If a Catholic ploughman, homeward plodding his weary way in any part of Britain, felt passionately engaged in the struggle for complete and unqualified emancipation, his emotions were stirred less by resentment at the denial of his own civil rights than by the affront to his Church faith that the denial embodied. The Relief Acts had guaranteed his legal right freely to follow the religion of Rome. Their extension, to include the full rights of citizenship – would be of no immediate benefit to him. He was doubly disenfranchised: first because he was a Catholic, and second because he did not possess the social and financial status that qualified him to vote. Talk of electoral reform rarely went beyond the hope that the franchise could be extended to the property-owning middle classes of the expanding industrial towns. And when that hope was first realised, in the shape of the (extravagantly named) Great Reform Bill of 1832, it only increased the electorate from 435,000 voters to 652,000. Most Catholics – like other working men and women – remained disenfranchised until 1884. In England, at the start of the nineteenth century, emancipation was the active concern of the Catholic nobility and gentry. A recital of the grievances, felt by Catholics at the beginning of the new century, shows how class-related the campaign for full emancipation was.
In July 1804, John Douglass, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, drew up a list of complaints for a rich Catholic laymen, John Brockholes – undeterred by the knowledge that his great-grandfather had died fighting for the Old Pretender at the Battle of Preston – to pass on to the government. It was astonishingly limited to three grievances. Catholic marriages (being outside the law) deprived ‘deserted parties’ from receiving relief and redress. Catholics, serving in the army, were obliged to attend Protestant church parades. Monies, collected for the maintenance of priests, was – if ‘seized upon by malevolent persons’ who claimed it had been intended for ‘superstitious purposes’ – not recoverable by law.1
In his Address to the Protestants of the United Kingdom, Charles Butler of the Catholic Committee composed a more comprehensive list of disabilities. Most of them were penalties which only bore down on the prosperous classes. Catholics were ‘excluded from offices in cities and corporations’ and from ‘civil and military offices’. They were ‘prevented from voting at elections … filling their hereditary seats in Parliament … sitting in the House of Commons’. The disposal of property by gift to the religious foundation of their choice (‘which the law allows even to the Jew’) was prohibited to Catholics. ‘No provision [was] made for the religious comfort and duty of Roman Catholic soldiers and sailors.’ Catholics, who had to ‘support their own religious functionaries’, were also required to ‘contribute to the religious establishment of the country’. Butler added to his list of grievances two complaints that related less to the legal status of Catholics than to the way in which they were treated by their Protestant contemporaries. They were examples of the sort of discrimination which persisted for two hundred years and, to a lesser degree, persists – for all minority religions – today. ‘In hospitals, workhouses and other public institutions’ poor Catholics were discouraged from performing the rituals of their faith, and the children of the Catholic poor often had little option but to attend Church of England schools.
Supporters of the campaign for civil emancipation were motivated by a variety of emotions. The most avid – mostly men who had much to gain from the campaign’s success – saw the demand to extend the suffrage as an opportunity to promote old causes. The ‘nobility and gentry’ of the Catholic Association certainly hoped that, as a by-product of their exertions, control of the English Church would be returned to them and the power of both Rome and the priesthood would be diminished. Opposition – or tepid support – was also based on considerations that were supplementary to the main issue. Some Catholics were determined not to concede the rights of Rome as the price of a universal franchise. Others feared that victory for the Catholic Association would guarantee its dominance over the rest of the Church.
In Ireland the 1778 Relief Act had already given the vote to Irishmen who passed the property test. As a result, there were a large number of ‘forty shilling freeholders’ who qualified as the result of gifts from local landowners. The beneficiaries were expected to demonstrate their gratitude by supporting their benefactor’s nominees at election time. But in Dublin, complete emancipation – the right to sit in the House of Commons as well as elect it – was regarded by the growing independence movement as an essential step along the road to national liberation. And the leaders of that movement believed, with much justification, that emancipation had been promised to them in return for their support of the 1801 Act of Union. Pitt, it was said, had put the idea to George III. But the King had already made his position clear. At a levee on January 28th 1801 he dismissed the notion as ‘the most Jacobinical thing I ever heard of’ and, to avoid any doubt about his feelings, added, ‘I shall reckon any man my personal enemy who proposes any such measure.’2 The House of Hanover – conscious in this, if not every particular, of the obligations placed upon them by the coronation oath – was the last barrier on the road to emancipation. Most, though not all, Whig ministers were in favour. George III, and his two sons who succeeded him, were irrevocably against.
The campaign for Catholic emancipation lasted for almost half a century and ended in success because of the determination, dedication and acumen of the men who both believed in it as a principle and expected to benefit by its acceptance. But while their years of labour rolled the boulder to the very edge of the cliff, one man can claim credit for pushing it over. Daniel O’Connell, a Dublin lawyer from a prosperous landowning family, believed that Catholic emancipation and Irish liberty went hand in hand. But unlike most Roman Catholics – perhaps because of a period of agnosticism in early manhood – he advocated a ‘new scale of justice which would emancipate the Protestant in Spain and Portugal as well as the Christian in Constantinople’.3 That was too comprehensive an aspiration to inspire the many Catholics who saw changes in the law exclusively in terms of their effects on the Church of Rome. As a result, progress towards emancipation was hindered, though not directly opposed, by a man who, although less attractive than O’Connell, was certainly as single-minded and courageous. John Milner – the priest from Winchester whose dramatic intervention had made the 1791 Relief Act acceptable to most of the Catholic clergy but, paradoxically, not to him – was not prepared to make the slightest sacrifice of Roman rites or papal authority in return for political freedom.
John Milner became Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District in 1803. It was an appointment that he regarded as unforgivably belated. The delay was an indignity to which he was never reconciled. In October of the previous year he had written to Sir John Coxe Hippisley – a Member of Parliament with an unaccountable interest in Catholic affairs – to complain that he had twice been passed over for promotion, despite ‘having a second time been unanimously recommended by the three Catholic Bishops whose business it is to present candidates’.4 The letter ended with a request for Coxe Hippisley to write to Rome on Milner’s behalf – an extraordinary suggestion in itself, which was made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Milner was to spend much of the rest of his life resisting lay influence on what he regarded as purely clerical business, and the added fact that Coxe Hippisley was a Protestant.
No sooner had his promotion been confirmed than Milner began to cause trouble inside and outside his diocese. In 1807, his reflections on his first four years of episcopal office reveal the low esteem in which he held John Douglass, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District. ‘I have again and again, in the reports I have made to Rome on the state of religion in England represented those evils under which it groans viz the frequent and notorious publication of heterodox and schismatical doctrine.’5 He took his examples from the City of London where, according to his accusation, John Douglass exhibited ‘constant and systematic opposition … to holding a synod or any other meeting of his episcopal brethren for remedying these and other evils’. Milner’s dislike of Douglass had many causes, including the readmission to London services of Charles Berrington – the sceptical priest who had joined the Catholic Society. Milner was obsessed by London, a condition which his critics attributed to the ambition to become a virtual archbishop. So great was his passion to move to the capital that he petitioned, with the support of the Irish bishops, to become Douglass’ Coadjutor. A Congregation (held in December 1806) took the official decision that Milner should remain, for the rest of his vocation, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. Milner became English agent for the Irish bishops and spent much of his time in London pursuing old enemies and ingrained obsessions.
Milner understood that, since the campaign for independence was indivisible, ‘the fate of us English Catholics depends on that of our brethren in Ireland. If their claims are overlooked, ours will never be thought worthy of notice.’6 But, although the hopes of both Catholic communities were intimately related, they were not always expressed in identical demands by men with related priorities. The first emancipation initiative to follow the Act of Union did come from Ireland. But it was a petition which – among other grievances – complained that Protestant monopolies were restricting trade. It was signed by six peers, three baronets and eighty-nine ‘men of property and distinction’.
William Pitt refused to present the petition to Parliament. His friends offered an explanation. During one of his fits of sanity – which coincided with the Act of Union – George III had sent his Prime Minister a message: ‘Tell him that I am well. But what he has to answer for [is] who is the cause of my being ill at all.’7 And Pitt – in a moment of quixotic irresponsibility – had accepted that it was Catholicism that had driven the King mad and promised never to promote Catholic interests again. So Charles James Fox was left to present the petition to the House of Commons, where the motion to endorse and support it was defeated by 336 votes to 124.
Foolishly, the English Catholic Committee chose to ignore the whole emancipation campaign. A pamphlet, published in the name of Sir John Throckmorton, justified the decision by assertions which, in its dismissal of the Irish emancipation movement, were self-evident nonsense. ‘They have yielded before us. Many more statutes are still in force against us. Yet our relative position is far preferable to theirs.’8 The final sentence confirmed the pamphlet’s purpose. Throckmorton promised that, at some yet-to-be-determined future date, ‘when there will be an English Catholic petition we shall be happy to prove the sincerity of our position’. The English Catholic gentry were preparing to buy emancipation for a price that Irish Catholics would not pay. The full cost was revealed in another Throckmorton pamphlet. The ‘government has only to signify that it is their wish that the king in future shall have the nomination of the Catholic Bishops. This will be conceded.’9 The veto was back on the agenda. For the next twenty years the emancipation debate ranged around the question ‘what “securities” was the Catholic Church prepared to provide as guarantees against subversion?’ Only the Catholic Association had an immediate answer, and that – the King’s involvement in Church business – was unacceptable to most of the clergy.
There was no doubt that an overwhelming majority of Catholics were loyal subjects of King George and, if they thought about it at all, were willing both to swear their allegiance to the crown and to deny the Pope’s authority over secular matters. Putting aside the difficulty of deciding where the line between secular and religious authority should lie – a matter for theologians – dignity and self-respect made many Catholics reluctant to provide ‘securities’ to guarantee their good faith. And most of those who initially accepted the principle became opponents of the idea when presented with practical examples of the form those securities might take. Coxe Hippisley proposed a scheme which would, in his opinion, convince the English government that only loyalists would become Catholic bishops. A short list of four to eight candidates should be presented to ministers, who would then make the final selection. The proposal, another version of the dreaded veto, only intensified the argument, which was to take years to resolve.
The hope of progress – even at a price – was damaged by events outside the control of both obdurate and compliant Catholics. The Pope travelled across Europe to crown Napoleon Emperor of France and, although the crown was snatched from his trembling hand by the impatient Bonaparte, his presence at the ceremony in Notre-Dame seemed to confirm Rome’s support for England’s greatest enemy. However, the war against France continued to produce small bonuses for the Catholic Church. One of them was the Church of England lapsing into a moment of ecumenical generosity. John Douglass wrote to the Bishop of London on behalf of the Catholic Church to ask if there would be any objection to a group of émigré nuns setting up a school in the capital. Dr Porteus sent what he, no doubt, thought was a generous reply. He was prepared for the initiative to go ahead, ‘as long as the unfortunate ladies educate non but the children of Roman Catholics’, but he had a further requirement: ‘They must conduct themselves quietly and discreetly.’10
William Pitt died on January 23rd 1806. That, in itself, dealt the prospects of emancipation a savage blow, and the already minimal hopes of progress were further reduced by the revolt of self-styled ‘orthodox’ priests against the concordat between Pius VII and the Emperor Napoleon. John Milner denounced the Pope’s critics for doing ‘scandalous injuries to the lawful successor to St Peter’. He then turned on what he described as a group of ‘lay Catholics who, to the exclusion of their clergy, associated together as a literary club’ but failed to ‘produce any work in support of their learned pretensions’ because they were, in truth, ‘a new Catholic Committee’11 bent on emancipation at any price. After a year of not very convincing claims to possess only cultural aspirations, the ‘literary club’ admitted its true purpose, changed its name to the Catholic Board and resumed its attempts to find a way of convincing fellow Catholics that an ambiguous oath of loyalty was a price worth paying for full emancipation.
The Board opened membership to clergy as well as laity and invited all the Vicars Apostolic to serve on its general committee. Milner’s name appeared on the list of the Board’s subscribers, but that did not prevent him from dismissing Edward Jerningham, its secretary, as a nonentity and accusing its committee of publishing ‘anonymous defamatory pamphlets, mutilated and altered deeds and false reports of parliamentary speeches’.12 The invective was accompanied by the encouragement of opposition to any suggestion that Catholics provide some sort of assurance of good conduct – the basic requirement of emancipation as set out by Earl Grey, a supporter and parliamentary advocate of the cause.
A general meeting, called for February 1st 1810, had the ostensible purpose of testing Catholic opinion. Lord Clifford and a ‘dozen Catholic gentlemen’ agreed to dine together at Doran’s Hotel in Dover Street and asked John Milner, together with the Vicar Apostolic of the London District and his Coadjutor, to join them. ‘The dinner was no sooner removed and the waiters withdrawn’13 than Milner realised what should have been clear from the start. The dinner was not a social occasion, but an attempt to gain support for the terms of an emancipation agreement.
Edward Jerningham, the Secretary to the Board, read out the proposed message to Parliament. It was drafted in the form of five ‘Resolutions’. The first two asserted the urgent need to end ‘the state of political degradation’ by a reform that was described as ‘essential to the preservation of the Empire’.14 The third and fourth proposed that a new petition should be presented to Parliament and that the presentation should be entrusted to Earl Grey and William Windham. The fifth, as well as confirming the Catholic commitment to the ‘common cause … of freedom and independence’, announced that Catholics were ‘firmly persuaded that adequate provision for the maintenance of the civil and religious establishments may be made consistent with the strictest adherence on their part to the tenets and discipline of the Roman Catholic religion’. It also asserted that ‘any arrangements founded on this basis of mutual satisfaction and security and extending to [Catholics] the full benefits of the civil constitution of their country will meet with their grateful concurrence’.15 The Board clearly expected that such an anodyne form of words would win universal approval. But they were rejected out of hand by Milner. He suspected, rightly as it turned out, that ‘security’, which the Fifth Resolution promised, would be ensured by allowing the government a veto over the choice of bishops. In passing, Milner denounced Father James Archer for the sin of attending the theatre on the previous night.
Next day the Five Resolutions were put to a meeting of ‘Catholic gentlemen’ in the St Alban’s Tavern. The first four were carried without dissent and, according to the minutes of the meeting, the fifth ‘was, with the single exception of the Vicar Apostolic for the Midland District, agent for the Irish prelates, unanimously adopted’. In fact the position was far more complicated than the minute suggests. Milner was certainly opposed. He regarded the Fifth Resolution as ‘expressly calculated to lay our Church, the inheritance of the martyrs, bound and gagged under the feet of a hypocritical Protestant establishment’. In a more moderate moment, he warned against the folly of accepting the notion of securities ‘without knowing … what the Protestant securities would be’16 and asked – with language and logic on his side – how a good Catholic could be expected to endorse the secure future of the Established Church.
Milner also argued that, the merits of the Fifth Resolution aside, the meeting should adjourn until the views of the Irish bishops – for whom he acted as English agent – were known. His procedural proposal, like his opposition in principle, was swept aside. The three other Vicars Apostolic who were present at the meeting abstained in the final vote, but – after the meeting had closed – were persuaded to sign the document on which the Five Resolutions appeared. The Irish bishops were particularly affronted. Not only had they failed to be consulted, but their English colleagues had accepted limitations on the freedom of the Church which they had explicitly rejected. John Troy, the Archbishop of Dublin, described the authors of the Fifth Resolution in language more offensive than John Milner’s most intemperate invective: ‘an assemblage of laymen all of whom … had long been distinguished for an absence of principle’.17 In his St Patrick Day’s sermon in Cork Cathedral, Father John Ryan accused the English of ‘striking a treacherous bargain. The veto has been held out to our brethren in a neighbouring country and they have received the advances with servile complacency.’18 Only one Englishman escaped condemnation. ‘A single pillar of this little church stands alone to uphold the shattering fabric and the name Milner has become identified with whatever honour and safety remains.’19 Milner himself reported to his fellow Vicars Apostolic that ‘From Cape Clear to the Giant’s Causeway, nothing was heard but that the English Catholics had betrayed them.’20 The publication of resolutions was the fashion of the time and the Irish bishops passed six of their own. Number four robustly ‘disclaimed … all right in the Pope or any other Foreign Potentate to interfere in the Temporal Concerns of the Kingdom’. But they were adamant that an Oath of Allegiance was sufficient guarantee of their sincerity. Governments could not be given the power to influence the choice of bishops.
There was so much Irish intrusion into the English debate on the government’s role in the selection of bishops that the Duke of Norfolk began to fear that the decision would ultimately be taken in the archdiocese of Dublin and Armagh, and Edward Jerningham thought it necessary to issue a statement to calm his, and less noble, nerves. ‘I must again declare that the Catholic Bishops of Ireland do not, nor never did, consider the prelates of England subject to them in any respect.’21
In May 1810, the House of Commons prepared again to debate a call for Catholic emancipation. Henry Grattan moved the resolution and, as usual, it was defeated. The highlight of the debate was a speech by George Ponsonby – supporting the motion – during which he read from letters in which John Milner accepted the need for a government veto on episcopal appointments. The letter had been written in 1798 at a time when an unrepresentative group of Irish bishops had persuaded their agent to write to English allies in those terms. But the bitter argument that followed, and which resulted in the Catholic Board refusing ‘ever to admit Dr Milner to their confidence again’, did not concern his apparent inconsistency. It began with the largely unjustified complaint that he had published confidential correspondence, and degenerated into allegations and counter-allegations of perfidy, disloyalty and apostasy. Milner called Douglass and Poynter – Vicar Apostolic and Coadjutor of the London District – ‘abettors of the beginnings of schism’ who were ‘in league with the enemies of religion’.22 The leadership of the Catholic Church in England approached the final act in the drama of emancipation hopelessly divided.
The evidence suggests that the faith, and therefore the morale, of less elevated Catholics, both priests and laymen, survived the debilitating effects of the civil war between their spiritual leaders. The details of the battles may not have reached all of rural England, but most Catholics knew that a war was raging. Milner was an obsessive pamphleteer, and broadsheets, outlining his passionate opinions, were distributed in London and the Midlands. Priests, representing the rival camps, preached sermons that excoriated their opponents. The ‘nobility, gentry and persons of distinction’ (who were for emancipation whatever the cost) instructed their tenants, employees and resident priests about the sins of those who stood between them and full civic recognition. Yet the Church prospered. Liberated by the Relief Acts and encouraged by the enthusiasm of French émigré priests, English Catholics opened nine hundred new chapels during the twenty-three years between 1791 and 1814. The most rapid expansion was in Lancashire. In Wigan the Catholic population, though stable for most of the eighteenth century, doubled during the next ten years and totalled more than 2,000 by 1900. By 1801 there were 9,000 Catholics and four chapels in Liverpool; two chapels and 6,000 Catholics in Manchester. By 1819 the Catholic population in Wigan had grown to 3,000 (two chapels and three priests), in Liverpool to 18,000 (four chapels and six priests) and in Manchester to 15,000 (two chapels and four priests).23
The least fertile ground was Wales, but Holywell, in Flintshire, was host to a miracle. Winifred White, a young Cheshire woman who suffered from a crippling condition of the spine, was given only a few weeks to live when she hit upon the idea of visiting Holywell, the shrine of her patron saint. She crawled from her lodgings to the well, bathed in its waters and walked back. The efficacy of the cure, and its divine origins, were validated by both John Milner and William Poynter – a ‘realist’ who wanted the Church to move with the times and accept government influence over its management.
The increase in numbers – combined with the confidence that came with relaxation of the penal laws – encouraged the drive to provide every Catholic boy with a Catholic education. The colleges that were (or were to become) seminaries had mixed fortunes. St Cuthbert’s in County Durham – one of Douai’s descendants – became Ushaw. Its new building was opened in 1808. Oscott, in the Midlands, was cleared of debt and its syllabus revived when, in the same year, John Milner took direct control in place of the previous management, whose earlier failure he attributed to their Cisalpine tendencies. But St Edmund’s in Ware – another Douai legatee – was evolving from a seminary into England’s oldest Catholic public school. In 1809, during the transition, it became the scene of the first-recorded student sit-in. Thirty young men occupied an inn in Waltham Cross and issued a list of grievances about food and discipline. An attempt to flee to Scotland failed and the miscreants were persuaded, by a delegation of priests and parents, to return to the college. The ringleaders were expelled.
The Dominican school at Carshalton failed, but three great public schools (in addition to St Edmund’s) were established. The Benedictines, from Dieulouard in Lorraine, settled in Ampleforth, twenty miles west of York. The Community of St Gregory moved from Acton in Shropshire to Downside near Bath. The Jesuits were already established at Stonyhurst – and remained there during the years in which, officially, the Society no longer existed in England. For a time they were therefore regarded as secular priests. Jesuits do not give up easily, so they had applied for affiliation to the Russian Society. Father Gruber, the Russian Jesuit General, agreed, subject to a renewal of vows. Rome initially disagreed. The Jesuits waited, prayed and built a new, and bigger, college. It says much for the single-minded devotion of the teaching Orders that they serenely carried on their work against the background of personal animosity, often dressed up to look like theological disputation, which diminished the early-nineteenth-century Catholic Church.
It fell to Henry Grattan, a Protestant and therefore free from the prejudices of the various Catholic factions, to set the emancipation merry-go-round in motion again. As usual the process was preceded by a petition and the preparation of a draft bill, which, it was proposed, should include explicit assurances about the primacy of the Church of England and the security of the Protestant succession. Between February and April 1813, all the complicated flummery necessary for the discussion of a bill was completed. Its supporters believed that it was both conclusive and ingenious. The rights of succession aside, all Catholic disabilities were to be removed, except for the right to be appointed Lord Chancellor or Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. And the ‘security’ was to be provided in a fashion to which, it was hoped, no Catholic would take offence. A long Oath of Allegiance, included in the bill, contained the promises never ‘to concur or consent to the appointment of any Bishop, Dean or Vicar Apostolic but such as be of unimpeachable loyalty and peaceful conduct’ or to have any correspondence with Rome that was ‘tending directly or indirectly to overthrow or disturb the Protestant Government and Protestant Church’ of England.
The bill’s progress was briefly interrupted by a proposal from the assiduous Sir John Coxe Hippisley that its consideration should be postponed until a Select Committee had examined the full extent and consequences of Catholic disabilities. That was quickly brushed aside, but another proposal was not so easily disposed of. For one thing, it originated with George Canning – a brilliant orator and progressive Tory who was to become, briefly, Prime Minister. For another, it could be said to be consistent with the spirit and intention of the bill. Canning proposed that two commissions – one for England, one for Ireland, and both chiefly consisting of Catholics – should supervise the working of the bill. They would confirm the loyalty of candidates for preferment and certify the innocence of communication from the Vatican. Supporters of the new clause claimed that they intended to speed the bill’s passage, but it was open to two insurmountable objections. It implied that Catholics could not be trusted to keep their word. And although the right to inspect documents was not to apply to communications that related ‘wholly and exclusively to spiritual concerns’, there was no way that a document could be classified as outside the Commission’s jurisdiction without it first being read by the men who were not allowed to read it. Milner – still a doughty opponent of government interference – had a different but equally compelling objection to the inspection clause as originally drafted. The definition of excluded material was so narrow that it allowed interference with correspondence ‘on subjects of literature, health, civility etc as well as on all professional business’.24
The Irish bishops were adamant. Canning’s clauses – even as amended by Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary since 1812, to guarantee a Catholic majority on the Commissions – were ‘utterly incompatible with the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church and the free exercise of our religion … We cannot, without incurring a heavy load of guilt, accede to such regulations.’25 William Poynter – never wholly opposed to accepting the need to guarantee Catholic sincerity, and on good terms with Castlereagh – felt unable to oppose the whole bill and hoped he could secure its improvement. He suffered from all the failings of the reasonable man. John Milner did not labour under that handicap. The bill, he wrote, was ‘contrived with a heart of malice which none but the spirits of wickedness in high places, mentioned by St Paul, could have suggested to undermine and wither the fair trees of the English and Irish Catholic Churches’.26
John Milner set out his objections in a letter written to William Poynter and travelled to London from his home in the Midland District in order to make sure that London’s Vicar Apostolic received it on the day it was written. It suggested that – in light of the Canning clauses – they join forces in opposing the bill. Milner received a reply which he described as evasive: unusually for him, an understatement. Poynter said that he neither knew what was contained in the contentious clauses nor whether the Irish bishops opposed them. What was more, he was ‘presently labouring under an indisposition’ and, in consequence, ‘unfit for any exertion’.27 On the day after the reply was received, Milner visited Mr Keating’s Catholic Bookshop where, by chance, he met Peter Collingridge, Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, who had also come to London to discuss the bill with Poynter. Collingridge was invited to join Milner’s campaign. He refused. Milner – still fighting the battle – asked for a meeting of Catholic notables to be convened the next day. It assembled under the chairmanship of the Earl of Shrewsbury and considered a paper which Milner might have written with the intention of continuing the argument, rather than negotiating a mutually acceptable compromise. ‘Thirdly. Is not an English Vicar Apostolic obliged to speak out openly, so as to be clearly understood by the Catholic public?’28 The meeting broke up without taking any decision, apart from the agreement not to follow Milner’s lead. ‘The success of the Bill on its third reading was as confidently anticipated to take place during the next few hours as the rising of the sun next morning.’
It would have done so, had it not been for an extraordinary breach of convention in the House of Commons. While the bill was in committee, James Abercromby, MP, was in the chair. That enabled Charles Abbot, the Speaker, to defy all precedent and make a strongly partisan speech. The bill, he said, had been introduced to avoid civil strife. The behaviour of John Milner and the Irish bishops made clear that it would not have that result. Then he revealed his real objection. Catholics, he argued, could not be trusted with political power or influence since they owed allegiance to the Pope as well as to the King. He moved that the clause of the bill, that gave them the right to vote and sit in Parliament be struck out. Mr Speaker Abbot’s motion was carried by 251 votes to 247 and the bill, having been rendered meaningless, was abandoned.
Milner took credit for the collapse of the bill and the Catholic Board agreed that he should take the blame. A special meeting of the Board was convened. The only item on the agenda was a proposal to remove John Milner from the committee of which he had become a member, at his own request, when the bill of 1813 was first discussed. Milner was asked if he would resign in order to avoid the embarrassment – to both him and the Board – of an expulsion. He declined on the grounds that to do so would imply the acceptance of guilt. But he agreed to attend the meeting at which his position was to be discussed. Indeed, he was the first delegate to arrive. The discussion was as much concerned with the offensive language that Milner used in disputation with his colleagues as it was with responsibility for the demise of the bill, and it was clear from the start that the motion to expel him would be carried by a large majority.
It was not until the result was declared that Milner spoke in his own defence. Then he read a seven-point statement which had clearly been prepared in anticipation of defeat. He then left the meeting, pausing only to pronounce a dramatic valediction that became part of nineteenth-century Catholic folklore. Its mythological status is confirmed by a dispute over the actual words he used. In one version Milner paused at the door before saying, ‘I hope you will not turn me out of the Catholic Church nor shut me out of the kingdom of heaven’29 – an unlikely valediction, since it was hardly a moment for irony and Milner certainly did not believe that the Catholic Board had the power to excommunicate him. An alternative – ‘You consider me unfit for your company on earth. May God make me fit for your company in heaven’ – reads as if it has been composed and polished by faithful disciples. Another version has the plausible ring of aggressive spontaneity. ‘You may expel me from this Board, but I thank God that you cannot exclude me from the Kingdom of heaven.’30 Whatever words he used, they inspired two of the delegates to leave with him – a gesture that Milner must have found almost as gratifying as the encomium issued by the Irish bishops: ‘The Right Reverend Dr J Milner, Bishop of Castabala, our vigilant, incorruptible agent, the powerful and unwearied champion of the Catholic religion, continues to possess our esteem, our confidence and our gratitude.’
The English Vicars Apostolic did not echo the Irish bishops’ admiration. When they gathered in Durham, at the suggestion of the ‘noblemen and gentlemen of the Catholic Board’ who wished ‘to be guided by their opinion’, Milner – accused of offensive conduct and spreading falsehoods – was not invited to attend. In his absence they reaffirmed their support for the Fifth Resolution, without clarifying what intrusion into Church affairs it would permit, and composed a pastoral letter, which called on all good Catholics to do likewise. They knew that their decisions would win favour in Rome. The Vatican had yet to recover from the chaos caused by the invasion of Napoleon’s army and the French annexation of the Papal States in 1809. So relations with the Church in England were, to a very large degree, dictated by Father Paul McPherson, Rector of the Scots College and, in those unusual circumstances, agent in Rome for both the English and Scottish Vicars Apostolic. He was known to be in favour of the Fifth Resolution and it was no surprise when, largely due to him, Milner was instructed to remain in his own district, and Archbishop Troy was told that the Church in England was outside his jurisdiction. Both men responded with glorious irrelevancies. Troy expressed disgust that the Fifth Resolution had been agreed in a tavern ‘amid the clatter of plates and glasses’. Milner accused John Douglass, Poynter’s predecessor, of being in the pay of Catholic nobility. In their headquarters, the Quirinale Palace, the Vatican high command was sufficiently exercised by the state of English Catholicism to issue two formal statements. One – known, because of the official in whose name it was published, as the Quarantotti Rescript – endorsed the bill that had failed to pass through Parliament and suggested minor alterations to the oath it contained, but urged its acceptance even if the amendments were rejected. The second Rescript emphasised the importance of good relations between England and the Holy See.
The English Catholic Board was delighted by Rome’s initiative, but anxious for assurance that the Rescripts could not be revoked. McPherson did his best to provide it. But he had underestimated Milner’s energy and enterprise. With the explanation that he had work to do on behalf of the Irish bishops, he visited Rome and on May 24th 1814 was received in audience by Pope Pius VII to whom he claimed that, in England ‘schismatic measures have been carried on’.31 At meetings with Cardinal Litta – the Prefect of Propaganda Fide – he described the English Vicars Apostolic as ‘all venal and corrupt and sold to [he meant bought by] the Catholic laity’ and accused Poynter of fraud. Poynter was summoned to Rome. He too had an audience with the Pope. But before he arrived, Pius VII received a message from the English Catholic Board rejoicing at the restoration of his authority over the Papal States. His reply was not what they expected. The state of Catholicism in England was to be examined by a congregation of cardinals.
Poynter, like Milner, had a meeting with Cardinal Litta. It began badly, with the Cardinal denouncing the Fifth Resolution as indefensible, demanding the dissolution of the Cisalpine Club (under whatever name it operated) and criticising the exclusion of Milner from meetings of the Vicars Apostolic. Litta then turned to the accusation of fraud. Milner had overplayed his hand by claiming that Poynter had retained more than his proper share of the funds that were distributed among the English Districts after the closure of the continental seminaries. Litta knew that the accusation was groundless and, in consequence, changed his whole position, decided that a veto was acceptable in principle and instructed Milner to draft a form of words which satisfied the Catholic Board without eroding the Pope’s authority. The drawn-out negotiations were interrupted by receipt of the news that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. Pius VII fled north and so did Poynter and Milner.
While Milner was still in Rome the Society of Jesus was re-established in England during a ceremony that he was invited to witness. It was, by any standards, an important occasion in the life of the Catholic Church. But Milner thought of it – as his obsession caused him to think of everything – in terms of his dispute with the other English Vicars Apostolic. The readmission of the Jesuits was, he wrote, ‘considered by some London Catholics as the downfall of the catholic religion; which proves how different their ideas are from those of the Vicar of Jesus Christ’.32 He was right to anticipate anxiety in England. In December 1813, the English Jesuits had been granted the long-requested permission to renew their vows as affiliates of the Society in Russia – without the Vatican thinking it necessary to notify the English Vicars Apostolic. But the bull Sollicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum, which restored the Order worldwide, could not be kept secret. Milner immediately welcomed the decision. All his colleagues refused to recognise the bull. The usually flexible William Poynter was particularly opposed. The recognition of the Jesuits would, he feared, renew the old tension between the secular and regular clergy. He also suspected that the Jesuits, once again operating as a society, would vigorously oppose any sort of veto and every sort of oath.
When Poynter expressed his fears to Cardinal Litta, he received the reassuring news that the Pope, conscious of the Society’s controversial reputation, intended it to be restored only in countries ‘in which the government consents to receive and recall them’. Cardinal Consalvi confirmed that ‘the Bull of restoration was not to be forced on any’, but the individual Jesuits who had remained in England were not prepared to wait for the approval of a Protestant government. There was particular resentment in Wigan, England’s most Catholic town, where priests who had been expelled from Stonyhurst and Liège ministered to 1,400 communicants. The Protestant government came to the aid of the anti-Jesuit Vicars Apostolic. Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, supplied a pre-arranged reply to a letter from William Poynter: ‘The Prince Regent and the British feel insuperable objections to the establishment of the Society of Jesus in England.’ He later found it necessary to clarify government policy. Like ministers before and after him, he had written ‘England’ when he meant the ‘United Kingdom’. There was to be no restoration of the Jesuits in any part of Great Britain or Northern Ireland. The ‘Gentlemen of Stonyhurst’ declared themselves an exception and lived like the members of the Society that, they believed, God wished them to be.
The Congress of the Cardinals, which was to decide the fate of the Catholic Church in England, was held in Genoa on April 28th 1815. Its conclusions were conveyed to Poynter (with copies for Troy and Milner) by Cardinal Litta, but it was assumed that the ideas, on which they were based, were Cardinal Consalvi’s. The ‘Genoese Letter’ was emphatic that, if emancipation was ever to be granted, agreement to a veto was essential and suggested that if it be in the form of a short list, drawn up by the temporal power ‘to expunge the obnoxious’, from which the Pope made a final selection, it would be acceptable. Whatever effect the Genoese Letter had on the English Catholic leadership, it did nothing to reduce the parliamentary opposition to emancipation. Debates in both the Lords and Commons ended with far less support for the Catholic cause than it had attracted in 1813. By December 1815 – with Napoleon defeated and the Pope back in Rome – Litta got close to performing the last rites over its corpse. There was ‘no hope’ of emancipation ‘on those conditions which his Holiness could offer and [which] are so opposite to the principles of the civil power’. And, as if to say that the Vatican had grown weary of the prolonged controversy, Litta added, ‘The Pope does not, and never did, ask for the emancipation of Catholics.’33 The letter’s final paragraph read like a coded message that Rome was changing sides. ‘With sorrow and even annoyance we learn that the Right Reverend Dr Milner, heedless of the admonitions, indeed reprimands, made to him in Rome continues to cause grave disturbance.’
Mixed messages are always interpreted by partisans as confirming their worst fears. And in Ireland, Daniel O’Connell assumed that the Vatican was on the point of capitulating to the English Catholic Board. He justified his assumption with the plausible explanation that Castlereagh – who had certainly visited Rome while the Cardinals’ Congress was sitting – had struck a bargain with Cardinal Consalvi. The two men had sat together at the Congress of Vienna where, O’Connell suspected, Consalvi had promised to ‘concede the British Crown [the] effectual supremacy over the Catholic Church in Ireland’ in return for ‘the restoration of part of the Pope’s territories still withheld’.34 Ireland would have to act alone.
At a public meeting in Dublin in January 1815, O’Connell set out the principles of an essentially national Catholicism. The Irish people must make clear to Rome that they would never accept English authority over their Church. He believed that Rome would support their stand. But if it did not, Ireland should still resist. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘sincerely a Catholic, but I am not a papist … I deny the doctrine that the Pope has any temporal authority, directly or indirectly in Ireland.’35 He went on to argue, more contentiously, that even the Pope’s spiritual authority was limited. ‘He cannot vary our religious doctrine in any respect.’ Although many of the men and women in the audience would not have realised it, he was making a distinction between the authority of the Catholic Church and the Pope – a distinction neither party would have accepted. He changed his mind with the years. In 1837 he ‘revere[d] in all things the authority of the Holy See … My submission to the authority of the Church is complete, whole and universal.’36 In 1815 he was an Irishman first and a Catholic second.
Whatever the niceties of O’Connell’s theology, after the Dublin declaration the relationship between the English establishment and Irish Catholicism acquired a new dimension. Irish Catholics had been suspected first of supporting Spain, then France, in those countries’ attempts to overthrow the lawful government of England. After January 1815, Irish Catholics were seen as being subversive for Ireland itself. Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalism went hand in hand.
The militancy of the Irish Catholics was in sharp contrast to the complacency of the Catholics in England – many of whom feared that full emancipation would awaken the sleeping Protestant tiger. Even the real enthusiasts for reform were pitifully grateful for every gesture of support (no matter how tentative) that they received. In May 1816, William Poynter reported to Rome: ‘A debate took place in the House of Commons … The object of it was to take consideration [of] the penal clauses next session. The majority against was 31 – the time, it seems, has not yet come – yet it was pleasing to observe that nothing injurious to the Religion or character of Catholics was said by those who opposed it.’37 However, there were ‘some comments on the intemperate behaviour of some among the Irish’. The drive for emancipation in Ireland was holding back support for emancipation in England.
O’Connell’s campaign was built around ‘aggregate meetings’ – mass rallies by another name. So at least a section of the Irish peasantry was associated with the emancipation movement. O’Connell was not, however, a champion of the landless Irish peasantry who rallied behind him, more because he was an orator than because he represented their political, economic or religious interests. His speeches reflected the interests of his class – the moderately prosperous Irish Catholic landowners. In England, the campaign for emancipation was still largely the preserve of the priesthood and gentry, sometimes working together and sometimes in opposition to each other.
There the case for emancipation was faithfully represented by The Tablet – a weekly newspaper, founded in 1840, which initially found it ‘hard to speak with moderation on the subject of Irish politics’.38 It became more Catholic in content with the resignation of its Church of England joint owner in 1843, but maintained its reputation for controversy until Herbert Vaughan (the future Archbishop and Cardinal) became ‘sole and absolute proprietor’ in 1868. The paper also reflected the growing appetite for ‘popular journalism’. One item in an early edition carried the headline ‘Horrible Murder in Barnsley’. Sensationalism aside, its early existence confirmed that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Catholic England included the beginning of a middle class.
The Church itself was starting to edge away from its dependence on wealthy patrons. That was not a conscious policy. It was the result of the growth in the number of tradesmen and artisans who felt able openly to attend Mass and contribute to the upkeep of chapel and parish. In the London District numbers expanded at such a rate that new chapels opened almost every year – Hampstead and Poplar in 1816, Stratford and Moorfields in 1817 and Horsham in 1819. The Poplar chapel was built to accommodate a congregation greatly increased by the arrival of Irish immigrants – an early manifestation of a phenomenon which, later in the century, was to change the character of the Catholic Church in industrial England.
The London District led the way in the provision of Catholic schools for Catholic children, but it still failed to meet the need or the demand. By 1815 there were three schools funded by Catholic charities, and another run and financed by parishioners and patrons of St Patrick’s, Soho. The four schools provided about 1,200 places – leaving more than 1,000 Catholic children without the hope or prospect of a Catholic elementary education. Charities that claimed to be Christian, but not denominational, offered places at their schools and – initially, after assurances were given that the Bible and a spelling book would be all that the pupils were allowed to read – they were taken up. But it was later discovered that, although they were protected from heretical texts, the children sometimes sang Protestant hymns. On the principle that ignorance was to be preferred to heresy, the pupils were withdrawn.
The Catholic Church in Scotland either took education more seriously or apostasy less so than was the case in London. By 1822 there were Catholic schools in Dumfries, Greenock, Ayr and Paisley, where two more were opened during the next decade. In Glasgow the employers of Irish labourers founded three schools for the children of their workers. Although they stipulated that ‘no formal creed’ should influence the religious instruction, the Catholics of Glasgow sent their children to the schismatic institutions without any recorded objection from their priests. By 1825 they had five schools of their own, teaching Catholicism to 1,400 Catholic children.39
Naturally enough, the rising enthusiasm for education coincided with an increase in literacy and, equally naturally – in early nineteenth-century Catholic England – the growth of literacy was regarded by the rival factions as a God-given opportunity to defend their beliefs and attack their enemies in print. Until 1801, when the Catholic Magazine was published in Liverpool, there had been no Catholic periodical in Britain. A second publication, The Conciliator, was launched in 1813, but survived for only a dozen issues, probably because conciliation does not produce compelling journalism. Polemics does. That is why the Orthodox Journal, first published in the same year, succeeded. Its proprietor – William Eusebius Andrews, sometime editor of the Norfolk Chronicle – could not have been more frank about its purpose. It was created to combat the policy of the Catholic Board. And, because its proprietor was a long-standing admirer of John Milner, it represented his views in language that he might have used. Although Richard Thompson, the mild and insignificant Vicar General of the Northern District, did no more than express doubts about a fellow priest’s rejection of a loyalty oath in any form, the Orthodox Journal denounced him with invective that was not even original. It reported that ‘he bellowed forth the most unjust imputations against some of the most illustrious members of an order of the Church at a Tavern dinner in the midst of the jingling of glasses and the belching of toasts’.40
Milner contributed to almost every issue of the Orthodox Journal and always in a style that might have been, and probably was, designed to cause offence. He seemed particularly to enjoy name-calling. George Silvertop, an enthusiast for compromise over the oath and veto, became ‘Mr Copper Bottom’ and, in what must have come very close to libel, was accused of keeping company with ‘fox-hunting laymen amidst the orgies of Bacchus’.41 Milner’s attacks on William Poynter were not as vituperative as his assaults on the Catholic Board, but they were sufficiently wounding to provoke a complaint to Rome. Cardinal Litta responded with the reproof that Milner’s conduct was unbecoming. Milner changed his byline rather than his style. For a while he wrote under the pseudonym ‘Merlin’.
Anonymity did not suit Milner and it was not maintained for very long. When it was abandoned, Poynter complained to Rome again and Litta replied that Milner, although told to mind his manners, had ignored the Vatican’s advice – just as the English Vicars Apostolic had ignored the advice to admit Milner to their meetings. A third complaint (this time by Silvertop, among others) evoked a sterner response from Rome: ‘His Holiness commands and orders [you] to take no further part henceforward, directly or indirectly, in the said journal.’42 It was not a command that Milner could ignore. So, protesting that all the complaints against him were the product of malice, he resigned. The sorrow of parting was, to a degree, alleviated by the knowledge that he had already threatened to resign if the editor persisted in publishing letters that criticised his articles. In fact, the Orthodox Journal needed him more than he needed it. Without Milner’s polemics, it withered and died after struggling on for seven years. Other Catholic periodicals did not last as long. The Publicist – also opposing concessions from Church to state – lasted for three years. The Catholic Gentleman’s Magazine – reflecting the views of the Catholic Board – survived for only one.
The failure of the Catholic periodicals was a reflection of the Church’s opposition to theological speculation. Opposition to the publication of vernacular translations of the Bible had been justified by the fear that, in the hands of laymen, the testaments would be misunderstood and their message misinterpreted. The Word of God came to the world courtesy of Rome. So it was only to be expected that, even in the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England was alarmed by the movement to make bibles readily available to all its members. The movement was begun, in England, by the Protestant Bible Society. When a group of Catholics, believing it was the best way to defend their territory, considered setting up a society of their own, Thomas Smith – Coadjutor of the Northern District – wrote to William Poynter in outraged anxiety: ‘Distribution of Bibles is founded upon the avowed principle that each one is to form his creed from the Scriptures independently of tradition and the authority of the Church.’43
The Catholic Board did not agree and, when the Protestant Bible Society began to distribute Douai and Rheims editions to whoever wanted them, it decided to form a Roman Catholic Bible Society. William Poynter – always anxious to compromise and moderate – cooperated in the enterprise, with the explanation that he intended to ensure its religious respectability. Milner condemned the whole exercise in the language of impeccable orthodoxy. ‘It is not the Catholic rule of faith that every individual should [be] judge of the reasonableness of every article of faith, but he is to believe them on the authority of the Catholic Church.’44
Whatever differences divided the factions that made up the emancipation movement, they were certainly united by their indomitability. For the first twenty years of the nineteenth century they tried, time after time, to convince Parliament that their cause was just. Time after time they were rebuffed. And time after time they regrouped and tried again. Sometimes – as with Grattan’s House of Commons motion in 1817 – they were heavily defeated. Sometimes – as with General Thornton’s free-enterprise resolution – the Commons refused even to discuss the subject. Occasionally – as with Grattan’s proposal in 1819 – they came close to success in the Lower House of Parliament. His motion was lost by two votes. Usually – as with Earl Grey’s attempt, in the same year, to remove all mention of transubstantiation from the test of loyalty – they were heavily defeated in the Upper House. Grey’s bill was defeated by 141 votes to 89. Even the strongest supporters of the cause began to view the attempts at progress with weary resignation. John Gradwell, in London, wrote to his brother Robert in Rome, ‘The Irish petition will be presented to the House of commons in April by Mr Grattan who will, as usual, move for a committee to take the petition into consideration.’45
It was not until 1821 – with Grattan dead and William Plunkett, another Protestant, leading the emancipation faction in Parliament – that success seemed possible. A year earlier the Catholic Board had drawn up an address for presentation to George IV, who had been King since his father’s death in the first month of 1820. It was signed by seven bishops, seven peers, fourteen baronets and 8,000 ‘men of substance and position’ and was accompanied by numerous petitions from England and Scotland. It was almost a year before its contents were translated into a bill. Parliament was preoccupied by the King’s attempt to divorce Queen Caroline. But eventually a drafting committee was formed. Its first draft contained yet another Oath of Allegiance. It promised ‘full and undivided loyalty’ to ‘his Majesty, his Heirs and successors’. The second draft revived the idea of a commission to examine candidates for the episcopate and, in consequence, open the way to a royal veto by another name.
Plunkett’s proposals proved more popular in the Commons than in the Catholic Church. They were condemned by Milner, questioned by Poynter and, after first being supported by the Irish bishops, denounced by Oliver Kelly, Bishop of Tuam, who claimed to speak for a substantial minority within the Irish Church. In the Commons the Second Reading was carried by 254 votes to 243 and a wrecking amendment, which proposed the exclusion of Catholics from Parliament, was defeated – despite another irregular intervention by the Speaker – by 223 votes to 211. The Catholic Board was so certain of victory that it had prepared an address of gratitude to be presented to Parliament. It was not needed. In the Lords the bill was opposed by the Duke of York (the heir presumptive to the throne), who described it as in conflict with the coronation oath’s vow to uphold the Protestant religion. His intervention proved decisive. The bill was lost by 159 votes to 120. It was said that thirty-nine peers saved the Thirty-Nine Articles. They also saved the Vicars Apostolic of England from facing the dilemma of how to deal with an Act of Emancipation of which they did not approve.
There followed a year in which the forces of emancipation were so dormant that they seemed dead. It coincided with the visit to Ireland by George IV. O’Connell, a passionate advocate of Irish freedom from the English yoke, had always been equally passionate in his allegiance to the English crown. At a meeting of Dublin citizens, called to prepare for the royal visit, he predicted that the King would ‘allay the dissention of centuries – a greater moral miracle’ than St Patrick’s expulsion of the snakes from Ireland. A second speech – delivered as George IV was about to board the boat for home – claimed that, thanks to ‘Your Majesty, discord ceased and even prejudice fled.’46 He then presented the King with a crown of laurels. The poet Tom Moore paid him a tribute of sorts. All Ireland had welcomed the King in ‘servile style’, but O’Connell had been ‘pre-eminent in blarney and inconsistency’.
O’Connell would have refuted Moore’s claim with the argument that his loyalty to the crown was genuine, and that its fulsome expression was a necessary demonstration that Irishmen could be both Catholics and patriots. In 1823 he began his campaign to prove that they could also change the course of history without recourse to the violence that he loathed. The (Irish) Catholic Association was founded with the avowed aims of healing the wounds sustained during disputes over the veto, uniting the nation in the demand for emancipation and providing the common people with the power that comes from solidarity. The inaugural meeting was held in Dempsey’s Tavern, Sackville Street, Dublin on May 23rd. The Convention Act, which had been passed to suppress the United Irishmen, was still in force. So although the Association had a formal membership, its meeting had to be open to all ‘associates’ who paid a shilling a year. The ‘Catholic Rent’, as it was called, was collected at the rate of a penny a month – very often by the priests who held the Association together. More than £200 was collected in September 1823, and within another year the weekly collection had risen to £1,000. That was less than O’Connell had hoped it would be. But it was enough to subsidise the publication of emancipation broadsheets and accumulate a war chest for when the day of reckoning came.
Enlightened opinion was beginning to make itself heard. In the first number of the Parliamentary Review, published in 1825, John Stuart Mill demanded the removal of all Catholic ‘disabilities’. But it was politics, not philosophy, which secured the eventual victory of the emancipation campaign. It came after four more years of bills presented and defeated, renewed arguments about the oath and veto, and continued animosity between Milner and the other Vicars Apostolic. The Duke of Wellington – an opponent of every proposal for any sort of reform – presided over a Cabinet composed of six supporters and seven opponents of emancipation. It did not represent parliamentary opinion. The pro-emancipation motion – in what had become the annual debate on the subject – was carried. But it was the resignation of four ministers, over the wholly unrelated issue of disenfranchising two rotten boroughs, which set off the chain of events that changed the law. One of the replacements was Vesey FitzGerald, the Member of Parliament for Clare, who was appointed President of the Board of Trade and, in conformity with the rule of the day, resigned his seat and sought re-election.
The Catholic Association had chosen Major William Nugent McNamara – a Protestant and therefore eligible to sit in the House of Commons – as their candidate for Clare. But he refused to fight the by-election. The decision to replace him with O’Connell was a challenge to the established order. A Catholic was entitled to stand for Parliament, but was not allowed to take his seat unless he took the oath that branded him a heretic. In consequence the campaign concerned only one issue. O’Connell invited the ‘electors of County Clare to choose between one who abominates that oath and Mr Vesey FitzGerald who has sworn it full twenty times’.47
From the start, it was clear that O’Connell would be the people’s champion and choice. A crowd of 30,000 men and women attended, or attempted to attend, the hustings in Ennis. But O’Connell did not leave the result to be determined by his popularity. He spent £14,000, much of it in a way that, today, would result in his imprisonment rather than election. The British Catholic Association – though fearful that his campaign would turn into an attack on property – donated £5. Polling lasted for five days. At the first count O’Connell was only six votes ahead. Every Forty-Shilling Freeholder who could not produce a magistrate’s certificate confirming that he had sworn the Oath of Allegiance had been turned away. On the third day sympathetic magistrates administered the oath to Freeholders in batches of twenty-five at a time. Because of their efforts, the final result – declared on Thursday July 4th 1828 – was a landslide: O’Connell, 2,057; Fitzgerald, 982. The defeated candidate, reporting the result to Robert Peel – a one-time rabid anti-Catholic, whose change of view contributed to his reputation as the nineteenth-century Tory Party’s greatest reformer – chose, inexplicably, to describe the result as a ‘tremendous prospect’. Peel ruefully replied, ‘a prospect tremendous, indeed!’48
O’Connell did not attempt to take his seat, but waited to see how the government would react. Peel’s first instinct was to change the law so as to require the Oath of Allegiance to be taken by all candidates for office. The idea was abandoned as impractical. It seemed certain that Catholics would win every seat in Ireland, likely that the Tories would lose a general election and possible that there would be a civil war. Wellington told the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh – a friend from the Peninsular War, when he was rector of the Irish College in Salamanca – that he did not anticipate ‘settlement of the Roman Catholic question’. His pessimism became public knowledge when the letter in which it was confessed was passed from the Archbishop to O’Connell, and from O’Connell to the newspapers.
Robert Peel was both more pragmatic and more optimistic about a solution being possible. The by-election had convinced him that, whatever the merits of emancipation, it was irresistible. He was not the only convert for whom Clare could take the credit. The Irish Protestant Association, meeting in the Dublin Rotunda, declared its support for emancipation. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, asked Peel to consider what concessions might satisfy the Catholics, and Peel replied that ‘partial concessions would not be enough’ and that the ‘ruling principle must be equality of civil privilege’. Peel believed that his conversion had been so sudden and so complete that honour required him to resign and allow his constituents to pass judgement on his volte-face in a by-election. He lost and was forced to find another seat.
Wellington was not yet convinced. But Peel – with all the zeal of a convert – persuaded him at least to discuss the issue in Cabinet. The Prime Minister therefore advised the King, a rabid opponent of emancipation, ‘not to grant the Catholic claims … precipitately’ but to agree to them being examined. George IV gave his grudging agreement and, on February 25th 1829, the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament promised a review of ‘the whole condition of Ireland … and the laws which impose disabilities on His Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects’.49 In the atmosphere of the time, the review could have only one result. But the King was still not reconciled to the inevitable. On Wednesday March 4th 1829 Wellington and Peel were summoned to Windsor where they were harangued for five hours by George and his brother, the Duke of Cumberland. The King swore never to sign an Emancipation Bill. Wellington and Peel resigned.
They were out of office for less than twelve hours. On the evening of their resignation the King – regarding Wellington, if not Peel, as indispensable – asked them to return to office. They agreed on the understanding that they would introduce, and he would sign, an Emancipation Bill. Peel’s First Reading speech lasted for four hours. Much of it concerned the new Oath of Allegiance that a Member of Parliament was required to swear before taking his seat. It did not include the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Nor did it renounce ‘the invocation and adoration of the Virgin Mary’. The duty of good Catholics to depose an excommunicated monarch was not mentioned and was only referred to, in passing, by Peel on the grounds that it was not a notion that could be supported by any sane man. There was no suggestion that the government should have any sort of veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops or be entitled to intercept communications from Rome. One possible cause for Catholic complaint was a clause that promised ‘never to subvert the present Church establishment’. And there were a number of other irritants. Catholic bishops were prohibited from taking their titles from ancient sees. There were to be no celebrations of Mass outside churches. Religious Orders were to register with a local magistrate. It was confirmed that no Roman Catholic could occupy the throne.
The bill was approved, in both Houses of Parliament, by gratifyingly large majorities. On St Patrick’s Day 1829 the Second Reading was agreed in the Commons by 353 votes to 173. The Third Reading improved on that result: 320 to 142. In the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wrecking amendment was defeated by 217 votes to 112. It had taken fifty years of argument and four days of a by-election to right the wrong of three centuries. Asked how the Duke of Wellington had convinced the peers to support the bill, Lord Clarendon said that the conversion had been easily accomplished. He simply issued the order: ‘My Lords! Attention! Right about face! Quick march!’
The victory of pragmatism and principle was not complete. In order to prevent Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Association from occupying a majority of the Irish seats in Parliament, the Forty-Shilling Freeholders were disenfranchised, the qualification to vote fixed at £10 a year and the Lord Lieutenant given the power to suppress or disband dangerous societies. At last Catholics were legally emancipated, but they were still not free and equal citizens. After 1829 they enjoyed full civil rights. But most of them still suffered the social and economic penalties of prejudice – private rather than official discrimination.