impertinent and it would have come as no surprise if the Catholic members of the Committee had ignored it. None of them had been consulted. Indeed, no Catholic, lay or clerical, had been asked to offer an opinion. Yet the Committee endorsed the Protestation and sent it on to Thomas Talbot, the sympathetic Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. Talbot signed and urged other priests to do the same. Charles Walmesley, Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, signed and then withdrew his signature. Matthew Gibson of the Northern District gave Talbot permission to add his name if he thought it absolutely essential. Talbot said it was. Largely thanks to his endorsement, 1,523 signatures appeared at the foot of the Protestation.
It was then, and only then, that the Committee decided that a new oath was, after all, necessary. A version was drafted and shown, for approval, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Vicars Apostolic were not consulted. Had they been, they would have had no alternative but to reject it. The new oath began, as expected, with a vow of loyalty to the crown. It then went on to reproduce, almost word for word, a passage from James I’s 1606 Oath of Allegiance, which required complying Catholics to deny that the Pope possessed ‘any spiritual power or jurisdiction … that can directly or indirectly interfere with the constitution of the kingdom’. They would further be required to denounce as ‘impious and heretical’ the ‘damnable Doctrine and Position that Princes excommunicated by the Pope or by Authority of the See of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other person whatsoever’.5 In a phrase intended to echo the Act which had relieved Dissenters of the penalties, Catholics who took the oath were referred to as ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’ as distinct from ‘Papists’, who did not. That alone was enough to make the bill unacceptable to the clergy, for it implied that the oath-takers hovered uncertainly between the Church of England and Rome. Their antagonism was increased by the discovery that the lay members of the Committee wanted to revive the idea which brought them together: English bishops to be elected by the priesthood, and therefore freed from the authority of the Pope. The Committee was left in the paradoxical position of sponsoring a bill which, although it relieved Catholics of long-resented penalties, was not acceptable to the Catholic Church. The price of liberty was too high to pay.
On October 19th 1789, the Vicars Apostolic met at Hammersmith and, without consulting the Committee, condemned the document out of hand. The Committee pleaded for time to persuade the government to modify the wording of the oath. Talbot agreed and the condemnation was never made public in the London and Midland Districts. But in other parts of England explanations of why the oath was anathema were accompanied by the unequivocal instruction, ‘to these determinations we, therefore, require your submission’. Lord Petre, indomitable as well as indefatigable, attempted to convince the censorious Vicars Apostolic that they were in error. His letters to John Douglass, James Talbot’s successor in London, show that the task was so unrewarding that even his patience – stretched over nearly ten years of negotiation – was wearing thin. On January 7th 1791 he was conciliatory: ‘My Lord, I hope that my explanation of the words which alarmed you will convince your Lordship that there is not the most distant intention of any of the parties concerned, catholic or protestant, to disturb the pope in any of his spiritual right or authority.’6 On the following day – ‘explaining parts of my letter which your Lordship seems simply to have misunderstood’ – he exhibited only exasperation: ‘Friends of mine to whom I have shown the letter are quite astonished by the interpretation that you have put on my words.’
It was too late. On December 19th 1791 Douglass, Charles Walmesley of the Western District and Gibson of the Northern published a formal rebuke. ‘The Assembly of the Catholic Committee has no right and no authority to determine the lawfulness of Oaths, Declarations or other Instruments whatsoever containing Doctrinal matters. This authority resides in Bishops, they being by Divine institution, the spiritual Governors of the Church of Christ and the Guardians of Religion.’7 Having rejected the Committee’s right to draft the proposed oath, they went on to denounce its contents. ‘On October 21st 1789 [we] condemned an Oath proposed at that time to be presented to Parliament … Some alterations have been made by the Catholic Committee in that condemned oath, but as far as we have learned of no moment. Therefore [the oath] cannot be lawfully or conscientiously taken by any of the Faithful of our Districts.’8 It took Petre almost a month to reply. His letter was more a rebuttal of the Apostolic Vicars’ conduct than a refusal to abandon the campaign. ‘We have the greatest respect for Episcopal authority … But the requisition of submission made by the Apostolic Vicars appears in the present instance not grounded in equity.’
The Committee’s formal response was composed in even stronger language. The Vicars Apostolic were, they claimed, ‘inculcating principles hostile to society and government, derogatory to the allegiance due to the state’.9 There was, they believed, no need to search for a compromise. An oath, in the form which they proposed, guaranteed the passing of a new Relief Act. Sir John Mitford, a future Lord Chancellor, agreed to move the bill in the Commons. Almost alone among the Vicars Apostolic, Charles Walmesley remained confident of victory for the Church and defeat for the bill. ‘I have,’ he wrote, ‘asked my Master that this bad oath may not pass and He will grant my prayer.’ The drama that followed was enough to convince men of a spiritual disposition that the age of miracles was not dead.
The opponents of the bill were badly in need of a champion. They found one in Winchester. John Milner was a scholar as well as a priest and – significantly in light of the position he was to take up in the oath controversy – neither an aristocrat by birth nor dependent on aristocratic patronage. His views on the governance of the Catholic Church were proclaimed by the titles of his two most famous theological works. One was a simple statement of belief, The Divine Right of the Episcopacy. The other was a warning of a dangerous heresy, Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected.10 Milner was a man of energy and ambition, but it is not clear why he suddenly decided to abandon his antiquarian studies and make for London to fight against the Relief Bill. We do, however, know that he thought the call to arms so urgent that, in the coach on the way to London, he drafted a pamphlet denouncing the oath, had it printed immediately upon his arrival and then took a copy to Edmund Burke’s lodgings. It seems unlikely that Burke and his associates were moved by Milner’s description of the special status enjoyed by the Catholic episcopate. But they were convinced by evidence which he provided that, despite its claims, the Committee did not represent English Catholic opinion and that the bill, as originally drafted, would – because of conscientious objections to the oath – provide relief for only a minority of the Catholic population.
The bill had its First Reading in the House of Commons on March 1st 1790. In his opening speech John Mitford made clear that the Act would only benefit men and women who were prepared to describe themselves as ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’, but suggested that Papists who rejected that description made up a small, and dangerously dissident, group of irreconcilables. According to folklore, the climax of the debate came when the Attorney General, Sir Archibald Macdonald, suddenly rose in his place to announce that, as he entered the chamber, ‘a piece of paper had been put into his hand which proved that one of the Catholic parties was as good subjects and as much entitled to favour as the other’.11 The paper was Milner’s pamphlet and, although it almost certainly did not alter the course of the debate in the dramatic fashion the myth-makers claim, it convinced a number of Members that the bill before them was unacceptable to most of the Catholics whom it sought to relieve. In consequence, when the bill reached its committee stage, the objectionable ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’ was replaced by ‘Catholic’ and it was sent ‘as amended’ to the House of Lords.
The Vicars General – as opposed to the wording of the oath as to the description of the bill’s beneficiaries – campaigned with such effect that when, in June 1790, the bill was debated in the House of Lords, Lord Rawdon (the first speaker) conceded that it would not extend relief to a considerable, perhaps a majority, of Catholics.12 The Bishop of St David’s then made noble flesh creep with the forecast that, if the bill passed into law in the form in which it had reached the Upper House, one set of Catholics would be at the mercy of another, the courts would be swamped by prosecutions initiated by informers, and the prisons would be filled by good citizens whose only crime was the refusal to abjure their faith. When he spoke a second time, he was more constructive. He proposed that the contentious oath be deleted and replaced by the oath that was included in the Irish Relief Act of 1778. The peers wished the Irish oath to be strengthened by the inclusion of an undertaking to support a Protestant succession. With that slight alteration, the Bishop’s amendment was carried. In its new form, the bill passed through both Houses of Parliament without opposition and became the Catholic Relief Act of 1791.
Under its provision, oath-takers could no longer be summonsed for being a ‘Papist’, for hearing or saying Mass, for being a priest or deacon, for entering or belonging to ‘an order affiliated to the church of Rome’, for ‘performing any right, ceremony, practice or observance of the Popish religion or assisting others therein’ or for failing to attend Church of England services. Catholics were freed from the risk of prosecution for organising education in a church. Nor did the law require them to move out of London or register their property. The Act did not relieve Catholics of the obligation to pay double land tax. That penalty was abolished – with little notice and therefore no complaint – by its omission from the annual land-tax bill. Being a practising Catholic or, indeed, a Catholic priest or deacon was no longer illegal. Catholics were allowed to practise law. However, many of the new ‘rights’ they had acquired were no more than the statutes catching up with what had been common practice for a hundred years. In only one particular were civil rights still denied. Catholics – even if they took the oath of loyalty – were still not allowed to vote or sit in either House of Parliament. The opposition of Protestant bigots was avoided by the imposition, or confirmation, of some petty restrictions on Catholic conduct. Catholic assemblies had to be registered at the quarter sessions. Catholic chapels were to be ‘locked, barred and bolted’ while services were in progress. No Catholic could become master, provost or warden of an Oxford or Cambridge college or headmaster of a royal foundation grammar school, and no Catholic school could admit Protestant pupils.
One aspect of the movement towards emancipation degenerated into near farce – the usual fate of attempts to impose laws that vary from one part of the United Kingdom to another. The clauses in the 1781 Act, which were intended to give another boost to recruitment and to please the martially inclined Irish gentry, permitted Catholics – previously not allowed to rise above the rank of major – to hold colonelcies. But the Act only applied to Ireland. So, in order to avoid compulsory demotion when an Irish colonel was posted to London, it was proposed that the right be extended to England. The extension required amendment of the Mutiny Act to which initially the King would not agree, but – after many months of argument – he was persuaded to change his mind, and new clauses, which authorised the change in the law, were added to an Appropriations Bill already before the House of Commons. Then the King realised that, as well as agreeing that Irish Catholics could become regimental colonels, he had accepted the possibility of their being awarded staff appointments. He was prepared to allow Catholics to fight for him in the field, but not to plan in which field the fight should take place. Lord Granville, the Prime Minister, was required both to withdraw the offending clauses and to promise never again to introduce a ‘Papist bill’. Granville resigned and was succeeded by the Duke of Portland, a vehement opponent of Catholic emancipation.
It was not only Irish colonels serving in England who had to accept the status of second-class citizens. Catholic civilians, as well as being denied the right to vote, still had to face innumerable indignities. Their churches were always officially called ‘chapels’ to distinguish them from ‘proper’ places of worship. To drive the point home, the chapels – which had to be built without tower or steeple – were prohibited from ringing bells to summon the faithful to prayer. The wording of the 1791 Relief Act reflected the distaste that Protestant England felt for its Catholic minority. Although the oath which the Act incorporated referred simply to ‘Catholics’, the long title called its beneficiaries ‘Papists or persons professing the Popish religion’ – terms known to be offensive to Catholics – and made clear that there were, at best, doubts about their innate right to religious tolerance. Relief was ‘thought expedient’. Concessions – reluctantly given – were preferable to resentment, riot and revolution.
The law had changed significantly. But the attitude, and sometimes the conduct, of hard-line Protestants had not. In the northern counties of Ireland – fast becoming the centre of anti-Catholic bigotry – jobs in the emergent heavy industries were denied to Papists. Even in Dublin, where Catholics made up the vast majority of the population, they were still subject to private harassment. At the soup kitchens that, on Fridays, offered meat broth to the starving poor, the recipients of the largesse were harangued on the subject of the Pope’s close relationship with the devil. Offers were made, and frequently accepted, to buy the children of pauper Catholic families. The purchase being made, they were assimilated into Protestant families as members or servants.
The Committee of Ten – all of whom would have benefited personally from an extension of the franchise and regarded the Second Relief Act as only a staging post to the achievement of full emancipation – decided to move the process along by calling a general meeting which, they said, would represent the Catholics of England. It was held on June 9th 1791, two days after the Act was passed. Two hundred men – priests and laity – assembled in the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. The first item on the agenda was a vote of thanks to the Committee. But – as the proposed recipients of the self-generated gratitude should have realised – as many Catholics were as offended by the wording of the original oath as were gratified by the relief. So the vote of thanks was defeated, on the grounds that it ‘could not be conscientiously given to persons who had so long and so violently endeavoured to impose a condemned oath of heterodoxy and schism on the Catholics of England’.13 An amendment which offered congratulations to whoever had persuaded Parliament to accept the orthodox oath was ruled out of order by the chairman. The decision that there should be no vote of thanks to anyone for anything did not augur well for the future of the Committee. Nor did the debate that followed. The outcome of the meeting’s main business served only to emphasise the deep division between different groups of Catholics.
There was no discussion of the ways and means by which full emancipation could be achieved. The concern of the Committee was the governance of the Catholic Church in England, not the rights of the English Catholics. They regarded the Church as their property and they wanted to regain the control they had enjoyed during the age of its persecution. The motion, which noted that ‘the oath contained in the Bill for the Relief of English Catholics is not expressed in the words of the Protestation’ (which the Committee had presented to the government in 1789), and reaffirming the ‘Committee’s continued adherence to the Protestation as an explanation of their civil and social principles’, was carried by 104 votes to 72. The true aims of the Committee – an English Catholic Church which was independent of Rome and governed as much by rich laymen as by its bishops – had been endorsed. But it was no longer possible to argue that emancipation was its only aim, or that it spoke for all of Catholic England. So the Committee of Ten transmogrified itself into the Cisalpine Club – Cisalpine as distinct from (and opposed to) Ultramontane, and because it represented the views of Catholics on the anti-clerical side of the Alps. Its inaugural meeting – held on the appropriately unorthodox premises of the Freemasons’ Tavern – confirmed its purpose as organising opposition to papal tyranny. Its members remained vocal, but became ineffectual. The impetus towards emancipation had to come from elsewhere. It came from Ireland.
Most English Protestants who believed in Catholic emancipation as a matter of principle also held the view – and expressed it, to win the support of their more bigoted associates – that improving the status of Catholics was essential to the tranquillity of the kingdom. The need, in terms of stability and security, was greatest in Ireland, which could exert pressure of which England or Scotland was never capable. Political power lay in London. But the power of numbers gave Irish Catholics a strength that the tiny English Catholic minority did not possess.
John Milner – future Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District and hero of the episcopate’s battle against the Committee of Ten – believed that, in the last push for full emancipation, Ireland would lead the way. ‘The fate of the English Catholics depends on that of our brethren in Ireland. If their claims are overlooked, ours will never be thought worthy of notice. On the other hand, whatever redress of grievances or legal privileges they obtain, we shall not be long deprived of. In a word, they are the stately vessel which catches the breeze and stems the tide. We are the cock-boat which is towed in her wake.’14 The essentially pragmatic view of emancipation – relief as an expedient – was faithfully expressed by Lord Castlereagh during the debates that ended with the Act of Union and the voluntary dissolution of the Dublin Parliament. ‘Until Catholics are admitted into a general participation of rights, which when incorporated with the British Government they cannot abuse, there will be no peace or safety in Ireland.’15
It was, therefore, a combination of principle and necessity that produced, in 1793, an Irish Relief Bill with provisions which – in terms of the approach to full emancipation – leapfrogged the English Act of the same name. The Irish Act, as the bill became, abolished the historical penalties imposed on Catholics, but its historic importance lay in the clauses that gave Catholics the right to vote. They were still precluded from sitting in Parliament. So emancipation was far from complete. But it was closer to achievement in Ireland than in England.
The bishops of the Catholic Church in Ireland, with three separate Acts of Indulgence to celebrate (1778, 1782 and 1793), ended the eighteenth century determined to work in harmony (its critics said to ingratiate themselves) with the Protestant establishment. In 1788, before the process of ‘relief’ was complete, Archbishop Butler had written from Thurles to the priests in his diocese expressing his concern about the health of George III and instructing them to show their gratitude for His Majesty’s benevolence by preceding all Masses on both Sundays and holy days with prayers for the royal welfare. His letter was not the product of sudden compassion, but the result of a carefully considered combination of Christian charity and self-interest. In A Justification – a slim volume – he explained that it was the duty of the Irish Catholic Church to give thanks for favours received, and expressed the pious hope that there were more on the way. He did not go into details about the favours for which it should express its gratitude.
Reconciliation was official Church policy. The finest flowering of that aspiration was a message sent by the Irish bishops to the Pope in 1788. They were unanimously in favour of the ‘revocation of the censure of excommunication against freemasons as the enforcement of this law involves the denunciation of the very heads of state, of most nobles and military administrators’. The request was not even acknowledged. But the policy achieved some beneficial results. The most important was the decision, taken by the Dublin Parliament in 1795, to make a grant towards the establishment of what became the most influential of all Catholic seminaries. Its full title, the Royal College of St Patrick, Maynooth, County Clare, was chosen as a gesture of goodwill. But it caused a bitter dispute within the Catholic Church in Ireland which, in some ways, replicated the disagreements in England over the Relief Act oath. It concerned the rights and role of bishops. The episcopacy was in conflict with Rome, not the laity. Of course, Rome won.
The Catholic Church in Ireland had already embarked on a programme of self-improvement. Even as Archbishop Butler was instructing his priests to have a mind for the welfare of the King, he was also holding meetings – as the Thurles conference and, indeed, the Council of Trent required – to ensure that his clergy understood the rules governing the baptism of an unborn child, the prayers that must be learned before confirmation, the circumstances in which it was permitted to say more than one Mass a day, and the qualification of candidates for ordination. But Maynooth, as it was always known, came to dominate more than Irish clerical education. For the next hundred years all of Irish Catholicism was said to be governed by the stern alternative ‘Maynooth or may not’.
During the first thirty years of its existence Maynooth prepared 4,000 Irishmen for the priesthood and became such a force in the recruitment of secular clergy that the Irish seminaries in continental Europe shrank and closed. Maynooth illustrated and represented a new era in Irish Catholicism in which a combination of episcopal reorganisation and the relaxation of penal laws enabled the priesthood to discharge its pastoral duties in a way that made it an integral part of Irish life. So, when the Great Famine came in the mid-nineteenth century and the exodus followed, Irish Catholics took with them their own brand of community Catholicism. But arguments over the constitution of the seminary divided the Catholic Church in Ireland, provoked the bizarre suggestion that it might achieve a status something like ‘established’ and diverted, into a cul-de-sac, the journey towards full emancipation.
The acceptance of a government grant would have ended three hundred years of financial independence during which the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland – occasionally helped by gifts from abroad – was uncontaminated by any sort of state endowment. But purity came at a price that was deeply resented by many Irish Catholics. Against their will and wishes, they paid for the upkeep of two Churches. Their tithes and glebe charges supported the alien Church of Ireland, while collections and payments for prayers and services provided a meagre living for their own parish priests. They consoled themselves with the thought that help from the state would, inevitably, be accompanied by state interference. And so it proved in the case of the Maynooth grant.
Early in 1795, Richard O’Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh, John Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, and Patrick Plunkett, Bishop of Meath, were asked by the Governor General to discover what official answer the Irish episcopate would give to two related questions. They were predicated on the assumption that the Dublin government would, in some way, help to meet the cost of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The two questions must have caused even more surprise than the offer. They were repeated in a letter that Troy sent to some, though not all, of his colleagues: ‘Could the Government be allowed the appointment of the President and Professors at Maynooth?’ and ‘What answer are they to make to the proposal of the nomination of Bishops by the King?’ The four metropolitans and eighteen bishops assembled in Dublin and agreed their reply to the questions. To the first they responded, ‘Negative. No interference.’ Their second answer was not quite so emphatic. ‘The proposal [to allow the King to nominate bishops] is to be resisted in limine.’16 They then considered how the Pope should respond if the questions were referred to Rome. Their advice was even more equivocal: ‘Not to agree to His Majesty’s nomination if it can be avoided.’ If agreement was unavoidable, they hoped it would be possible to persuade the King ‘to nominate one of three recommended by the respective Provincial Bishops’. For two years neither Church nor state thought the question worth pursuing.
There the matter might have ended had not Wolfe Tone, an Episcopalian Irish nationalist, behaved as Catholics were expected to behave and attempted to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland. In December 1798, three months after the abortive rebellion was crushed, John Troy, the Archbishop of Dublin, was called into the presence of the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The Archbishop was asked a variant of the old question: was it within the Pope’s power to cede influence over episcopal nominations to a secular authority? Assured that it was, he then – no doubt to Troy’s astonishment – asked how the bishops would respond to an offer of an annual state grant which was sufficient to provide support for every priest and bishop in Ireland. Troy answered that the total cost of such a scheme (£200,000) made the idea totally impractical. Then, much to his credit, he added that, were the Catholic Church in Ireland to become the creature of the state, it would wither and die.
On August 17th 1799 Troy wrote to Cardinal Borgia at Propaganda Fide with an explanation of what had prompted the Lord Lieutenant to ask such unexpected questions. ‘The government gave me to understand that the guilty conduct of some of our priests, secular and regular, in the recently suppressed rebellion brought suspicion on our clergy.’17 The government attributed their disloyalty to their ‘abject dependence on the people’. The only way to restore the King’s confidence in the loyalty of the Irish Catholic Church was agreement by Pope and Church ‘that His Majesty should have the privilege, as in Canada, of presenting to the Pope the candidates whom he deems suitable to be Bishops’.
Troy, according to his own account, stood his corner. The rebel priests were relatively few. Salaried priests would be regarded as government mercenaries. The cost of state support would be greater than the government would be prepared to pay. Only the Pope could alter the way in which bishops were selected and appointed. Having assured the Cardinal that he had ‘made other difficulties’, Troy gave Borgia notice that he proposed to consult ‘the three Metropolitans, my Suffragan Bishops and other Prelates’. During the second week in January 1799 they met in Dublin, to ‘deliberate on the proposal from government’.
The assembled bishops did not, as might have been supposed, dismiss the proposal out of hand. Instead they replied to the questions that were really a proposal in a paper that amounted to their alternative offer. It began by setting out the normal procedure for the selection of a bishop and confirmed the necessity of respecting the established rules. Then it added two additional steps which might be taken before the appointment took effect: ‘The candidates so selected to be presented by the President of the election to the Government which, within one month after such presentation, will transmit the name of the said candidate, if no objection shall be made against him, to the Holy See.’ If there were an objection – the proposal did not suggest what objections would be regarded as legitimate – ‘the President of the election will be informed … who in that case will convene the election of another candidate’.18 The paper ended with the necessary and proper caveat that their proposals could have ‘no effect without the sanction of the Holy See’, and added that the Irish clergy would ‘use their best endeavours to procure’ papal agreement. The four archbishops and six bishops were offering a Protestant government the power of veto over the appointment to the Roman Catholic episcopate. They were, in fact, proposing a little, local Reformation. Henry VIII’s break with Rome had been caused by differences neither over liturgy nor theology. Henry had denied the right of the Pope to interfere in English affairs. The ten bishops proposed to follow his lead and usurp, on behalf of the Westminster government, the Pope’s power in Ireland.
King George did not regard the concession as sufficiently significant to warrant his agreement to what he regarded as creeping emancipation. So the negotiations might have ended with the veto being vetoed. But, wisely, the bishops decided to keep the whole discussion secret until the entire Irish episcopate had pronounced on the proposals. A majority of Ireland’s thirty bishops, firmly but discreetly, rejected the idea that the government might be given the power to veto the nomination of an Irish bishop. They insisted that the ten of their colleagues who had drawn up the response to the government had no authority to speak or negotiate on behalf of the whole Catholic Church in Ireland. They were merely the episcopal trustees of Maynooth College. That dismissive description was not the worst thing to be said about them. One observer called them a ‘terrified little coterie’. A Dublin barrister, who meant to speak up in their defence, said that they dared not defy ‘an Administration exercising martial law’.
The allegations of coercion – vigorously denied by the government when the story of the negotiations were made public ten years later – did the ten bishops less than justice. John Milner, their greatest critic, wrote about the negotiations taking place at a time when ‘Orangemen and soldiers were demolishing chapels and torturing Catholic peasants’.19 But he added, more accurately, that the negotiators were ‘really led to believe that the Church … would not only be protected and honoured but also that it would, in a sort of subordinate way, become the Established Church of Ireland’. He might have added that – relying on both European and South American precedence – they believed that the proposal was acceptable to the Church and would be endorsed by the Pope. Their error was over-enthusiasm – compounded by the failure to acknowledge that the Church in Ireland was, in effect, a political as well as religious institution. Their memorial was Maynooth. The ruined reputations and frustrated hopes left behind an institution that became crucially important to the progress of Irish Catholicism.
While Catholic Ireland was developing its distinctive form of seminary education, at the expense of the continental institutions on which it had once relied, the Scots College in Rome was struggling to meet the incessant demands of the Church by which it had been created. It had been set up to provide ‘a steady and regular supply of secular clergy who would spend their lives working in Scotland amongst Scottish Catholics’ and, according to Abbé Paul McPherson, who examined the college after the turn of the century, the ill discipline of the students and incompetence of the staff meant that the college had ‘failed and failed lamentably’ to fulfil that purpose.20
If Scottish Catholic confidence recovered, following the passage of the Scottish Relief Act in 1793, the improvement must be attributed to the behaviour of the nobility. The Huntley family built a chapel, dedicated to St Gregory, which they claimed to be ‘bigger than the best Roman Catholic chapel in London’, and there they celebrated the first High Mass to be said and sung in Scotland since the Reformation. In 1796, the refugee brother of the executed Louis XVI of France took refuge in Holyrood House. Inevitably the French Revolution left its mark on the Catholics of Britain and of its Irish province.
The Catholic Church in England benefited from the aspects of the revolution that it found most distasteful – the Reign of Terror and the assault on religion, which included the Cathedral of Notre-Dame becoming a Temple of Reason. From 1790 onwards there was a steady flow of refugee priests from across the Channel. Three émigré curés arrived at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, in or about 1794. They left after the Bourbons were restored in 1815, but their twenty-year influence on the fishing port was profound. One, Nicholas Alain Gilbert – who published Methods of Sanctifying the Sabbath in Whitby, Scarborough etc21 – left behind him a tradition of service and scholarship that sustained the Church for years. But the most important contribution he and his colleagues made to Catholic life in the East Riding was evangelical, not academic. In 1774 there were fifteen Catholics in Whitby; in 1805 there were three hundred and they celebrated Mass in a new chapel. Reading fared even better. Priests who, after crossing the Channel, had made a temporary home in Winchester, moved on to the Berkshire town, where they took up permanent residence in the King’s Arms. At the time of their arrival, Mass was said in a rented room. One of the priests taught French to the locals and used what he earned to build a new chapel that could accommodate five hundred worshippers.
During the 1790s there was a great exodus of English nuns from France and the Low Countries – Carmelites from Antwerp to Cornwall, Benedictines from Dunkirk to Hammersmith in London and from Ghent to Preston. The seminary at Douai was forced to close and some of its staff joined the Old Hall Academy in Hertfordshire and helped it to evolve into St Edmund’s College, which it remains today. But most of the Douai staff were relocated to the sites of new English seminaries at Ushaw in County Durham and Oscott in Birmingham – thus helping to drag English Catholicism out of the country and into the new industrial towns. All in all, the one English Catholic casualty (and that resulted in only temporary injury) was the English College in Rome, which was suppressed by Napoleonic edict and its building used as an infantry barracks. Graves were opened and the lead coffin linings were taken for melting down and making into musket balls. Amongst the bodies to be desecrated were the last mortal remains of William Allen.
Fear and hatred first of revolutionary France, then of Napoleonic France and perhaps of France and the French in general, increased English sympathy for followers of the religion that the Republic had persecuted and which remained at odds with the authoritarian state. But the next attempt to move on towards full emancipation was brought about by changes in the parliamentary alliances rather than by shifts in the national mood. William Pitt had steadfastly refused to denounce, though he was unable to endorse, a pamphlet – written by an Undersecretary in his own government – which, as well as anticipating the 1798 Relief Act, proposed that a share of Irish tithes should go to the Catholic Church. Pitt’s view was partly principled and partly pragmatic – as represented by the 1798 Act. ‘The benefits of a free constitution’ increase ‘the prosperity and strength of all His Majesty’s Dominions’. That view was shared by Henry Grattan, Prime Minister of Ireland and a man of immovable opposition to even the prospect of a Catholic hegemony: ‘I shall never assent to any measure tending to shake the security of the Kingdom or subvert the Protestant ascendency.’22 But he also believed that ‘the Irish Protestant can never be free while the Irish Catholic is a slave’.
In the summer of 1794, Pitt had formed his second administration and appointed the Earl Fitzwilliam Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Fitzwilliam rashly courted Grattan’s support and replaced anti-emancipation Tories with Whig Reformers. Believing that what the Whigs called ‘a new order’ was about to transform Irish politics, Grattan introduced an Emancipation Bill. The King was scandalised that Fitzwilliam had, ‘after no longer stay than three weeks in Ireland’,23 flouted ‘the wisdom of ages’. He ordered that the bill be withdrawn and announced that emancipation was ‘beyond the power of ministers’. Enfranchising Catholics would be a betrayal of his coronation oath. It seemed that emancipation was as far away as ever.